New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Tom Waits - Hell Broke Luce

Things have been uneven since the year of Blood Money and Alice, so I haven't been following Tom Waits as closely lately. I just heard this song for the first time today:

Pretty horrifying. The top youtube comment is:

I did one pump in iraq, two more in afghan. Now i'm out of the service and listen to this song when I think about how badly my body has been broken down, how my illusions about america and the world broke down, how everything in my life has broken apart in one way or another as a result of my service.

more attacks on science

"The new chair of the House of Representatives science committee has drafted a bill that, in effect, would replace peer review at the National Science Foundation (NSF) with a set of funding criteria chosen by Congress."

thoughts on the "scumbag analytic philosopher" meme generator?

Meme generator HERE.

I honestly can't tell how funny most of these are. I think in general it's hard when you are the target of something to be a good judge in this manner. Some (e.g. "Point unclear? Better change some words to italic." as well as the one about using "she" but citing no women) do strike me as hilarious, but many are too unfair and misleading.

Nonetheless, I'm impressed that one (or people) this knowledgeable of analytic philosophy can hate it so much. I mean with most paradigm type issues understanding usually breeds respect.

I think I'd appreciate it more if the meme was academic philosophy instead of "analytic philosophy," and if the dehumanizing "scumbag" wasn't used, but perhaps that is just me being defensive. I don't know. Any thoughts? Which ones work and which ones don't? Why and why not?

Rothman on whether to go to graduate school

Nice discussion HERE including a cool shout out to friend-of-the-blog L.A. Paul. Most horrifying part:

What percentage of graduate students end up with tenure? (About one in four.) How much more unhappy are graduate students than other people? (About fifty-four per cent of graduate studentsreport feeling so depressed they have “a hard time functioning,” as opposed to ten per cent of the general population.) 

Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.

Call for comments on Google Scholar's - Top Publications in Philosophy

There seems to be a strong societal push for "metrics" which means, as best as I can tell, limiting our reasons to ones that can be uncontroversially translated into something numerical, ignoring other facotrs, and then drawing conclusions.  OK.  That is probably a caricature, but I suspect not much.  

In any event, here, by GS, is another metric-driven ranking of philosophy journals.  It has some rankings that strike me, at least, as rather different from how an expert in the field would rank on the basis of quality, prestige, significance, etc.  So, for example, Synthese and Phil Studies are 1 and 2 (certainly both good journals, but I suspect few philosophers would rank them 1 and 2.)  Or consider that Journal of Consciousness Studies is 7 and Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences is 10.  By contrast, we have Ethics 14, Phil Review 17, and Journal of Philosophical Logic 20.  

plea for citation

I remember that somewhere Nietzsche said something to the effect of "They muddy the water, to make it seem deep." Can someone reading this  provide the citation and maybe full aphorism?

If I had an expendable kewpie doll I'd give that as a prize to whomever gets it. . . I don't though, so in its stead I offer gratitude.

Chad must be entertained at all costs

The onion dot com breaks story wide-open HERE (hat tip Neil Tennant).

Next they are going to do a story about all of the various accreditor-mandated "assessment reports" about to consume Professor Rothberg's entire month of May.

Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Só tinha de ser com você’

Busy times (and slow internet…) here at Lund, where I am attending the awesome G.I.R.L. conference. So a quick BMoF with a bossa nova classic, ‘Só tinha de ser com você’, here in the Elis Regina & Tom Jobim version. It is one of my favorite songs of their legendary duo album Elis & Tom (1974), also containing other jewels such as ‘Águas de março’.

Lost in translation

 Peter Gordon’s excellent book (Continental Divide) on the 1929 Davos encounter between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger is an insightful and historically informed account of the complex interplay of issues that were brought to the table. The central hinge or fold of Gordon’s book is the full translation of and commentary to the encounter itself, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft, which was transcribed by students of both Cassirer and Heidegger (Otto Bollnow for Heidegger, and Joachim Ritter for Cassirer). A central fold of the encounter itself occurs, I would argue, when the Dutch linguist Hendrik J. Pos intervenes into the discussion and suggests that what separates Cassirer from Heidegger is that, as Pos puts it, “Both men speak a completely different language,” and moreover there are several terms in each of these distinct languages that he doubts can be translated into the other’s language. For Heidegger, he nominates the terms “Dasein, Being, the ontic,” and for Cassirer “the functional in spirit and the transformation of primordial space into one another.” (CD 189)

Heidegger’s response to Pos’s claims brings to light a number of interesting points about the nature of philosophical problems and the role of philosophical discussions and disputations in addressing such problems. I’ll just highlight some of the implications of these points as they relate to the analytic-continental divide (working off some of the nice points made in Jon's post).

