New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Degenerating public discourse on free discourse - and a plea to philosophers to engage

Public debate on the status of "free speech" seems to ebb and flow frequently in the US.  In a spate of recent op eds and analyses, this debate has focused on  campus "restrictions on speech" in the name of civility.  Here is a representative piece published in the NYT. This latest cycle of the debate has framed the issue as "conservative" or "libertarian" defenders of unfettered free speech against "liberal" promoters of civility and opponents of hate speech and bullying. Along the way, the important ideal of free speech - the civic goal worth caring about - has been lost and this strikes me as a paradigm case in which philosophers could be of great public value were they to get out there and join the public debate.

How to understand the non-voters

Leiter reports that 14% of philosophers do not plan on voting in the upcoming U.S. presidential election.  Assuming only people who are eligbile to vote responded to the poll, what principled reasons can a philosopher give for not voting in the presidential race as well as the various other congressional and other positions/issues that are at stake?  I am genuinely baffled by this. 

I understand "third party" votes.  Although they have been roundly criticized, given the dysfunctional state of the election process, at least they send a clear message.  Not voting, on the other hand, could simply be apathy.  Can apathy about the state of the country be justified?  Or is it really the case that none of the candidates are satisfactory?

Any Californians reading, you have no excuse not to vote.  In addition to everything else, CA will decide whether to label GMOs, abolish the death penalty, amend its "three strikes" law, and, oh yes, whether to slash budgets for public education.

Why do people distrust atheists?

Mohan's recent post on looming theocracy in America made me think more about why Americans would not want an atheist as president, or indeed in any other important political position. Research by Azim Shariff, for instance Gervais, Shariff and Norenzayan (2011) indicates that prejudice against atheists is widespread, and primarily fueled by a distrust in atheists. Remarkably, this research was carried out in Canada, with undergraduates from the University of British Columbia, not a particularly religiously zealous population. Nevertheless, the research indicates a pervasive distrust of atheists. Just to give a flavor of this, one experiment let people read a story about a 31-year-old man, Richard, who does some morally questionable stuff. "Richard is 31 years old. On his way to work one day, he accidentally backed his car into a parked van. Because pedestrians were watching, he got out of his car. He pretended to write down his insurance information. He then tucked the blank note into the van’s window before getting back into his car and driving away. Later the same day, Richard found a wallet on the sidewalk. Nobody was looking, so he took all of the money out of the wallet. He then threw the wallet in a trash can." Students were then asked whether they thought it was more probable that Richard was a teacher or that Richard was a teacher AND xxx. Where xxx was - between subjects - "Christian", "Muslim", "Rapist", or "Atheist". Remarkably (stunningly!) students thought it more likely that Richard was a teacher AND atheist or a rapist than they thought he was a teacher AND a Muslim or Christian. They committed the conjunction fallacy least with Christians, a bit more with Muslims, and most with rapists and atheists. The difference between atheist and rapist was not statistically significant….

"Their own first responders": prosocial behavior in disasters

The event of Hurricane Sandy is multi-dimensional; its sociological dimension is that people on the ground are "their own first responders," in Russel Honoré's phrase. Honoré's experience leading the militarized rescue effort in New Orleans after Katrina matches what sociologists have long demonstrated (and what Rebecca Solnit narrates in A Paradise Built in Hell): what appears in disasters is prosocial behavior, not atomized predation. 

Links to up-to-date SPEP program

[NOTE: We are keeping this post at the top of the page through Monday, November 5th. Relevant new content will continue to show up below this post.] 

SPEP main program with up-to-date changes is now HERE.

SPEP satellite program with up-to-date changes is HERE.

Flight information for Rochester airport is HERE, and SPEP Hurricane Sandy page is HERE.

Theocracy Looming

The United States of America is the third most populous country in the world. (It is the only country less than a billion strong that has more than 300 million citizens.) And so I have always assumed that it incorporates lots of statistical anomalies. Certainly, it has a lot of the worst of everything, but also oodles of the best of everything. (Think of its intellectual, artistic, and gastronomic achievements.) 

Imagine my surprise therefore at being told by the NY Times last week that it is now easier for a gay person to be elected to public office than an atheist. Wouldn't you think that the statistical heterogeneity that permits gays to be elected in San Francisco and Boston would simultaneously permit atheists to be elected there and in Ann Arbor, Austin, and Madison. False?

