New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

How to ensure gender balance in edited volumes?

(This came up on a FB thread I happened to lay my eyes on; it does not involve anyone I actually know, so it feels a bit like I’m intruding into other people’s business, but this seems important as a topic. Apologies if I am being intrusive!).

What should you do when you are putting together an edited volume on a given topic, you make a serious effort to have a fair representation of female contributors, and yet you end up with a very unbalanced lineup because the potential female authors you approached all declined the invitation? Do you go ahead as is? Do you put the project off and work further on involving female contributors? (Which potentially can only be achieved if you change a bit the focus of the volume as originally conceived.) Do you call the whole thing off?

There seem to be downsides to all of these options. So this appears to be a real dilemma, and I’d be curious to hear people’s thoughts on this. I’d be particularly curious to hear experiences of volume editors who somehow managed to redress the problem after a difficult start, as this may be useful advice for those editing volumes at the moment.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Criolo

Good news for me: Criolo will be performing at the Melkweg in Amsterdam tomorrow, and it looks like I’m going! So to get myself in the mood, and to entice those in the Amsterdam area looking for cool things to do this weekend, here are some of Criolo’s songs.

Criolo has been active as a rapper since 1989, but his breakthrough only came last year, with the album Nó na orelha, where he mixes rap and hip hop with more mellow beats. The album made a huge splash, with raving reviews by critics and lots of love from the public. At the Brazilian MTV Music Award 2011, he won in the categories best album, best new artist and best new song with ‘Não existe amor em SP’, which I posted in the Best of 2011 edition of BMoF earlier this year. It really is a great song, despite the somewhat misleading title (there is no love in Sao Paulo – not true!). So here I’m posting this song again, but now in a live version at the MTV Music Award, and in a duo Criolo-Caetano Veloso. I’m also posting the other big hit from the album, ‘Subirusdoistiozin’, and the opening track, 'Bogota', with a great Latin-sounding beginning.

Stapel, the 'Lying Dutchman', will publish his diary

Diederik Stapel, also known as the ‘Lying Dutchman’, was the protagonist of one of the nastiest cases of professional misconduct in experimental psychology, amidst a recent surge of such cases. The committee in charge of investigating the extent of his fraudulent conduct has recently announced its conclusions. As could have been expected, it looks very bad, also affecting a number of his collaborators who, due to negligence, unwittingly allowed him to engage in such practices (article here in Dutch).

Stapel now says he feels ‘sadness and shame’, but in a surprising turn of events, he has also been writing a diary since the whole commotion started, parts of which he is planning to publish in book form! (Article in Dutch) Is it “a way to try to make money off of his terrible decisions”, as suggested by Bryce Huebner (to whom I owe the pointer to the article on Twitter)? Or is it a case of someone who is so used to being in the spotlight that any form of public attention is welcome? I don’t know what to make of it, but I suppose one shouldn't be too surprised by his penchant for poor judgment.

Presenter tips for making accessible presentations

This is a guest-post by Teresa Blankmeyer Burke.

Scaliger’s helpful post about making APA presentations visually accessible and appealing reminds me there are also things philosophers can do to make their presentations more accessible to deaf and hard of hearing audience members. Odds are good that at least a few audience members will have hearing loss -- according to the U.S. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, fifteen percent of adults between the ages of 20 and 69 have hearing loss, and this percentage increases with age.  Most of these people rely on residual hearing (amplified or unamplified) and visual cues. This post is focused on making talks more accessible to that population – I’m planning another post on accessibility for those working with sign language interpreters and CART (captioning).

Identical twins are not genetically identical: Potential consequences for the Minnesota Twin Study

[cross-posted from our Psychology Today blog]

When I was a child one of my favorite books was about a pair of identical twins who decided to switch clothes. They looked so much alike that their parents had had to dress one in blue and the other in green. The twin boys fooled their parents for a long long time. An obedient 3-year old, I was thrilled by their ingenuity and boldness.

Though parents can usually tell the difference between their identical twins--grandparents, teachers, neighbors and peers sometimes cannot. And for good reasons. Identical twins very often look almost exactly alike. No surprise there, if identical twin share all of their DNA.

When in Glass Houses....

This hard-hitting review is getting thumbs up from my fellow analyticals. I agree with a core underlying complaint: "The insulation of French philosophy, often marketed as a thoughtful dismissal of the ideals that underlie Anglo-American philosophy, is in fact rooted in nothing loftier than a systematic disregard for linguistically inaccessible literature."  If the reviewer's description of De Fontenay's approach (which apparently is highly critical of features of analytical moral philosophy) is accurate, she deserves a lot of castigation. Even so, I do not recall that we analyticals are widely noted for our linguistic prowess and careful citation of French (and other non-English) authors! When in glass houses...