Plagiarism in business ethics (at University of Virginia)

The University of Virginia has a famous honor code. So I was surprised to learn through one of my favorite blogs, Retractionwatch, that one of UVA’s advanced graduate students  in business ethics (in the business school) had to retract a paper from the Journal of Business Ethics (a Springer journal). Retractionwatch quoted the Director of the Olsson Center for Applied Ethics, Andy Wicks, as follows: “we opted to take no additional action beyond extensive internal conversations…it is an isolated incident that was a mistake rather than a calculated effort to plagiarize.” Yet, according to the retraction notice 16% of the paper was plagiarized; this is not a case of a few missing quotation marks. I contacted Professor Wicks, and he wrote me that, “a thorough review of the case was conducted according to school policy. The review process included a panel committee and a forensic review of the student’s work. We cannot discuss individual student matters due to confidentiality and privacy policies.” Fair enough, privacy is important. (I also contacted the graduate student, but received no answer.) In effect, outsiders are being asked to trust the school's judgment.

I was also surprised that in addition to the retraction, the journal did not take further steps against the UVA graduate student. For, in January, Retractionwatch, reported on a case of self-plagiarism that led to a five year ban from Journal of Business Ethics. This involved a case of a scholar re-publishing his own previously published work without acknowledging this. I am no ethicist, but plagiarizing another would seem a far worse offense than plagiarizing oneself--this is why, I think, Retractionwatch tends to use the term "duplication" to refer to the lesser offense. Turns out, alas, that the self-plagiarist teaches at a school in Thailand, while one of the supervisors of the UVA graduate student, is on the editorial board of the journal. As they say in the business world, it can’t hurt to have friends in the right places. (The editor of the Journal of Business Ethics also did not respond to my email.) 

Reviewer welcomes newfound confidence...

"Refreshingly, and in stark contrast to the essays in the recent Metametaphysics anthology (Chalmers, Manley, and Wasserman (2009)), most of this anthology's essays confidently assume that ground is a vital and respectable notion."--From this review.

Religious education, child abuse and responsible parental stewardship

[this is cross-posted at Prosblogion] Richard Dawkins has argued several times (e.g., here) that bringing up your child religiously is a form of child abuse. I think his argument that religious upbringing in general is child abuse has little merit (after all, Dawkins himself is the product of a traditional Anglican upbringing and calls himself - rather proudly - a cultural Anglican, hardly the victim of child abuse). However, his claim in the linked article is that parents who attempt to instill things like Young Earth Creationism (henceforth YEC) in their children are doing something wrong, or are somehow overstepping their role as parents. This question, I believe, is worthy of further attention.

Do Memory Sports Champions Have Savant Syndrome?

[Cross-posted from our Psychology Today blog]

By Berit Brogaard and Kristian Marlow

Mark Aarøe Nissen is a 22-year-old math student at Aarhus University, Denmark, with extraordinary memory abilities. He has competed in memory sports for several years. He can recite the number Pi to more than 20,000 decimal points, recall thousands of names, faces and historical dates and remember the order of a pack of cards.

Lund Philosophy and Cog Sci department is worried about its future--you can help

[The following letter has been circulating on the web.--ES]

Dear Colleagues,

We urgently need your help. The Department of Philosophy in Lund, which is located in Kungshuset - a beautiful  16th century house in the centre of the town which originally was home to the University as a whole - is now  on its way to being relocated. In the Spring of 2014, we are supposed to move to a new building, together with other departments in the Joint Faculty of Humanities and Theology.  Judging by past experience, the next step after the relocation might well be an administrative merger of the different departments into a huge megadepartment. Such mergers have taken place at other universities and at our university as well.

Boston, Texas, and the roads: affect and the power of normalization

It is not to minimize the horror of the Boston bombings -- indeed, it is to highlight it -- that I point to the difference between media coverage of Boston and that of the West, Texas explosion. The former was roughly 24/7 on the big cable channels, with some coverage of the Texas explosion. But then when you look to the road fatalities stats, you realize there's something amazing when 30,000 deaths a year doesn't gain any national news at all. So what's going on? Some observations below.

Peter Singer, class warfare-ist

Obesity is an ethical issue, because an increase in weight by some imposes costs on others... [a] way to achieve the same objective would be to set a standard weight for passengers and luggage, and then ask people to get on the scales with their luggage. That would have the advantage of avoiding embarrassment for those who do not wish to reveal their weight...the point of a surcharge for extra weight is not to punish a sin, whether it is levied on baggage or on bodies. It is a way of recouping from you the true cost of flying you to your destination, rather than imposing it on your fellow passengers.--Peter Singer [HT Feminist Philosophers.]