Today, Billy Graham has a full page ad urging people to vote on "Biblical principles." Who knew how many already do?

Other people's SPEP plans? // possible master post on Monday for list of (non!)cancellations

The annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy meets this year in Rochester N.Y. from November 1-3 (pretty awesome program schedule HERE).

Given the picture à droite, the timing might prove to be as unpropitious as the 2010 Eastern Division meeting of the APA, where airline  and rail shutdowns caused something like a third of the speakers not to make the conference (I'm still bitter about the Lance and Kukla author meets critics not being held).

Mark Ohm and I have just managed to move our flight (going from Baton Rouge through Atlanta) to Tuesday the 30th  so I'm hoping to beat the storm as well as the possible cascading flight delays and cancellations. I'm wondering what anybody else is doing. Amtrak runs the "Empire Service" line (the one from NYC to Niagara Falls through Rochester), but the entire line will be in the affected area. Still, rail tends to be more reliable than air during this kind of thing. Maybe, one could take the Maple Leaf line from Toronto to Niagara Falls, and then hop east on the Empire Service?

Any other thoughts? Is there a blog or web page where people are announcing whether they are making it or not? Please feel free to post in this string what your plans are as they develop.  If nobody else is doing this, I can try next week to keep an updated list of cancellations on a dedicated post here at NewApps. Just put in the comments of this post (and then the one I'll start next week) if you can't make it, and I'll organize and update the master list above that. But if someone is alreadly doing that in the blogosophere, please let me know and we'll just prominently link to that effort.

Long refereeing times and the percentage of women in top philosophy journals

This brief musing is prompted by Catarina's excellent post on the scarcity of women in Mind. In the interesting discussion that developed, it turns out that Mind does (or at least did in the recent past) practice triple blind refereeing. But lack of triple blind refereeing is not the only factor that might account for these low percentages. I believe that long review times combined with tiny acceptance factors might also be a contributing factor for why women do not publish much in top philosophy journals. Mind has, according to Cullison's journal surveys a long review time (7 months). Mind is not alone in this. For instance, Journal of Philosophy has 10.44 months as average review time. Not all top philosophy journals are slow. Noûs and PPR are faster. But the tiny acceptance rate might still be an additional barrier for people who need to get their first publications out, or to beef up their tenure dossier. People who are TT positions, or postdocs or grad students who try to get TT positions cannot afford to wait for a very long time for what will in all likelihood be a rejection. By contrast, people with tenure can afford to wait for a decision. Very long decision times give tenured faculty members an advantage, at the expense of (male and female) junior faculty, graduate students and postdocs.

Suppes on neuroscience as foundations of mathematics

(OK, so it looks like I’m over-posting a bit today… Just one more!)

Between today and tomorrow, the workshop ‘Groundedness in Semantics and Beyond’ is taking place at MCMP in Munich, co-organized with the the ERC project Plurals, Predicates, and Paradox led by Øystein Linnebo. The workshop’s program seems excellent across the board, but the opening talk is what really caught my attention: Patrick Suppes on ‘A neuroscience perspective on the foundations of mathematics’. The abstract:

I mainly ask and partially answer three questions. First, what is a number? Second, how does the brain process numbers? Third, what are the brain processes by which mathematicians discover new theorems about numbers? Of course, these three questions generalize immediately to mathematical objects and processes of a more general nature. Typical examples are abstract groups, high dimensional spaces or probability structures. But my emphasis is not on these mathematical structures as such, but how we think about them. For the grounding of mathematics, I argue that understanding how we think about mathematics and discover new results is as important as foundations of mathematics in the traditional sense.

Baldwin on women publishing in Mind

On January 13^th 2012, a workshop took place in London bringing together the editors of some of the most prestigious philosophy journals as well as others involved in philosophy publishing (such as the area editors for CUP and OUP, among others). Podcasts of the talks and discussions have been made available here, and should be of interest to the NewAPPS readership at large.

One of talks (and accompanying Q&A session) has been quite extensively discussed since yesterday on Facebook and at a post over at the Feminist Philosophers. Thomas Baldwin, the editor of Mind, makes some statements concerning the ratio of women publishing in Mind which are worrisome, to say the least. Here are some passages (more passages transcribed here, courtesy of Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa).