Okay, on to a more philosophically outrageous aspect of this review:

But to suggest that such awareness of shared pain can substitute for more principled approaches -- as De Fontenay does -- is to regressively return animal ethics into an extension of sentimental care for animals. It is (arguably) the lasting collective achievement of animal ethics from Singer on to show that the treatment of animals should not be limited to momentary spurts of compassion for cute and furry animals. Animal ethics should, rather, offer a conceptually disciplined framework through which moral restrictions on what may be institutionally done to members of other species can be evaluated and generated.--Tzachi Zamir

See how they fly like lucy in the sky: Positive effects of magic mushrooms on the brain

By Berit Brogaard and Kristian Marlow (Cross-posted from Psychology Today)

Whether "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was a product of the Beatles' experimentation with psychedelic drugs is still a subject of great debate among Beatles fans and music experts. But it was no secret that the lyrics of many of the pop legend's famous tracks was inspired by LSD, including "I am a Walrus," "Tomorrow Never Knows," and "What's The Real Mary Jane." The Beatles' creating during a hallucinogenic trip is not a rare case of acid-driven creation, invention or discovery. The double helix structure of DNA occurred to geneticist and neuroscientist Francis Crick while he was tripping on the Lucy drug and low-level tech Kari Mullis hit on the idea behind Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), a now widely-used technique for amplifying a single piece of DNA by a factor of 100 billion, while cruising along the Pacific Coast Highway one night in his car on LSD.

The phylogeny and ontogeny of deductive reasoning

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

In a recent paper, the eminent psychologist of reasoning P. Johnson-Laird says the following:

[T]he claim that naïve individuals can make deductions is controversial, because some logicians and some psychologists argue to the contrary (e.g., Oaksford & Chater, 2007). These arguments, however, make it much harder to understand how human beings were able to devise logic and mathematics if they were incapable of deductive reasoning beforehand.

This last claim strikes me as very odd, or at the very least as poorly formulated. (To be clear, I side with those, such as Oaksford and Chater, who think that deductive reasoning must be learned to be mastered and competently practiced by reasoners.) It looks like a doubtful inference to the best explanation: humans have in fact devised logic and mathematics, which are crucially based on the deductive method, so they must have been capable of deductive reasoning before that. Something like: birds had to have fully formed wings before they could fly – hum, I don’t think so… Instead, the wing analogy suggests that there must be some precursors to deductive reasoning skills in untrained reasoners, but the phylogeny of the deductive method (and to be clear, I’m speaking of cultural evolution here) would have been a gradual, self-feeding process.

I liked continental realism before it became cool

I'm going to move heaven and earth to try to attend these:

1. "Translating Realism" at Notre Dame (featuring: Adrian Johnston (University of New Mexico), Dorothea Olkowski (UCCS/Rotman Institute), Michael Naas (Depaul)),  
2. "The Return of Speculative Philosophy" at the University of Toronto (featuring Rebecca Comay).

There's a particular kind of validation where the stuff you've been digging starts to gain traction, though one must avoid the music fan trope of accusing the now popular thinkers of "selling out" at exactly the moment this happens.

Logical Properties of 'It Seems'

I am currently finishing a paper on the semantic and logical properties of 'seem'. As 'seem' is a subject-raising verb, we can treat 'it seems' as a sentential operator. This raises the question of how this operator behaves logically. Is it hyperintensional? Does it distribute over conjunction? Over disjunction? Over conditionals? Does it commute with negation?

I think it's fairly obvious that 'it seems' is hyperintensional. It seems to Lois Lane that Superman is not Clark Kent but it doesn't seem to her that Superman is not Superman. The other questions are harder.

Raiding Canada

Last year, Moya Greene, the CEO of Canada Post was appointed CEO of the Royal Mail (in the UK). Today, Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of Canada was appointed Governor of the Bank of England. I am sorry you guys don't have any home-grown talent. Would you like our Prime Minister too? 

You'd be very welcome.

On card-carrying contextualists

In her introduction, James explains her methodology by pointing out that "in order to follow Spinoza, and to grasp the significance of his claims, it is not enough to explicate the text: one must also set it in the context of the sequence of theological and political debates to which he is contributing" (4). Though not myself a card-carrying member of the contextualist school, I believe that at least in the case of the TTP this attitude is quite fruitful and apt for a rather simple reason. The most salient feature of the text (as James points out) is its polemical nature, and it is hard to grasp the full meaning of a claim made as part of a debate when that claim is abstracted from its setting. Obviously, this interpretative attitude makes the decision about the proper context for understanding the book utterly critical.

