New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Placement Data and Trends, 2011-2013

By clicking the link posted below you can download an Excel spreadsheet with placement data from the last two years, 2011-2012 and 2012-2013, together with a “how-to” guide for future years of data gathering and analysis. The data is sourced from ProPhilosophy, the link for which you can find here. 

Here are some of the findings:

For on the spot updates of June 30th protests in Egypt. . .

you could do much worse than Graham Harman's blog (the American Press, as well as Al Jazeera, are pretty hopeless thus-far).

In addition to what's happening outside of his window, his posts today have links to the most important twitter feeds of people out and about in the protests. The twitter posts also have some really good links to long-form essays explaining what's been going on.

When I am Wrong on Williamson

During the past week I engaged in a polemic with Prof. Williamson (here, here, and here). Along the way I claimed that "in his piece Williamson is scathing of Dummett and the kind of  philosophy promoted by Dummett." In a patient series of letters, Professor Richard Heck has convinced me that I am certainly wrong to claim that "Williamson is scathing of Dummett." In his piece, Williamson makes a clear distinction between Dummett's position and the community of those that followed him: "Dummett’s posing of the issue between realism and anti-realism provides a case study of an occasion when the philosophical community was offered a new way of gaining theoretical control over notoriously elusive issues... The community spurned the opportunity, if that is what it was." (8) So, I apologize to Prof. Williamson and our readers for claiming otherwise.

I had also thought that Williamson held Dummett responsible (in the manner, say, of Socrates's responsibility for some of the vices of his students) for the follies and intellectual vices (stereotypically associated with 'continental' philosophy [about which more below]) of those that followed the "opportunity" Dummett had created (note, for example, the qualifying "if that is what it was.") So, for example, after commenting on Dummett's willingness to give up on the law of excluded middle, Williamson added: "When law and order break down, the result is not freedom or anarchy but the capricious tyranny of petty feuding warlords." (17) I took Williamson to be blaming Dummett for the bad consequences. (This is compatible, of course, with Williamson admiring Dummett in lots of other ways.) After my exchange with Heck, I am less confident about my interpretation, especially because Williamson is -- to quote Heck -- "fully aware of Dummett's efforts at answering the question "which principles of logic are supposed to carry authority.""

Brazilian music on Fridays: more music for protesters

The protests in Brazil have now for the most part cooled off a bit (though still alive!), and now the government is tryig desperately to figure out how to respond to the uproar (so far, they seem mostly clueless). Things turned more complicated when the protests became a big umbrella, sheltering anyone and everyone who is against the current government and the status quo in general, including people proposing to return to a military regime! But all in all, it was a huge wake-up call for those in power, and I’m optimistic that positive results will ensue – for starters, the increase in the public transport fare in São Paulo, which got the whole thing started a few weeks ago, has already been reversed.

This week, I’ll post two songs from the 1980s that, again, remain entirely pertinent in their criticism of the structural social and political problems in the country: ‘Brasil’, written by Cazuza and here sung by Gal Costa; and ‘Que país é esse?’ by Legião Urbana. Both songs were some of the anthems of protesters over the last weeks, and the second video is made with images of these recent events. (Well, I can only hope that, in 30 years from now, they will no longer offer a fitting description of the country...)

A tribute to Gillian Howie

Radical Philosophy has published a moving tribute to Gillian Howie, who died, much too soon, earlier this year.

sometimes philosophy helps it get better

I think that given all of the understandable browbeating about the relevance of philosophy it is worth pointing out that with today's U.S. Supreme Court decisions it is clear that academic philosophy has non-trivially helped the world become closer to what it ought. 

Andrew Sullivan's PhD is in government from Harvard, but his dissertation was on philosopher Michael Oakshott. And Wayne State's John Corvino has, like Sullivan, worked tirelessly to charitably construe the best arguments against homosexual rights, and to publicly show why they are lacking.

When I was an undergraduate resident assistant at the University of Texas, Corvino came to a program I sponsored and gave a speech on morality and homosexuality. It was the most packed program in any of the U.T. dorms that year, filling a mondo-sized classroom. He was such an amazing guy, able to be so patient and kind with a crowd that contained a sizeable number of very angry people (pretty vile and scary casual expressions of bigotry about gay people were until very recently much more tolerated in public spheres in the United States than they are now). It's been a blessing to follow his career and see him help to accomplish on the public stage at large what he was able to do that night at U.T.