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Vaca Profana'

In Brazil, during the military dictatorship of the 1960s and 1970s, there was quite a lot of censorship of the arts in general and music in particular. What got banned was mostly stuff with (real or imaginary) political, ‘revolutionary’ undertones, but overly 'sexy' stuff was also given a bit of a hard time. In the 1980s, when I was already more or less a thinking being, censorship had decreased considerably (technically, we had a non-elected military president until 1985, but it was nothing like the ferocious dictatorship of the 1970s), but many LPs were still sold with a sticker on the cover which said “Public broadcasting of song XXX forbidden”.

My parents had the 1984 album Profana by Gal Costa, and there I was leisurely enjoying the album on my own, when I see the infamous sticker: “Public broadcasting of ‘Vaca Profana’ forbidden”. Total panic sinks in, as I had been listening to the song full blast the whole day. What would happen to me, would they arrest me? This could have been my most rebellious act to date, overshadowing my presence (at age 5) at the meetings of the then-illegal Brazilian Communist Party and other political gatherings. I was quite surprised and relieved to hear from my mother when she got home that it was actually ‘no big deal’.

Words of Wisdom from a Salmon Preface: Formalism and Audience

The Philosophy of Biology Lab that I co-run with Jim Griesemer here at UC Davis is re-reading Wesley Salmons' Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World.  I am reminded how, when doing such re-readings, one can find little nuggets of wisdom that may have been overlooked on the first read.  Even in the Preface. 

Salmon writes:

Although much modern work on scientific explanation has been rather formal and technical -- often treating various quasi-formal 'models' in great detail -- I shall dwell extensively on less formal considerations.  There are two reasons for this emphasis.  In the first place, I have been convinced for some time that many recent philosophical discussions of scientific explanation suffer from a lack of what Rudolf Carnap called "clarification of the explicandum."  As Carnap has vividly shown, precise philosophical explications of important concepts can egregiously miss the mark if we do not have a sound prior informal grasp of the concept we are endeavoring to explicate.

It's my impression that this is a lesson that many have failed to learn; all too often I see formalism with little attempt to explain what the formalism is intended to represent (and not just in philosophy of science).

More from Salmon's Preface:

Women and Wiki

Bryan Jackson recently wrote to Sally Haslanger to ask why there were no women on the list of metaphysicians on wikipedia. Sally shared this very good question with a few philosophers who have been interested in similar questions. After some discussion via email Sally started revising the entry. I have no idea how to revise wiki entries or what the rules are for making revisions, but I strongly encourage wiki-tech-y people to make further improvements to the list. Below the fold you can see the old wiki entry, which Bryan was referring to, and the entry as of tonight.

Weekly Philo of Economics: Adam Smith's use of the "revival set"; on naming and abstraction

[Because I am about to go on holiday, I am cheating a bit this week. Below an excerpt from my manuscript-in-progress-on Adam Smith.--ES]

It is evident that the mind takes pleasure in observing the resemblances that are discoverable betwixt different objects. It is by means of such observations that it endeavours to arrange and methodise all its ideas, and to reduce them into proper classes and assortments. . .  When two objects, however unlike, have often been observed to follow each other, and have constantly presented themselves to the senses in that order, they come to be so connected together in the fancy, that the idea of the one seems, of its own accord, to call up and introduce that of the other. If the objects are still observed to succeed each other as before, this connection, or, as it has been called, this association of their ideas, becomes stricter and stricter, and the habit of the imagination to pass from the conception of the one to that of the other, grows more and more rivetted and confirmed. As its ideas move more rapidly than external objects, it is continually running before them, and therefore anticipates, before it happens, every event which falls out according to this ordinary course of things.--Adam Smith (History of Astronomy, 2.1-7, 37-41)

At NewAPPS I have posted about this passage from Smith's posthumously published (1795) Essays on Philosophical Subjects (EPS) before. Smithian causation is founded on a pleasing psychological disposition that activates the mind to notice and, perhaps, even search out resemblances between objects. In the most Humean part of Smith’s treatment above, the habitual observation of the ordered, constant conjunction of two objects causes the habitual conjoining of the two ideas in order to form an association between them (as Smith says) in the imagination. (In Hume’s terminology this is called a "natural relation.")