...But James interestingly suggests that, in spite of this historical grounding, the book should not be read merely as an "active theological-political intervention in the politics of its time," but also as a work which "yields insights of general philosophical interest, bearing on our own predicament as much as that of the Dutch state in the second half of the seventeenth century" (6).--Yitzhak Melamed reviewing Susan James' Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion, and Politics: The Theologico-Political Treatise, Oxford University Press.

I was trained as a member of the contextualist school, and I used to carry my card proudly when I left home. (Nowadays as regular readers of this blog know I vaccilate between trying to save or abolish the school!) But the school was also founded with a dogma--the denial that classic philosophical texts addressed perennial issues that may have permanent answers. Yet, in the part of the introduction quoted by Melamed, James comes very close to denying the contextual dogma; Spinoza's text ""yields insights of general philosophical interest." So, what we are seeing, I think, is an evolution in the contextualist school.

What happens to starting salaries if we abolish interviewing at the APA?

In my four years on the job-market I had about fifteen APA interviews--about a third of these include some of my most horrid experiences in professional philosophy (some favorites: being asked to respond to a series of quotes from my supervisor's letter of recommendation; the five minute silence after I answered a question about how I would teach medieval philosophy with "I would ask Profs. X and Y in your department for advice on that one;" not to mention far worse stories!) As an interviewer I have also left interviews , where I felt that my clarifying questions torpedoed (unintentionally, really!) some very worthy candidates' job-chances. Professional philosophers are not very good at this kind of thing. So, I am very open to just abolishing APA interviews (recall the discussion on the Leiter report and here at the PhilosophySmoker) [ht John Doris].

But I worry that if job-searches are not scheduled around the shared time-frame set by the Eastern APA that then there may be an unintended, bad side-effect: lower starting salaries. For, in the current situation most tenure track searches occur side-by-side. This generates at least the non-trivial possibility that at least some lucky folk may get multiple offers, which generate the opportunity for (modest) bidding wars. A few thousand dollars bump, say, in the first year can generate a huge difference in total salary at the end of one's career. Once the norm of interviewing at the APA dwindles I bet the tacitly-shared hiring calendar in philosophy will also disappear and a lot of universities will notice that they can hire philosophical talent cheaper than they do now.  I realize that even if I am right about this (not guaranteed, of course), this added benefit to the lucky few may not outweigh all the moral, psychological, and financial costs of interviewing at the APA. But with increasing downward pressure on academic salaries it is also in our shared financial interest to try to keep competition for talent alive. 

Kids as super-witnesses: Storing raw and uninterpreted data in memory may carry testimonial advantages

[Cross-posting from Psychology Today]

The U.S. legal system gives preference to adult testimony in court cases. In 2002 Thomas Junta was accused of killing a man in a Massachusetts hockey rink quarrell in 2000. Thomas’ son 12-year-old Quinlan Junta was a key defense witness for his father but his testimony did not convince the jury. Thomas was found guilty and sentenced to 6 to 10 years in state prison.

Make sure everyone can see your point

Job-talk season will soon be upon us, and before that the formidable Eastern APA. Well-appointed philosophers now come equipped with sleek slide-shows in which years of toil have been reduced to bullet points and fuzzy photos of colleagues in their offices. Although the Dark Ages of Powerpoint have passed, some presenters don’t take account of the difficulty certain members of their audience — among them, perhaps, the more eminent — will have in seeing their point. Literally.

▶ Update: A very helpful comment from Teresa Blankmeyer Burke includes a link to guidelines recommended by the American Printing House for the Blind. The APH favors sans-serif fonts. I myself find Helvetica and its ilk harder to read in bulk than, say, Garamond. One compromise would be “slab-serif” fonts (the example below is American Typewriter; look here or here for more examples); “old-style” or “antique” fonts (Garamond, Janson, Goudy Old Style), may also work; avoid Times and other “modern” or “didone” fonts. The APH recommends emphatically that grey-scale graphics (“black-and-white” photos, shadowed letters) be avoided.

It’s easy to make your work accessible to the visually impaired. The bonus in doing so is that everyone will benefit. My aim here is simply to offer a few tips on accessibility. But since accessibility and good graphic design go hand in hand, the advice given here may be useful more generally.

