New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Advice to graduate philosophy programs who require referees to answer multiple choice questions in addition to their letters about potential PhD students

Stop it.  They are stupid.  And a huge waste of our time.  

question about disciplinary norms regarding prerogatives of rank

Two general questions about statistical and moral norms governing rank.

1. Among tenure-track and tenured faculty, to what extent does having a higher rank typically give one greater control over teaching assignments?
2. To what extent should having a higher rank give one greater control over teaching assignments?

For example, is it normal for all ranks to typically teach the same distribution of upper and lower level courses? Or is it normal for Fulls to teach whatever they want, even if this means some of them only teach upper level courses while Associates and Assistants are required to teach freshmen and sophomore general education courses? Are there any good arguments for the norms being one way or the other? 

I genuinely have no idea what the answers to the above are, and as a result think I don't really know the commonly accepted meaning of the terms "Full," "Associate," and "Assistant" as applied to job titles, e.g.

1. To what extent is it the job of Assistant Professors to assist higher ranked professors? 
2. To what extent is being an "Associate Professor" like what retail stores mean when they call non-management employees "associates." 

I'm not being sarcastic by asking these questions. The answers would be extremely helpful information, if only so that I know what I'm saying when I say that I am an Associate Professor.*

[*Full disclosure: I was a "K-Mart Associate" for three years and am so confident in the meaning of that term that I have in fact co-written with my wife two (unpublished) work-place comedies which go far towards explaining the meaning of the term. Even though I've worked four times longer in academia at this point, I couldn't begin to imagine penning an academic comedy without resolving basic questions such as the above. I guess I'd also have to find academia comedic, and that's a much dicier sell than it was in the glory days of Kingsley Amis or even David Lodge's early novels. Ah well, at least we've got Merle Haggard, even with the goofy instrumental solos still a pure thing in this fallen world.]

A neo-classical unionism

For the first century or so of the modern union movement, unions were esssentially extra-legal.  They were conceived as alternative centers of power that challenged the state and capitalist control of production that was itself instituted by state-enforced property regimes.  As such, unionization was not fundamentally about making better deals with capital, or improving conditions of wage-labor, but of changing the dynamics of economic control.  The primary goal was worker control of the means of production.  As such, there was no question of unions being legally sanctioned entities that would enter into state mediated bargaining with capital. 

One (unethical) way to get a timely and friendly email referee report

Is to hack the editorial system, or to have unknown benefactors with a weird sense of humor (the story is here).

Still Dead. Feeling No Better.

Thomas Nagel’s recent attack on Darwinism raises important metaphysical questions about methodology, which Eric has begun to explore. Here, I want to muse on a no doubt unintended effect of Nagel’s argument—a rumoured small boost in the regard accorded to Fodor’s earlier attack on Darwinism (aided by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, whose complicity in this is a mystery to me). True, Fodor's little dagger looks philosophically cautious by comparison to Nagel's WMD. My purpose here is simply to remind you, dear reader, that like Generalissimo Francisco Franco, Fodor’s negative critique is Still Dead. And it's feeling No Better. 

 

Never Let a Good Child Sexual Predator Scandal Go to Waste

From Volume 459 of the Annals of Pre-emptive Securitization:

The university's Board of Trustees proposed and unanimously approved the fingerprinting policy earlier this fall as a way to better protect minors on campus from potential criminals, reportedly following the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse case that rocked Pennsylvania State University in 2011. "It's prudent for us to do our due diligence and make sure we don't hire people like that," Florida Gulf Coast President Wilson Bradshaw told local media last month."

Cf Brian Massumi's analysis of the "future birth of the affective fact":

First do no harm: New insights into the treatment of epileptic seizures

[cross-posted from our Psychology Today blog]

Jim Abrahams witnessed his son Charlie, who had childhood epilepsy, undergo frightening seizures. The boy would convulse and loose consciousness. Medications didn't help. As his seizures continued, his cognitive abilities slowly deteriorated. Jim, who wasn't a medical doctor, decided to start investigating alternative treatments. After days in the library looking through books and medical journals, he found a book on childhood epilepsy written by Dr. John Freeman, the director of the Pediatric Epilepsy Center at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The book described that a diet that mimics the metabolism of starvation by cutting most dietary sources of carbohydrates and proteins could in some cases cure drug-resistant childhood epilepsy.