The best medieval solution to the Liar ever

I posted this on M-Phi yesterday, but now it occurs to me that it might be of interest to some NewAPPS readers as well (the interest sparked by Brit's recent post suggests this much!). It is in fact a review of Stephen Read's edition and translation of Bradwardine's treatise on insolubles, which I just wrote for Speculum. 

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Thomas Bradwardine (first half of the 14^th century) is well known for his decisive contributions to physics (he was one of the founders of the Merton School of Calculators) as well as for his theological work, in particular his defense of Augustinianism in De Causa Dei. He also led an eventful life, accompanying Edward III to the battlefield as his confessor, and dying of the Black Death in 1349 one week after a hasty return to England to take up his new appointment as the Archbishop of Canterbury.

What is thus far less well known about Bradwardine is that, prior to these adventures, in the early to mid-1320s, he worked extensively on logical topics. In this period, he composed his logical tour de force: his treatise on insolubles. Insolubles were logical puzzles to which Latin medieval authors devoted a considerable amount of attention (Spade & Read 2009). What is special about insolubles is that they often involve some kind of self-reference or self-reflection. The paradigmatic insoluble is what is now known (not a term used by the medieval authors themselves) as the liar paradox: ‘This sentence is not true’. If it is true, then it is not true; but if it is not true, then what it says about itself is correct, namely that it is not true, and thus it is true after all. Hence, we are forced to conclude that the sentence is both true and false, which violates the principle of bivalence. It is interesting to note that, in the hands of Tarski, Kripke and other towering figures, the liar and similar paradoxes re-emerged in the 20^th century as one of the main topics within philosophy of logic and philosophical logic, and remain to this day a much discussed topic.

The Espresso Party?

Dear Italy, What's up with the seismology verdict? What's next? Assembling Trabants in Modena? Very worried about you. Anxiously, Atremor in Toronto

When Science and Philosophy Disagree

Tom Nagel has an interesting engagement, or tussle, with empirical fact in his recent book, Mind and Cosmos. He writes:

With regard to evolution, the process of natural selection cannot account for the actual history [of consciousness] without an adequate supply of viable mutations, and I believe it remain an open question whether this could have been provided in geological time merely as a result of chemical accident, without the operation of some other factors determining and restricting the forms of genetic variation.

This is startling. Is it really in the purview of a philosopher to assert, and on an extremely flimsy scientific foundation, that the supply of mutations is insufficient to produce consciousness? Or even that it is an open question? (Keep in mind that Nagel’s judgement is not based on an expert review of the literature. He cites Michael Behe and Stuart Kauffman, as well as “the untutored reaction of incredulity to neo-Darwinism.”) On this slight basis, Nagel makes a case for teleologically directed mutation, once again an apparent excursus into scientific theorizing.

When is it legitimate for philosophers to get embroiled in empirical matters?

On the Origin of Analytic Metaphysics, again...

The lore we are told inspired by, say, Putnam (not a disinterested spectator) and more recently Huw Price, who thinks we delude ourselves, is roughly this: after the founders of analytical philosophy had successfully ridden philosophy of its thirst for metaphysics, Quine, discerning a crack in Carnap's edifice, re-opened the door to our deposed Queen, μεταφυσική, in "On What There Is" (and "Two Dogmas"); with the door ajar and Alvin Goldman and Dan Dennett distracted by 'naturalizing' everything, Hillary Putnam developed a Quine-ean argument from the authority of science for the really real existence of numbers and, more significantly, David  Lewis -- perhaps spurred on by some Antipodes -- drove a truck through the opening by embracing modal realism. 

We love linear stories [Carnap --> Quine --> Lewis], don't we, so even the descriptive metaphysics of Strawson's Individuals (1959) can't quite be squished into, shall we say, our conceptual scheme. Now consider the following paragraph written in 1930:

The pursuit of metaphysics as the study of generic characters of existence has been slowly regaining its professional adherents. Once its central theme, reaction to the unchecked flights of nineteenth century romantic speculation has well nigh banished metaphysics as a legitimate subject matter for philosophy. But the problems which professional philosophers refused to consider became acutely pressing in the special sciences. It was to be expected that ere long comprehensive treatises on the nature of existence would appear, fashioned by philosophers were where sensitive to the advances of recent science as well to the ancient tradition that philosophy is the systematic study of being. To the series of distinguishes essays on metaphysics which contemporary philosophers have contributed, these volumes [by Whitehead--ES] are a notable addition.--Ernest Nagel (1930 "Alfred North Whitehead," republished in Sovereign Reason, p. 154.)