Even Majority-Women Disciplines Like Primatology Need a Gendered Conference Campaign

Readers of this blog are no doubt well-familiar with the Gendered Conference Campaign and the petitions associated with it.  I think most of us have assumed that the problems the GCC attempts to rectify – the underrepresentation of women as conference speakers and volume contributors – went hand-in-hand with the underrepresentation in the field.  That is, most of us have assumed that, because women are underrepresented in philosophy, women were not seen as archetypical philosophers and so do not come to mind readily when conference and volume organizers are putting together their lineups (thus perpetuating the underrepresentation of women).

However, a new study published in PLOS ONE (see summary and video interview with lead author Lynne Isbell here) from researchers at my university, UC Davis, suggests that the situation is more complex than that.  Primatology has a higher percentage of women than men, and yet there are still underrepresentation issues at conferences.  From the abstract:

Analysis of 21 annual meetings of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists reveals that within the subfield of primatology, women give more posters than talks, whereas men give more talks than posters. But most strikingly, among symposia the proportion of female participants differs dramatically by the gender of the organizer. Male-organized symposia have half the number of female first authors (29%) that symposia organized by women (64%) or by both men and women (58%) have, and half that of female participation in talks and posters (65%).

Election Predictions: Winners and Losers

Along with President Obama and many Democratic Senate candidates, the winners on election night included people who tried to predict the results by aggregating polling data -- most famously, Nate Silver of the New York Times. Their method was basically to average the recent polls, and use the result as a prediction. (Silver also did more sophisticated things, weighting the polls based on past accuracy, correcting for house effects, and running Monte Carlo simulations to calculate probabilities of victory.) Those who tried to predict the results by gauging enthusiasm at political rallies and trusting their gut feelings to adequately represent the preferences of the American electorate didn't do as well. If you'd like to catch up on the intense debate over poll aggregation as a way of predicting elections, I'll refer you to Brad DeLong's summary of 2 reasonable criticisms of Silver and 45 bad/ridiculous ones.

I put together this chart ranking 25 different predictions from people across the American political spectrum. (I think my Doktorvater would approve.) They're ranked based on the sum of the electoral vote margin in the states they got wrong, with the popular vote used to break ties.

#	Predictor	Outcome	Obama / Romney picks, all Obama wins	Pop=3.2%	StateFail	Grade
1	Markos Moulitsas and Daily Kos Elections	332-206	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL	3.5%	0	A+
2	Nate Silver, New York Times	332-206	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL	2.5%	0	A+
3	Simon Jackman, Huffington Post	332-206	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL	1.7%	0	A
4~	Josh Putnam, Davidson College	332-206	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL		0	A
4~	Drew Linzer, Emory University	332-206	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL		0	A
6	Sam Wang, Princeton University	303-235	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL	2.34%	0.9	A-
7	Jamelle Bouie, American Prospect	303-235	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL	2.2%	0.9	A-
8~	TPM Polltracker	303-235	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL	0.7%	0.9	A-
8~	RealClearPolitics	303-235	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL	0.7%	0.9	A-
10	Intrade Prediction Market	303-235	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL		0.9	A-
11~	Ezra Klein, Washington Post	290-248	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL		3.9	B
11~	Larry Sabato, University of Virginia	290-248	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL		3.9	B
13	Cokie Roberts, ABS NEWS	294-234	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL		5.6	B
14	Dean Chambers, Unskewed Polls	275-263	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL	1.79%	10.5	C+
15	Erik Erickson, Redstate	285-253	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL		17.2	C
16	SE Cupp, MSNBC	270-268	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL		22.0	C-
17	Karl Rove, Bush advisor (popular)	285-253	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL	3%	23.9	D+
18	Ben Shapiro, National Review	311-227	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL		28.0	D
19	Ben Domenech, The Transom	278-260	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL ME2	R	26.7+?	D
20	Christian Schneider, Milwaukee J-S	291-247	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL		30.5	D-
21	James Pethokoukis, AEI	301-227	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL	2%	30.5	D-
22	Michael Barone, Washington Examiner	315-223	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL		33.8	F
23	George Will, Washington Post	321-217	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL		35.7	F
24	Steve Forbes, Forbes Magazine	321-217	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL		40.5	F
25	Dick Morris, Fox News	325-213	NV PA MN WI IA NH OH CO VA FL		41.5	F

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Agua de beber'

(Sorry folks, minimalistic BMoF today due to conferencing.)