"Not you alone, but with the state and so on"

This is how Gary Becker concludes his impromptu remarks at a May 2012 University of Chicago seminar (set up by Bernard Harcourt [1] with François Ewald [2]) on Foucault's reading in Birth of Biopolitics[3] of Becker's human capital theory[4].  

Or if I look at the United States, how can I understand what young African-American men are doing? To me, this theory—and I’m not saying I fully understand what they’re doing—but the theory says, well, they have a lot of different options available.

What we’re pointing out to them is, if you drop out of high school in the United States, you’re pretty much destined to be unemployed, to have low earnings, to be in poor health, to have low marriage rates, and the like. That’s what the theory points out to them. And what it then points out to them is that you can overcome that in various ways. Not you alone, but with the state and so on.

 Discussion and notes below the fold.

Thomas Nagel and the Principle of Sufficient Reason (or, on unprincipled natural teleology)

[Thomas Nagel's Mind & Cosmos has generated a number of very critical reviews, including this blistering one by Leiter/Weisberg, and another, wide-ranging one by Eliott Sober (thanked for his refereeing at OUP by Nagel in the preface to M&C!) as well as gratitude from the creationists (recall Mohan's discussion). Mohan has blogged about some of Nagel's moves before,  but the rather long post -- apologies -- below engages with issues thus far unexplored in these discussions.--ES.]

Analytical philosophy has made great progress over the last century. But its original, necessary biases did some harm, too. In particular, detailed working knowledge of the history of philosophy and metaphysics was banished for several generations. While metaphysics is thriving again, we still lack (despite the brilliance of David Lewis' modular approach) complete systems of thought that can rival in depth and interlocking breadth the past masters (say, Suarez, Leibniz, etc.). The damage has also been more narrow. For example, one of the most obvious so-called ‘Kuhn Losses’ is our relative ignorance of the nature and implications of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). This is no surprise because analytical philosophy was founded in the act of rejecting PSR. Our forefathers’ attempt to balance between common sense and the truths of science meant -- as science and the PSR parted ways -- the willing submission to brute, ultimate facts (recall this post).  

In Mind & Cosmos, Thomas Nagel happily embraces “a form of the principle of sufficient reason” (17) in support of his "common sense" (5, 7, etc.) and against the recent “orthodox scientific consensus.” (10; 5) Rather than accepting this "ideological consensus," (128) Nagel insists -- regularly using language reminiscent of the great Feyerabend --  that "almost everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding the reductive research program as sacrosanct." (7) While Nagel insists that the champions of scientific enlightenment are bullies, he treats the "defenders of intelligent design" with "gratitude" (Plantinga returns the gratitude),  even though Nagel clearly recognizes that once one embraces one's inner sensus divinitatis one is also compelled in one's judgments. (12) 

A classic statement of the PSR is Spinoza's "For each thing there must be assigned a cause, or reason, both for its existence and for its nonexistence." (Ethics 1p11d2) That is to say, any PSR worth having imposes significant explanatory demands (especially of non-arbitrariness) on any philosophical system in which it is deployed. Below the fold I critically discuss Nagel's way of combining the PSR and his attempted revisionary science, but here I just register the marvelousness of Nagel's deployment of the PSR as an instrument in the service of common sense! (cf. 91-2) This is certainly an original move in the history of metaphysics--one that, in a single, magical stroke overturns Lovejoy's long narrative.

The Modus Ponens-Modus Tollens asymmetry and non-monotonic logics

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

A well-known phenomenon in the empirical study of human reasoning is the so-called Modus Ponens-Modus Tollens asymmetry. In reasoning experiments, participants almost invariably ‘do well’ with MP (or at least something that looks like MP – see below), but the rate for MT success drops considerably (from almost 100% for MP to around 70% for MT – Schroyens and Schaeken 2003). As a result, any theory purporting to describe human reasoning accurately must account for this asymmetry. Now, given that for classical logic (and other non-classical systems) MP and MT are equally valid, plain vanilla classical logic fails rather miserably in this respect.