 

Is the labeling of GMOs as GMOs anti-science? Part 2

In Part 1, I discussed the accusation that proponents of Proposition 37 in California are anti-science, pointing out that such claims rest on a highly misleading picture of the genetically modified food industry as involving pure "value-free" science. (See, e.g.,  here, here, here, here, here, and here.  Proposition 37 is a ballot measure that, if it passes, would label GM foods sold in California as GM foods).

Here in Part 2, I take up a second prong of the issue.  Even if one acknowledges that the production of genetically modified food is not a value-free endeavor, one still might think that proponents of labeling GMOs are anti-science because they (the proponents) refuse to accept the data that show that GMOs are not harmful to humans.  However, there are three problems with this version of the anti-science accusation: 1) it falsely claims that there is nothing new about GMOs, 2) it overlooks the point that there is enough uncertainty about the studies of GMOs on human health to make it reasonable for individuals to want to decide for themselves whether to eat GMOs or not, and 3) it assumes that human health is the only relevant scientifically-based objection to GMOs,

Spinoza, Hume, Hazony and Regimes of Truth

Some of the Hebrews seems to have seen this, as if through a cloud, when they maintained that God, God's intellect, and the things understood by him are one and the same.--Spinoza (E2P7S) [in Curley's translation]

In my previous three posts (here, here, here) on Yoram Hazony's The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, I did not engage with Hazony's efforts at articulating the epistemology (chapter 6) and metaphysics (7) of the Hebrew Scripture. Chapter 6 is a fascinating meditation on Jeremiah. Here I focus on the latter. According to Hazony in "the Hebrew Bible...truth is not in the first instance a quality of that which is said, but of "objects and persons." "Objects" here are taken very widely to include "objects of the understanding more generally, including actions and circumstances." (195-196). In particular, that "which is true is something that is reliable, steadfast, faithful; while that which is false is something that cannot be counted upon, or which appears reliable but is not." (199) So to simplify: something is true iff it is a steadfast object. So, in addition to true being a property of objects (etc.) it is also a normative property. As Hazony writes, "that which is true is that which proves, through time and circumstance, to be what it ought." (202)

Hazony contrasts what one can label -- to introduce and deploy a Foucault-ish terminology -- "the Biblical regime of truth" with the traditional one he claims we have inherited from Aristotle. (Foucault nor Heidegger are mentioned by Hazony.) In the traditional regime truth is a "quality of speech" (thought, etc.); true speech is about a reality separate from speech and agrees with or corresponds to that reality. (195) Let's grant Hazony the conceptual possibility that there are different "regimes of truth." So, here I ignore the kind of criticism familiar from, say, Bernard Williams' "general point:" that "nothing that was not opposed to the false could be rightly represented as the "the true." (Truth and Truthfulness, 272; emphasis in original; Williams' passage was discussed recently in an illuminating lecture on Foucault's debts to Marcel Detienne by my Ghent colleague, Maarten Van Dyck.) Williams is not just making a narrow (and plausible) point about translation; the general point denies the possibility of different regimes of truth. Given that here I am merely describing the history of various regimes of truth I need not worry if alternative regimes to ours represent anything.

On Preparing PhD Students to become undergraduate teachers

Teaching is Not Magic.  I'm stealing this motto from my fellow-blogger, Michael Cholbi.  Teaching is not some magical thing that one has innately or that one "gets" or that one gets the hang of after a few years of exposure.  Most philosophers are rightly skeptical of scholarly literature in what one might call "education studies."  But thankfully, philosophy has its own association of philosophy teachers (the AAPT) and its own journal (Teaching Philosophy) that both share that skepticism and recognize that good teaching is at the very least not something that every philosopher should have to figure out on her own and that it should be informed by argument, reason and evidence.  Its not good enough to point one's graduate students to these resources.  Graduate programs should be centrally involved in the AAPT and in Teaching Philosophy, because arguably, Ph.D programs are most responsible for the students who have learned the most.  Share the wealth, folks - how did you do it?--Rebecca Copenhaver, In Socrates' Wake.

Copenhaver's post is focused primarily on the North American situation (in my neck of the woods PhD bursaries are employees not "students," etc.), but her reflections apply more widely. The post reminded me of the weaknesses of my graduate education and also, alas, the shortcomings of my current practice as a supervisor. Anyway, I encourage everybody involved in PhD programs in philosophy to go read her whole post.