I usually don't get too excited about gringos singing Brazilian music, but this Al Jarreau version of 'Agua de beber' (composed by Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes) is admittedly pretty cool... (Check here for a live version by Tom Jobim and band.)

Does knowledge of evolution decrease one's rationally based faith?

Mohan wrote a very interesting blogpost, in which he argues that Obama's belief that his "belief in evolution" is compatible with faith is "an utterly false platitude". Mohan writes "Whether or not science is literally "incompatible" with religion, it seems to me obvious that belief in evolution should decrease one's faith inasmuch as it takes away one main reason for believing in God. Certainly, I can't see how knowledge of evolution could possibly strengthen anybody's rationally based faith." I disagree with this view, and would like to put forward some of the reasons for why I think this.

The more general question behind Mohan's question is: in how far is religious faith dependent on natural theology? I take natural theology not only in the narrow sense, as in e.g., the cosmological argument, design argument, moral argument, but also in a broader sense of theology that is not based on personal experience or revelation, but on a reasoned consideration of natural phenomena. One of the strands of natural theology, for instance, espoused by Swinburne, is that God provides a good explanation to explain some natural phenomena (e.g., the existence of the universe, fine-tuning etc). Now, there seems to be a tendency in American philosophers, even among those whose position towards natural theology is ambivalent (Plantinga is a good example) that natural theology in this sense provides more warrant for faith. If natural science can't explain it, we can appeal to God, so the idea goes, and this easily gives rise to the view that science and natural theology are somehow in competition. However, this view is strongly tied to a very specific perspective on natural theology, which has not been endorsed in much of the history of theology, namely natural theology is somehow prior to faith, a view also endorsed by some recent atheists on the topic (e.g., Philipse). Let me stress that this is not in line with the way that the relationship between faith and science has been regarded throughout history.

The magical number seven, plus 67,883: The extreme limits of memory retrieval and how to get there

[Cross-posting from Psychology Today]

In his famous paper entitled "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information" cognitive psychologist George A. Miller of Princeton University argued that our working memory, our ability to hold information in our minds for a few seconds, is limited to 9 items. That's fewer items than the items of a regular out of town American phone number. In light of this you might wonder what to say about cases of people with extreme memory abilities. Chao Lu holds the Guinness world record in reciting Pi, a record dating back to 2005. Lu recalled 67,890 digits of Pi in 24 hours and 4 minutes with an error at the 67,891st digit, saying it was a 5, when it was actually a 0. How is it possible to retrieve this quantity of information accurately through working memory? Is it magic? After talking to several people working in memory sports, we found out that it's not.

Rubio/Obama on Evolution

Slate's Daniel Engber compares Marco Rubio's statement on evolution with Barack Obama's in 2008. Rubio, as we have been hearing in recent days, was asked "How old do you think the Earth is?" and replied:

I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States.

Obama's statement is more nuanced. He was asked what he would say to his daughters if one asked, “Daddy, did god really create the world in 6 days?”

You don't need to be conscious when you think about hard problems. But what is the role of consciousness then?

You are preparing for your upcoming exam, reading through thousands of pages. Suddenly you realize that you forgot to pay attention to what you actually read. You were reading along but your thoughts were elsewhere. "Good God," you think. "Hours of wasted time." You turn back the pages and start over. This time you make sure you pay close attention.

Recent research, to appear in the journal PNAS, suggests that you may be wasting even more time by doing that. You don't need attention to comprehend what you read or to do math. In fact, you may not even need consciousness. The researchers, located at Hebrew University, used a technique known as Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS) to suppress consciousness in some 300 research participants for a short period of time. In CFS a series of rapidly changing images is presented to one eye, whereas a constant image is presented to the other. When using this technique, the constant image supposedly is not consciously perceived until after about 2 seconds.

A Philosophy App!

Phi2Phi is a philosophy app for iPhone and iPad, available free of charge here.

Developed by the University of Toronto epistemologist, Jonathan Weisberg, it allows you to ask other users questions anonymously. You can run micro-polls (to discover intuitions, for example, or test out thought experiments), get advice about teaching, and crowdsource reading suggestions and references. (Of course, you can also answer questions that other users ask.)

A brilliant procrastination device, but useful too! 

Setting the moral bar low

From a CFP:

Despite this influence, and despite the reception Dingler's ideas found in Paul Lorenzen's constructivist “Erlangen School” from 1950 on, today neither philosophers nor historians take notice of Dingler's original approach. One reason for this might be his concessions to National Socialist politics, which pale, however, in comparison to those of a certain Martin Heidegger.