As noted by Oaksford and Chater (‘Probability logic and the Modus Ponens-Modus Tollens asymmetry in conditional inference’, in this 2008 book), some theories of human reasoning (mental rules, mental models) explain the asymmetry at what is known as the algorithmic level (a terminology proposed by Marr (1982)) – that is, in terms of the mental process that (purportedly) implement deductive reasoning in a human mind. So according to these theories, performing MT is harder than performing MP (for a variety of reasons), which is why reasoners, while still trying to reason deductively, have difficulties with MT. Other theorists defend that participants are not in fact trying to reason deductively at all, so the asymmetry is not related to some presumed competence-performance gap. (Marr’s term to refer to the general goal of the processes, rather than the processes themselves, is ‘computational level’ – the terminology is somewhat unnatural, but it has now become standard.) Oaksford and Chater are among those favoring an analysis at the computational level, in their case proposing a Bayesian, probabilistic account of human reasoning as a normative theory not only explaining but also justifying the asymmetry.

Which one is the satire?

Cooper Union's new website: "Shake hands to new horizons, expansion and development! Syngerization of global leaders for the advancement of multidimensional growth prospects."

University of California's new brand attributes: "Visionary. Experimental. Optimistic. Awe-Inspiring. Essential. Audacious. Pioneering. Proven. Everything we say and do should embody these traits."

"Are you gay?"

I was asked the question in the title of this post during the closing moments of an Eastern APA job interview. I  believe I stammered "that's illegal," but maybe I only thought of that response in the bar later. In reality the conversation continued with the Chair of the department  after the interview and that was even less edifying. (I have shared more unprofessional interview moments here.) This by way of calling attention to our friends at Feminist Philosophy, who are having an important discussion about what to do in situations like the one I encountered. Those with wise council (I don't have any, alas) or in need of it should join in there.

A colleague in the discipline had warned me against the department with whom the 'are-you-gay-incident' occurred. (I was, in fact, trying to replace that person, but did not receive an 'on-campus-interview.') Given the deplorable situation on the professional philosophy junior/tenure-track job-market, we often forget that interviews are two-way encounters. Departments should be mindful that they are also 'selling' themselves not just to people desperate for a decent paying job in philosophy, but also to future professional colleagues in the discipline. I sometimes wonder if I will ever bump into the  self-described "philosopher of economics" who asked me the question about my sexual orientation/sense of self. I imagine the conversation starts with, "Actually, we have met before. You may not recall..."

You have to be narcissistic and regularly tap into your inner anger to succeed at blogging. Given that professional philosophy has treated me extremely generously during most of my career, my blogging floats along happily on my narcissism. But sometimes what animates my blogging are the memories of the many unprofessional experiences undergone and witnessed....

Will There Always Be Tenure?

Over on Leiter Reports, Amy Ferrer, newly appointed as executive director of the American Philosophical Association, has been writing a series of guest posts on the latest prospect for tenure track positions in North America. “According to much of public opinion, and unfortunately according to some in power in universities and our nation’s legislatures, tenured professors are paid too much to work too little, and can’t be removed from duty even if they’re doing a terrible job,” she writes. Currently, ¾ of teaching staff in post-secondary institutions are employed “off the tenure-track” and “The median pay per course, standardized to a three-credit course, was $2,700 in fall 2010 and ranged in the aggregate from a low of $2,235 at two-year colleges to a high of $3,400 at four-year doctoral or research universities,” according to a report from the Coalition of Academic Workers.

These are shocking trends, and it is perhaps natural to blame the poor economic climate and cling to the hope that things will turn around soonish. Of course, there is the right wing resurgence and that doesn’t bode too well. And as we saw, Ms. Ferrer puts some of the blame on public opinion. But surely things can't stay as bad as they have been for the last three years.