Liars and Truth-Tellers

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. This means you're free to copy and share the comic (but not to sell it). Thanks to Kevin Lepore for the reference.

A Few Puzzles for a Rainy Sunday

Five old puzzles to brush up on your logic skills before the GREs:

(1)
Yesterday I ran into my colleagues Eric Wiland and John Brunero, who were trying to sneak out to watch the baseball game. I asked Eric:
"Is any of you a truth-teller?"
Eric said something that sufficed for me to know the answer to my question. Are Eric and John liars or truth-tellers?

Not so easy ABCs

Number theory is notorious for producing conjectures that are easy to state but difficult to resolve. The Fermat theorem, stated in 1637—by Fermat, of course, in the margin of his copy of Diophantus’ Arithmetica—, requires nothing but a knowledge of basic arithmetic to comprehend fully. It was proved (by Andrew Wiles, building on the work of dozens of predecessors) only in 1995. The Goldbach conjecture (that every even number is the sum of two primes) and the twin primes conjecture (that there are infinitely many pairs of prime numbers p, q such that p + 2 = q), stated long ago, remain open.

A newer conjecture of this sort is the “ABC” conjecture. It has been a topic of excitement among mathematicians lately because a mathematician has made a credible claim to have proved it—but by idiosyncratic methods that other mathematicians will have to master before they can evaluate the proof. Proving it, moreover, would resolve a number of other outstanding problems in number theory.

▶ See the Wikipedia entry for more; see also Michael Nielsen’s very helpful page and list of references. I should note that of the news stories he refers to, the best is that from Nature; the New Scientist story should be ignored.)

In what follows I will describe in elementary terms the conjecture and its mathematical significance. The methods used by Shinichi Mochizuki in his claimed proof are very far from elementary. I won’t discuss them; follow the links if you want to know more. In a future post I will consider some philosophical questions suggested by the theorem and its proof.

Weekly Philo of Economics: Rawls' Silence on Hayek; and Ernest Nagel...

[I thank Kevin Vallier, a blogger over at BHL, for discussion; none of the mistakes below should be attributed to him.--ES],

I got my first taste of the existence of boundary policing within philosophy a year after graduation (Tufts 93): at my graduation a family friend had given me a collection of essays by Isaiah Berlin. Subsequently, I devoured it and his other writings; went on to Vico (of course), and a whole lot of other obscure authors. A year later I went back to Tufts to celebrate some friends' graduation and to beg for a TA job (in political science); as it happened I bumped into a "famous student of Rawls" on campus; he (not Rawls) was a very good teacher and involved in the great questions of the day in Washington. I admired him. He recognized me, we made some small talk, and for whatever reason I revealed my excitement about Berlin (I may have even carried a totemic copy of Four Essays on Liberty around with me). I am not sure what I expected, but was completely taken aback by the disapproving grunts, and was told something to the effect that Berlin isn't "really philosophy." Fair enough.

Much later I decided that Rawls had created (by design/also here) a "school" with broadly shared sensitivities and, thus, gaps in scholarly knowledge. For, Rawls would teach his own work in light of constructed traditions from which he privileged certain thinkers (including, in fact, Berlin when his "famous student" was at Harvard; Rawls studied with Berlin at Oxford on his Fullbright). One consequence of this way of teaching I noted in passing last week: in Theory of Justice (TJ), Rawls calls attention to the significance of the now forgotten Frank Knight (and Knight's debates with Arrow)), but from the evidence available to me it's clear that Rawls did not teach his students to appreciate the significance of Knight to TJ.

This by way of introduction to the topic of the present post: from the vantage point of contemporary political philosophy, Rawls' near-complete silence on his contemporary, Hayek, is striking, and even a bit puzzling. (Here's an exception to the point.) Even Nozick engages less with Hayek in Anarchy than one would expect today.

A Sokal Hoax in Mathematics, or is it Vanity Publishing?