The German wikipedia offers a sobering account of Hugo Dingler's life (which is not quite captured in the English version).

Ian Crystal

My friend and colleague Ian Crystal died suddenly on the morning of  last Wednesday, November the 14th.

His obituary is HERE, with information about the kind of person he was, his research, and how to donate to a scholarship that his brother Michael is setting up in Ian's memory. If you have memories of Ian you want to share with his family, the site I linked to has a place to leave comments.

Celebrating Universal Children's Day

Today is Universal Children’s Day. The date was created in 1954 by the UN, but it seems to me that it remains fairly unknown to the public at large. Now, why do we need a day to celebrate the children of the world and to promote their welfare, you may ask? Well, as it turns out, children remain one of the most oppressed groups among humans: scores of children around the world are neglected, abused, and fail to receive schooling, proper nutrition, love and attention. Whenever things get rough, say during wars and in violent environments, children are typically the most vulnerable and thus the most likely to suffer. More generally, parents and caregivers experiencing hardship will have extreme difficulties in being adequate caregivers (it’s hard enough when things are fine!).

Why is it so? There is a rather simple biological explanation for why human youngsters are vulnerable: the human species is unique in terms of the number of years (relative to the expected lifespan for the species) that a youngster is deeply dependent on others, parents in particular (but not exclusively), for survival. The fancy word for this phenomenon is altriciality, and humans share this characteristic with many bird species, but not with our closest living cousins, the great apes. As with many birds, rearing a human child is such a tough job that humans have become a largely monogamous species, again unlike our ‘promiscuous’ cousins the chimpanzees; motherly care alone is not sufficient, so the involvement of the father in childrearing becomes vital (if nothing else, to provide for food even if he is not a ‘hands-on’ kind of dad).

Reviewing Each Other's Books

Why exactly are Alvin Plantinga and Tom Nagel reviewing each other? And could we have expected a more dismal intellectual result than Plantinga on Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos in the New Republic? When two self-perceived victims get together, you get a chorus of hurt: For recommending an Intelligent Design manifesto as Book of the Year, Plantinga moans, “Nagel paid the predictable price; he was said to be arrogant, dangerous to children, a disgrace, hypocritical, ignorant, mind-polluting, reprehensible, stupid, unscientific, and in general a less than wholly upstanding citizen of the republic of letters.”

My heart goes out to anybody who utters such a wail, knowing that he is himself held in precisely the same low esteem. My mind, however, remains steely and cold.

A view from PSA 2012: Changes afoot

The 23rd biennial meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association (PSA) has just drawn to a successful close, with more sessions than ever and more attendees than ever.  So, from one perspective, all seems well.

Yet, it seems that one can reasonably ask why one should join a society like the PSA these days.  It used to be that many people joined in order to get the journal, Philosophy of Science.  But now, most academics get access to the journal through their universities.  Some old-fashioned types like me join societies whose goals they want to promote and whose communities they feel a part of; in addition to the PSA, I am member of HSS, ISHPSSB, ISEE, and the APA.

However, if one is not moved on that score, why join?  Why join the PSA, or any academic society, for that matter?

What is it about food and health related news?

As every mild chocolate-addict, I am always keen to read studies arguing that chocolate is somehow beneficial to one's health. The most recent exemplar in this long line of studies is one recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which indicated that the number of Nobel laureates of a country, controlling for population size, correlates positively with annual chocolate consumption per capita. As always in this sort of correlational studies involving chocolate, the results are probably spurious. They crumble on closer scrutiny, and at present seem to invoke mainly snickering in the scientific community. The bitter lesson is that we should raise the bar in our research, in particular in controlling for lurking variables, or just freaky results (in a large sample, so a statistical dictum goes, outrageous results are bound to happen; moreover, the author "reports regular daily chocolate consumption, mostly but not exclusively in the form of Lindt's dark varieties.")

Even if we do not take this pessimistic outlook, a lot of data reported in the medical (and it looks more and more, in the social sciences too) are false positives. So given the high probability of false positives, why is news about the adverse or beneficial effects of food, even if published in relatively obscure journals, headline material?

Four people who gained superhuman abilities from brain injuries or missing senses

At our lab in St. Louis we are working with several people with superhuman abilities, also known as “savant skills.” My research assistant Kristian Marlow and I are also currently finishing a book entitled The Superhuman Mind (under contract with an agency, see updates here). We are blogging about these cases almost daily over at Psychology Today. The following are four brief stories about some of the individuals we are working with.