The change represented by the Supreme Court decisions today is huge. Those of us of a dyspeptic temperment ought to be optimistic that other travesties of justice and inhumanity might also be changing, and that the philosophical and political labors of the Corvinos, Guenthers, Lances, Mays, and Sullivans among us might continue to help better realize a just kingdom here on Earth.

everything *is* terrible (hat tip Graham Harman)

If you lack the patience for the payoff, you can just fast foreward to the five minute mark.  The only nice thing I can say is that Richard Dawkins' big sweaty head floating around reminds me a little bit of Neal Diamond album covers from the 1970s.

I don't know what the morality of mocking this is. On the one hand, one should in general not pile on people willing to humilate themselves in the service of art. . . On the other hand, Dawkins can be a little bit mean himself.

My feeling about most sports (obviously excepting for the sport of kings, professional wrestling) is that if it's not worth doing, it's not worth doing well. Reasonable people disagree about whether this applies to people randomly moving balls around on fields. But I think we at least can agree that if something is not worth doing, it's not worth doing badly.

And the installation is startilingly reminiscent of the weird infomercials from late at night television in the 1980s when cheap video had replaced film. It's also very similar to the awful period in the early 90s when for your MFA performance in a graduate dance department you could do a video project instead of actually choreographing something. As with the T.V. shows, the technology was uniformly washed out and ugly. A universe where all of the light is flourescent. I don't want to visit such places ever.

And now it's much easier to do this kind of thing with computers and memes and whatnot. Feh. Am I missing something?

Postcards from Death Row

The art of letter-writing is dead – except in prison.  While people on the outside exchange staccato texts and tweets, people on the inside still compose long letters by hand or on typewriters.  They write with their whole hand, not just with their thumbs. 

We shouldn’t get too misty-eyed about this persistence of a lost art behind bars; after all, it’s a sign of deprivation.  If prisoners had access to cell phones and the internet, they would be tweeting, too – and perhaps their voices would be more difficult to silence. 

And yet, everyday practices such as letter-writing or texting cannot help but shape our Being-in-the-world.  A letter is a material thing: you can hold it in your hands, and you can lose it.  The temporality of letter-writing is much slower than texting; you can’t expect an immediate response, and so there’s more time to reflect on the impact your words might have on the receiver.  If you know that the mail is delivered at a certain time every day, then there’s no point in obsessively checking your inbox.  This might not help to decrease your anxiety, especially if you feel like your life depends upon the response; but it also doesn’t feed an addictive relation to delivery mechanism. 

Somewhere in between the letter and the text message is the humble postcard. 

[punkrockmonday #25] Blind Willie Johnson

This is the most beautifully haunting song ever recorded.

The title is from an older gospel song that is about the day Jesus died. I'm also pretty sure that Ry Cooder studied it intensely while preparing the Paris, Texas soundtrack, musical accompaniment to another sad story.

Discipline and Authority in Williamson's Sermons

During the last few days I have been rather critical of Timothy Williamson's dismissive-ness toward most of the rest of us and his inability to accept honest disagreement as a potentially intrinsic feature of philosophy (here and here). Now, amidst Williamson's (2006) kvetching about debased standards he does offer a positive proposal worth reflecting on:

But when philosophy is not disciplined by semantics, it must be disciplined by something else: syntax, logic, common sense, imaginary examples, the findings of other disciplines (mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, history, ...) or the aesthetic evaluation of theories (elegance, simplicity, ...). Indeed, philosophy subject to only one of those disciplines is liable to become severely distorted: several are needed simultaneously. To be ‘disciplined’ by X here is not simply to pay lip-service to X; it is to make a systematic conscious effort to conform to the deliverances of X, where such conformity is at least somewhat easier to recognize than is the answer to the original philosophical question. Of course, each form of philosophical discipline is itself contested by some philosophers. But that is no reason to produce work that is not properly disciplined by anything. It may be a reason to welcome methodological diversity in philosophy: if different groups in philosophy give different relative weights to various sources of discipline, we can compare the long-run results of the rival ways of working. (10)

Weird story in Foreign Affairs about french feminism against gay rights

THIS is really weird. French philosopher  Sylviane Agacinski (known to most Americans only via the Derrida biography as wife of Lional Jospin and mother of one of Derrida's children) is one of the public intellectuals who has spoken out forcefully against legalizing gay marriage.