Neil Levy kindly called my attention to the story: "A paper by Marcie Rathke of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople had been provisionally accepted for publication in Advances in Pure Mathematics. ‘Independent, Negative, Canonically Turing Arrows of Equations and Problems in Applied Formal PDE’." As LRB reports, "The paper was created using Mathgen, an online random maths paper generator." Unfortunately, "Neither Marcie Rathke nor the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople is willing to pay the ‘processing charges’ levied by Advances in Pure Mathematics, so we will never know if the work would actually have made it to publication." The exchange between 'author' and journal is priceless.

So, what did this hoax expose? LRB concludes the following:

Academic journals depend on peer review to ensure the rigour and value of submissions. The less prestigious the journal, the harder it is to find competent reviewers and the lower they will have to set the threshold, until at some point we arrive at, essentially, accept-all-comers vanity publishing. The murkier the business model and the lower the standards outside the mainstream, the harder it is for academics to challenge the status of the prestige journals, locking academics into the situation Glen Newey describes.

 

A new blog dedicated to the exposé of academic mansplaining

Reders of "What is it like to be a woman in philosophy" will be familiar with the dominant trope showcased in "Academic Men Explain Things to Me." Should be required reading.

Guest post by Lori Gruen on renewal of maternal deprivation research at Madison

 A few days ago Eric linked to a report by Lori Gruen (Ethics and Animals blog here; Wesleyan University website here) on the renewal of cruel maternal deprivation research on primates. The comments on Eric's post were such that we asked Lori to write a guest post for us. She graciously agreed; the post follows: [UPDATED 1:40 pm 16 Oct. See below for contact info for Madison's Provost.]

PAINFUL SCIENTIFIC FOOLISHNESS

“Major steps in scientific progress are sometimes followed closely by outbursts of foolishness. New discoveries have a way of exciting the imagination of the well-meaning and misguided, who see theoretical potentialities in new knowledge that may prove impossible to attain.” – Dr. Sherwin Nuland, Yale School of Medicine

Does the system we have in place to curtail scientific “outbursts of foolishness” and protect research subjects from “misguided” scientific curiosity work?

There was no oversight system in place back in the days when Harry Harlow’s experiments psychologically tormenting baby monkeys were making news.  Surely that sort of horrible work in which infant primates are taken from their mothers to make them crazy wouldn’t be approved of today. On my recent visit to the University of Wisconsin I was shocked to learn otherwise.  The oversight committee chairs told me they have never rejected a proposal.  Not one. 

And one of the protocols they did not reject is a renewal of maternal deprivation research. Disturbingly, it has been approved by not one, but two oversight committees.  A psychiatry professor who has a distinguished record of research on anxiety disorders plans to separate more monkey babies from their mothers, leave them with wire “surrogates” covered in cloth (a practice developed by Harlow) to emulate “adverse early rearing conditions,” then pair them with another maternally deprived infant after 3-6 weeks of being alone.  The infants will then be exposed to fearful conditions.  The monkeys in this group and another group of young monkeys who will be reared with their mothers, will then be killed and their brains examined. (The experimental protocol is here.)

Should Philosophers of Mind Worry About Identity?

Mind-body identity is really a very big deal in contemporary philosophyof mind. Should it be? Do materialists and naturalists need to commit to the identity of mind and body? I don't think so. In the context of mind-body debates, the debate about identity turns out to be about possibility, and this should not be much of a concern for naturalists.

First, a word about evidence.

Suppose that I have evidence that strongly supports a proposition, p. Suppose further that q implies p, and that the only evidence that I have in support of q is that which supports p. Should I accept q?

• In certain cases, obviously no. For example, suppose that I have strong evidence that Peter (who happens to be a banker) is a thief. Suppose, further, that my only evidence that lots of bankers (including Peter) are thieves is my evidence concerning Peter. Here, I would clearly be wrong to believe the stronger proposition. I have no reason to think that Peter is a bellwether for the banking industry.

• In certain other cases, yes. Suppose that I have strong evidence that a certain food gave Mary a lot of pleasure. Suppose, further, that I have no evidence in favour of this food except what it did for Mary. Even so, I would be right to believe that this food would give lots of people (including Mary) lots of pleasure. I have no reason to think that Mary is unique.

The general principle goes something like this, put in terms of possible worlds:

Collaborative research - why only psychology?

Mainly, I'm just sincerely asking the question of the title.  I'm interested in either explanations or justificactions, and I don't assume that there is no justification.  I sort of suspect that there is little reason for philosophers not to collaborate more broadly, but I haven't looked into this much and would be happy to be corrected.