Hmm, yes . . . but this neglects one rather obvious fact.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Niemeyer the composer

Today’s BMoF will continue to celebrate the life and work of the great Oscar Niemeyer. As it happens, he had his first foray into music at age 102, writing a beautiful text which was then put into music by the talented young samba-man Edu Krieger (who will get his own BMoF very soon!). The song is called ‘Tranquilo com a vida’, something like ‘In peace with life’, which pretty much describes Niemeyer’s own attitude towards life, and was recorded by Krieger himself.

Here are two videos of the song, one with the studio version, and a ‘domestic’ one at Niemeyer’s own house. Here is someone who clearly enjoyed life to the fullest!

Changing our frame of reference from "job market" to "political economy of philosophy instruction"

Th Dec 6, 5 pm CST: I'm moving this post back up as it's received some important comments from Ed Kazarian, in response to a comment I made at Leiter Reports to a post by Amy Ferrer, the Executive Director of the APA. By the way, all of Ferrer's posts at LR deserve reading. 

----

The past month (September 2011) we've had a series of interesting and informative posts on preparing graduate students to enter what is commonly called "the job market." The presupposition here is that the job market in philosophy begins post-PhD. 

I don't want to criticize the content of the posts; as far as I can tell, the advice has been excellent. But I do want to suggest that we change our frame of reference on these matters, and specify that we have been discussing only a small segment of the complete system of employment for philosophy instruction in institutions of higher education. So I'd like to suggest we call the analysis of the complete system "the political economy of philosophy instruction." 

New Disability Icon

Thanks, in part, to the efforts of philosopher Brian Glenney (an expert on the Molyneux question, and the author of a very fine piece of scholarship on Adam Smith), Gordon College introduces a "new icon, a person leaning forward, arm in the air as if to push the wheels." See here for more on this story. [HT Jeroen de Ridder on Facebook.]

Oscar Niemeyer dies at age 104

Oscar Niemeyer, the great Brazilian architect, just passed away at age 104, 10 days short of turning 105. The news has been a bit everywhere, so I suppose most readers will have seen it already, but some will be surprised to hear that he was actually still alive until yesterday. What most people probably do not know is that Niemeyer was not only alive but also kicking: he continued to be productive as an architect all the way until the end of his life. It was particularly remarkable that he continued to get involved in projects whose completion he knew he would not live long enough to see, but this did not deter him. (An uncle of mine was a long-time collaborator of Niemeyer, from whom I heard this and other interesting bits about Niemeyer.)

It is fair to say that Niemeyer was one of the greatest, most influential architects of the 20^th century. He is perhaps best known for his design of the government buildings of Brasilia, the built-from-scratch capital of Brazil inaugurated in 1960, but his projects are everywhere to be seen, mostly in Brazil but also elsewhere. (Check here for a complete list of his works, H/T Luca Baptista.) If one had to use only two words to define Niemeyer’s work, these would be: concrete and curves. He explored like no one else the aesthetic possibilities of reinforced concrete, in particular through curvilinear shapes; see for example the famous Sambadrome arch in Rio de Janeiro (below the fold).

When a killer review turns into a boomerang review.

First, let's stipulate that a "killer review" is a review that ends a philosophical debate (or closes out a tradition, etc.). Presumably such a review would include devastating objections and well-deserved ridicule for its target. For example, sometimes I indulge myself in fantasizing that I could write a killer review that ends discussion of fine-tuning arguments for the existence of God. Second, let's call a "boomerang review" a review that intends to be a "killer review," but that (you guessed it) rebounds on its author (by, say, damaging the author's reputation). Presumably the non-negligible risk of becoming an unwitting author of a boomerang review prevents the proliferation of attempted killer reviews. Perhaps, most reviewers recognize how difficult philosophy is when you start really thinking about it.