I'll leave it to others to dissect the use of racialized/gender stereotypes [e.g., "a slight Asian woman" vs "a man who must weigh at least 40 kilos more than she does"] by Singer in the piece.  Let's also grant Singer that air travel is not a "human right" (and stipulate that Singer could grant some exceptions). In effect, Singer advocates differential pricing. This is not uncommon: in higher education Stateside we are familiar with tuition discounts ("financial aid") based on, say, need.

Singer ignores need or ability to pay entirely in his analysis. It is unclear why that ought not be included in this "ethical issue."  Evidently, "true cost" does not mean subjective utility. Need is not irrelevant to Singer's proposal because Singer talks about "true cost of flying" without calling attention to all the subsidies offered to airlines, airports, and aircraft manufacturers by the general public (Singer uses the vocabulary of "public transport" without irony by the way); these may well involve non-trivial financial transfers from the poor to the middle classes and rich. Given that Singer selectively focuses on body weight (and shapes) when talking about "true cost" of flying, one cannot help but feel that he is selectively using (Euro/US-centric) upper-class moral sentiments to advocate policies that will disproportionally impact others.

Micro-Inequities: 40 Years Later

[Cross-posted from our Psychology Today blog]

In 1973 Mary Rowe, while working for the President and Chancellor at MIT, coined the notion of micro-inequities, which she defined as “apparently small events which are often ephemeral and hard-to-prove, events which are covert, often unintentional, frequently unrecognized by the perpetrator, which occur wherever people are perceived to be ‘different.’ " Examples of micro-inequities include:

• checking emails or texting during a face-to-face conversation

• consistently mispronouncing a person's name

• interrupting a person mid-sentence

• making eye-contact only with males while talking to a group containing both males and females

• taking more questions from men than women

• confusing a person of a certain ethnicity with another person of the same ethnicity

A hesitant thought after Boston

One brother is dead and the other is in custody in a hospital. Obviously I loathe what they did. Obviously my thoughts are with the victims and their families. Obviously I would have stopped them if I could have, by any means whatsoever. But I also feel enormously sad that a 19 year old boy could come to this. And being a naturalist - that is not believing that things happen magically because of some supernatural force for evil - I believe that there is some explanation for why this happened. Maybe his brain chemicals are at different levels from ours. Maybe he underwent some trauma - either acute or chronic. Maybe he was taken in by an irrational ideology or systematically trained as are government torturers. Maybe all of these. I have no idea, and neither do you. Probably we would never fully understand even if we tried. But something happened, something contingent and potentially avoidable. And I hope that there is a way to redeem some modicum of life for this boy also. I hope that there is a way for all to find restorative, rather than vindictive, justice in this. I hope we can do better than toss one more body on the pile.

Until economists share data and replicate results, they should probably keep quiet about policy.

By now most folk will have heard about the paper by a group of UMASS-Amherst economists that showed that a famous paper with claims about the relationship of growth and debt, which (together with the book aimed at the public) played a non-trivial role in providing the academic justification for austerity policies, by famous economists Reinhart and Rogoff were based on mistakes in the treatment of data.  (Here is a response by Reinhardt & Rogoff, which is remarkably lacking in generosity to their critics and also lacking in humility about the magnitude of their error. It reads as if it was written by lawyers rather than academics-in-search-of-truth.)

George Gale pointed me to this news-story, which recounts how a PhD student, Thomas Herndon, "first started looking into Reinhart and Rogoff's work as part of an assignment for an econometrics course that involved replicating the data work behind a well-known study." Beyond the significance that politics may be guided by flawed science, here is a part of the story that transcends partisan politics; economics (like many other sciences) has terrible practices in sharing and replicating data (here's a link to recent scholarship on this.) My economist friend, David Levy, has been publishing about these issues for at least two decades (here's a link to a paper in Social Epistemology), so I am not optimistic that we will see a change in ethos in the field any time soon.

Update: Recall this earlier story about Jeffrey Sachs.

[punkrockmonday #23] Louis C.K. - Are You a Lizard?; U2 (orig. Bob Dylan) - Maggie's Farm; Pink Floyd - Postwar Dream; Morrissey - Maggie on the Guillotine; Newtown Neurotics - Kick out the Tories

Woody Allen once said that the human species divides principally into the horrible and the miserable.

I know she had dementia, and I have some idea of how awful that is, but still. . . it's almost impossible for me to imagine Margaret Thatcher actually being miserable. 

Brazilian music on Fridays: Villa-Lobos

Here's something quite different today! Today I’m posting what is perhaps the most famous classical music piece composed by a Brazilian, namely ‘Trenzinho Caipira’, the Tocata of the second movement of Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras. It was composed in 1930, and the whole idea is to emulate the noises made by a train by means of the instruments in the orchestra. Almost as famous is the fifth movement of the same Bachianas, ‘Aria’, here sung by Kiri te Kanawa. Villa-Lobos is without a doubt the best-known Brazilian classical composer thus far, and is notable in particular for incorporating traditional folk rhythms and melodies into his music. 

(Apologies for the short post today: I'm in the middle of the Groningen Graduate Conference at the moment.)

Bertrand Russell - Face to Face Interview (BBC, 1959) - YouTube

(HT: John Corcoran)

We come to praise the analytic/continental divide, not bury it

Nice meditations by Graham Harman HERE on how writing styles are inextricably tied up to different conceptions of thinking.

Harman himself thinks that philosophical texts are more like aesthetic objects in that there is an indeterminacy between content relevant formal properties and content irrelevant formal properties. Different interpretations will take different formal properties to be content relevant (see Nelson Goodman on plagiarism for why this is a constitutive norm for art interpretation). This leads to a an undermining of accounts of content that treat the differentiation between style and content as unproblematic (cf McDowell on scheme-content).

Now what's interesting in terms of the post is that this leads Harman to see the analytic philosopher's typical disagreement with him about form-content indeterminacy in terms of the literary style of analytic philosophy.

This strikes me as rather deep. . . In any case, I could not agree more with the conclusion of the post.

I’ve often quoted the following remark reported to me from the Rorty archive. Rorty joked that “every 10 years or so, a book is published with a title something like ‘Beyond Realism and Idealism.’ And it always turns out that what’s beyond realism and idealism is– idealism!”

I feel much the same way about those who claim to be “beyond” the analytic/continental philosophy distinction. If that happens, it’s simply going to mean all analytic philosophy, with a sprinkling of ambitious ex-continentals who think they can pitch Deleuze or Derrida in ways that analytics will find sensible.

So, allow me to propose a toast to the analytic/continental divide. (With one caveat: we really ought to be reading each other more. There’s always room for that.)

This makes sense to me.

Talk to them!

 (This post is dedicated to my friends Marian and Jan-Willem, who last week welcomed a lovely baby girl into the world. They will most certainly talk to her an awful lot.)

Why is it that children from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds tend to have lower school performance than children from wealthier environments? This may seem like a naïve question at first, but understanding the exact mechanisms in place proves to be much more challenging than one might think. Most likely, the phenomenon is due to a conjunction of factors involving level of education of primary caregiver, parental involvement, a stable environment, adequate nutrition, among others. (Some would like to see ‘genetic predisposition’ on the list. Now, while this cannot be ruled out, I take it that the currently available data are too tangled up with the above-mentioned social factors to allow for an analysis of the genetic component in isolation.)

A recent post at the Fixes blog of the New York Times (Fixes and The Stone are both members of the larger Opinionator family) highlights one specific element: how much people from different socioeconomic backgrounds actually talk to their infants. As reported in the 1995 book Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children (by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley), it turns out that poorer parents talk considerably less to and around their babies than more affluent parents:

Pity the star academic

I bet the academic anthropology job-market is no better than the one in academic philosophy. So, what can one conclude about the politics of that field in light of the fact that after a stint at Yale, a scholar applies to "the City University of New York Graduate Center, the New School, Cornell University, and the University of Chicago (all of these twice)...Hunter College, Emory, Duke, Columbia, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins—as well as the University of Toronto," and then fails to land a job?

One can conclude that it is not easy to land a job in academic anthropology, especially if you apply (ahum) rather narrowly (not to say, snobbishly)...but such a sober assessment would undermine, of course, the mythic narrative of "exile" attached to being..."From 2008 through this spring, Mr. Graeber was a lecturer and then a reader at Goldsmiths College and, just last month, he accepted a professorship at the London School of Economics and Political Science."

Ah, yes, London...that academic wasteland...must be very tough being David Graeber.

Central European University is on board with the Gendered Conference Campaign

Exciting news from CEU in Hungary!

How (not) to address an email to women academics in the U.S.

Shortly after posting concerning my history and philosophy of biology resources page, I received a suggestion for an addition via email.  The suggestion was welcome, but the way it was addressed was not:  Mrs. Millstein.