There are, of course, many strategies by which killer reviews can be executed. One that had never occurred to me before is by way of praise. In Dutch we have a saying, 'iemand het graf in prijzen' (literally: to praise somebody into his grave), by which we convey an instance of high praise that is intended to produce negative feelings about the objects of praise. (Think about how parents might get rid off their child's intended spouse.) In this review, Mark Sagoff clearly aims to kill off welfare economics by way of praise.

Weekly Philo of Economics: on the methodological retreat of mainstream economics (Gul & Pesendorfer) [Part I]

In 2008 two Princeton Economists, Faruk Gul and Wolfgang Pesendorfer, published an increasingly influential methodological statement, "The Case for Mindless Economics" (hereafter "GP08"). Professors Gul and Pesendorfer publish regularly together and they also happen to be among the tightly-knit group of core-gate-keepers in the economics profession. So, for example, if you look at the submission guidelines of Theoretical Economics [TE], co-edited by F. Gul, you can read: "If you have previously submitted your paper to Econometrica, you have the option of requesting that the referees' reports and covering letters and the editor's decision letter be transferred to the coeditor assigned to handle your paper at TE." Of course, until very recently Pesendorfer was one of the co-editors at Econometrica. (It would be impolite, of course, to view these journals as rent-seeking instruments, but how else to interpret economically this policy: "a paper judged to be unlikely to be acceptable by a second round will be rejected, either without consultation with referees or in response to referee reports. In either case, the submission fee will not be refunded.") Econometrica does have an important "conflict of interest policy," but that does not prevent group-think. Either way, we can safely treat GP08 as a proxy for (recent) establishment views in economics.

The main and (almost) only target of GP08 is what they call "neuro-economics," which they conflate with (experimental) research on the brain. (They also frequently use the term "philosophy" to refer to an enterprise completely irrelevant to "economics" now and always.) Gp08 systematically ignores experimental research conducted by, say, economists (e.g. Vernon Smith and his various collaborators) that also focus on what GP08 calls "economic data." This is important to keep in mind when we evaluate the main thesis of GP08, which is that economics is mainly about rational choice theory (and its natural extension). The thesis is offered as a descriptive account of "common practice" among economists (1), although we also learn that given the economic "evidence" available to economists this approach has also rightly earned a "central role in economics." (43-44) Here's a  statement of the main thesis:

MOOCs: the newest online dating service

Employers willing to pay can now find their soulmates with Coursera's new escort, er, on-line dating, no, headhunter service to find students who like poetry, museum-going, and long walks on the beach. Or soft skills in addition to their raw performance. (Okay, now it's starting to sound like Craigslist.)

Providers of free online courses are officially in the headhunting business, bringing in revenue by selling to employers information about high-performing students who might be a good fit for open jobs.... Both Coursera and Udacity show employers more than just student grades. They also highlight students who frequently help others in discussion forums. Mr. Thrun, of Udacity, said those "softer skills" are often more useful to employers than raw academic performance. 

To be serious for a moment, this is an excellent example of the Autonomia themes of "real subsumption" and the "social factory" (somewhat technical discussion here), that is, the incorporation of everyday social skills into capitalist production.

You can move external objects with your mind! It's called synthetic telepathy

[Cross-posted from our Psychology Today blog]

Lou, who once set several major league baseball records, suddenly could barely keep his body upright during practice. He would fall while running bases, stumble over curbs and mishandle fielding plays. His wife, Eleanor, was concerned. Her husband held records for most consecutive games played, 2131 to be exact, and most career grand slams. Though Lou said it was just a phase, Eleanor got on the phone with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Charles William Mayo wanted them to come right away. They arrived on June 13, 1939 and six days later on Lou’s thirty-sixth birthday the doctors told Eleanor that her husband suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Lou Gehrig died less than two years later.

Negative thinking as a path to happiness? Review of Oliver Burkeman's The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, New York: Faber and Faber

"So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword other than laughter," said Gordon Allport, an American psychologist and one of the founders of the study of personality. Scientists have studied the effects of mirthful laughter, positive thinking and optimism on feelings of self-worth, mood disorders and depression since the 1970s.