As the correspondent pointed out to me after I questioned the way I was addressed, this can be a cultural difference that is difficult for people from other cultures to navigate.  In that spirit, I offer the following suggested guidelines, especially given that this is not the first time I have been addressed this way, and no doubt it won't be the last.  Not everyone may agree with my suggestions, but I think they are at least a safe way of addressing that is not likely to offend.  I am suggesting them only for the U.S. because that is the culture I am most familiar with; they may or may not apply elsewhere.

Weekly Philo of Economics: Of Picturing Something that we Cannot See (I) [Milton Friedman, Alfred Marshall, and Khan]

Random variables and elementary particles have neither values nor intentions; they may constitute a system but surely do not make a society.--An Economic Theorist (2004).

Whenever we get a glipse of economic man he is not selfish. On the contrary he is generally hard at work saving capital chiefly for the benefit of others. (Marshall 1885: 28)

Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz gave A Monetary History of the Unites States an epigraph from Alfred Marshall. Friedman's engagement with Marshall was not superficial; his one serious contribution to the history of economic theory was on the Marshallian Demand Curve (1949). Friedman's famous (1953) methodology essay, "The Methodology of Positive Economics," is sprinkled with references to and quotes from Marshall. One role for Marshall in Friedman's hands was against the 'Walrasian' general equilibrium analysis associated now with names such as Arrow, Debreu, and McKenzie, among others. 

One such a name, Frank Hahn, once remarked (1984) in print:

Some friends [of economic theory] in what might be called roughly, and a bit unfairly, 'Chicago' economics -- have taken the theory in practical applications a good deal more seriously than at present there is any justification for doing. Paradoxically, they are rather hostile to its abstract foundations, yet are happy to put a great deal of weight on them. (75)

The "paradox" of [A] friendship to economic theory when applied accompanied with hostility to its "abstract foundation," is said  to be the "primary interest" of MA Khan's essay (2004) "Self-Interest, Self-Deception and the Ethics of Commerce." (I would give it the subtitle: "a Wittgensteinian reading of Four "False Prophets" of Cambridge Economics.") Of course, the mathematical economists, Hahn and Kahn, know that there is no formal paradox in [A]--as long as the abstract foundations (associated by Friedman with Walras) are treated as dispensable in practice. Khan also owns up to a form of [B] "self-interest," that is, [B*] "the ethics of commerce," one that somehow requires Khan [C] to "understand" himself, that is, to be philosophical. (I write "that is, to be philosophical" not because of the occurrence of the word "ethics," but rather in recognition that within theoretical economics there is no place for self-understanding, while we philosophers still pay lip-service to Socratic wisdom.) Initially, Khan leaves the relationship between [A]-[C] ambiguous; his way of self-examination passes through Marshall's (1885) Inaugural Lecture The Present Position of Economics.

History and Philosophy of Biology Resources webpage

For some years now, I've been maintaining a webpage of internet resources that aims to be useful to historians and philosophers of biology; it originally began as a page just for myself and grew over time.  Although it has been public for a long time, and linked to from places like Wikipedia's philosophy of biology page, it occured to me that some who might be interested don't know about the page.  So, at John Protevi's suggestion, I am linking to it here (continuing a series of NewAPPS posts calling attention to web resources useful for philosophers; see, e.g., here and here).  

If you find it useful, please feel free to share with students and colleagues. And if you see things that are missing or mistaken, please let me know. I am happy to make additions and corrections. Apologies in advance if I have overlooked your page of publicly available HPB articles or other important internet source for HPBers.

But mainly, having put in the effort to maintain it, I'd love to know that others besides myself are using it!

What is logic?

A few weeks ago Jeff Bell had a post with the suggestive title ‘What is philosophy?’, referring to the eponymous work by Deleuze and Guattari. Now, as it turns out, a similar question, ‘What is logic?’, has preoccupied David Marans, a lecturer in logic at St. Thomas University in Miami, for quite some time. He thus created the Logic Gallery, a compilation of statements by philosophers and logicians across the centuries (starting with Aristotle and ending with Tim Williamson) on the nature of logic (or else comments from which one can infer the author’s conception of logic). It is a useful glimpse at the different views on logic held across time, and as such well worth spending some time on. In particular, it illustrates the early influence of the conception of logic as pertaining to debating and discussing, and the later predominance of the conception of logic as pertaining to thought and mental processes.

Marans welcomes suggestions for improvement and additional submissions. (I should perhaps add the proviso that there are no exact references to the original location of the quotes, and also that there may be some issues of translation.)