In The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking British author and Guardian feature writer Oliver Burkeman takes issue with "the cult of optimism," the convention that phony smiles, jovial laughter and positive thinking is a surefire path to happiness. Positive thinking is the problem, not the solution, Burkeman teaches us. He believes people have come to trust that a "Don't worry. Be happy" attitude toward life is the only route to contentment. People seem to be of the conviction that if you have negative thoughts and see your own limits, you cannot be happy. So to be happy we must set out on a journey that changes your mindset from negative and inhibited to enthusiastic, fervent and animated. We are told to visualize our dreams and goals, eliminate the word "impossible" from our vocabulary and put a big fabricated smile on our physiognomy. All that actually can lead to unhappiness, Burkeman says.

If backlogs in philosophy journals are the problem, are moratoria the solution?

Hypatia, a leading journal in feminist philosophy, has decided to place a moratorium on new submissions until July 2013. There have been moratoria in other journals, for instance in Noûs and PPR, but these are perhaps a bit less problematic, as they are general philosophy journals, and so you could find an alternative home for your paper in epistemology, metaphysics, philsophy of language etc. if there is a moratorium in those journals. By contrast, while Hypatia is not the only venue for feminist philosophy, it is the most prominent one, and it still seems less straightforward to publish feminist philosophy in general philosophy journals (I see no principled reason against this, but it still remains rare). 

Moratoria on new submissions are often motivated by long back logs in the journal's publication, and increases on editors and referees, all caused by an increase in submissions. For Hypatia, the editors attribute the steep rise in submissions to an increased interest in feminist philosophy. For Noûs and PPR, the reason for increased submissions might be that these journals have relatively decent turnaround times in terms of refereeing, combined with an excellent reputation, which leads young researchers to seek these venues, rather than, say Mind, which has a very long average review time (Cullison's journal surveys provide comparative data). It seems to me (although I don't immediately find quantitative data to back this up) that increased submissions by graduate students and other junior philosophers contribute to the problem. 

While the decision of Hypatia's editors is understandable, I think that moratoria, in the long run, are not a good solution. They disadvantage people who are untenured, and require good publications on their CV for jobs or their tenure evaluations. Often they have to get such papers in a relatively tight schedule. If the primary venues for their work happen to have a moratorium, this would be an unacceptable bad luck factor. So what are the alternatives?

Bad News in US Student Loan default numbers [updated title]

[UPDATE M 3 Dec, 7:20 am, CST: Josh Miller in comments rightfully chides me for uncritically accepting the overly dramatic wording of the zerohedge article. So I've modified the title of the post.]

That's the take-away from this story at zerohedge.com. Their headline is even more dramatic than my post's title: 

The Scariest Chart Of The Quarter: Student Debt Bubble Officially Pops As 90+ Day Delinquency Rate Goes Parabolic

As I read the charts in the linked posts, the percentage of student loans now +90 days delinquent shot up from 9% to 11% last quarter. And the dollar value of newly delinquent loans went from $21 billion to $33 billion last quarter. Out of a total student loan debt (non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, let's not forget) of close to $1 trillion this post makes the claim that putting it all together, over $120 billion of student loan debt is now in default. I can't pretend to know what it all means, but it can't be good.

Should Graduate Students Contribute to Edited Volumes?

In Catarina Dutilh Novaes's recent post, "How to ensure gender balance in edited volumes?" one anonymous commenter suggests:

One thing that I think editors can do is to be willing to invite junior women (and even promising graduate students) to write articles for volumes that are otherwise mostly big-name senior people. This does double (triple?) duty: it helps put less pressure on established people... while helping to ensure gender balance in these volumes, and it helps women who are at an earlier career stage with things like tenure and getting jobs (and simply becoming "known" in the philosophical community). I've seen more and more volumes with a few articles in them by junior people/grad students; the least we could do is ensure that THOSE articles are written by women.

This seems right and good to me, at least as far as the volumes themselves go and as far as the profession goes.  But my question is whether submitting papers to volumes is actually good for the graduate students (or early academics) themselves.  I am not so sure that it is.