Philosopher's Carnival #152 is. . .

HERE. 

Massive edition with lots of of cool stuff. 

Williamson's Sermonizing

Williamson's final paragraph begins: "In making these comments, it is hard not to feel like the headmaster of a minor public school at speech day, telling everyone to pull their socks up after a particularly bad term". I cannot speak for the participants at the conference, but my own reaction to being compared to a wayward British schoolboy was: So who died and made you headmaster?--Tim Maudlin

Yesterday, David Auerbach reminded us that Timothy Williamson is a serial dismiss-er.  In this piece (it appeared in 2006, but it self-plagiarizes stuff that appeared in the 2004 Leiter volume), Williamson rails against sloppiness in...analytical philosophy: " Much contemporary analytic philosophy − not least on realism and truth -- seems to be written in the tacit hope of discursively muddling through, uncontrolled by any clear methodological constraints...We who classify ourselves as ‘analytic philosophers’ tend to fall into the assumption that our allegiance automatically confers on us methodological virtue." (11; see also p. 4)

I much prefer searching self-criticism than kicking the outsider. So, I was about to start really liking Williamson. But it turns out, Williamson is not above kicking down. For the very same passage continues: "within the analytic tradition many philosophers use arguments only to the extent that most ‘continental’ philosophers do: some kind of inferential movement is observ able, but it lacks the clear articulation into premises and conclusion and the explicitness about the form of the inference that much good philosophy achieves." (11) Okay, so the point is: most analytical philosophers think they are superior in philosophical virtue to continental philosophers, but they are as bad as the legitimately despised continental philosophers.  Yes, in context Williamson says he is deploying "crude stereotypes," but he is not disowning the stereotype about continental philosophy! (Cf. "Much even of analytic philosophy moves too fast in its haste to reach the sexy bits." (15; emphasis added--ES)) The main point of Williamson's piece is to double-down on the stereotypical virtues of analytical philosophy: "precision" and "rigour" (15), and to do so in opposition to the despised 'other.' In fact, the un-argued hostility toward Kant, which I noticed yesterday, is a trope in Williamson: "if we aim to be rigorous, we cannot expect to sound like Heraclitus, or even Kant: we have to sacrifice the stereotype of depth." (15; logically that allows Kant to rigerous, of course, but if you sound like Kant, etc...) [Doubling-down is not the whole story, but about that more tomorrow.]

Are academic administrators right to make counteroffers?

I was talking a couple of months ago with a very close friend of mine who works in commercial information technology and we were comparing the ways that academia and industry differed. One of the ways surprised me a great deal.

In academia, when you get a job offer from another institution, you are expected to go to the administrators in your institution and see if they'll make a counter-offer. If the counter-offer is big enough, you might stay. I should note that in an era of flat pay, this is a perfectly rational thing for employees to do. But my friend has made me worry whether it is rational for administrators to make counteroffers. My friend said that a lot of managers in I.T. refuse to make counteroffers, for the following sorts of reasons:

1. The skills involved in getting a job offer and actually doing excellent work are not tightly correlated enough for it to be rational for managers to play the game. If you always meet counteroffers the end result is that you'll be overpaying all of the "Mr. Hair and Teeth" (I"m not being faceitous when I say that this is actually a technical term in indusrial I.T.) types and underpaying the weird people who actually do the work.
2. I.T. work is collaborative and great pay disparities on working teams is profoundly destructive to the kind of esprit de corps necessary for doing a great job.
3. Lots of people don't go on the job market because they are happy with how you are running the company; if you waste your payroll rewarding job hoppers you are punishing the very people who are happy with how you are doing things.
4. It takes a lot of effort to go on the market; if you make counteroffers you are effectively paying people for not working.
5. Independent of whether the prospective job hopper thinks she is acting in good faith, if you as a manager reward it you are encouraging massive dishonesty. People will string along other companies just to get a pay raise in your company. This will justifiably make other companies angry with you the manager for fostering an environment that encourages duplicity and wastes time (which equals money) of everyone concerned. It also infuriates the other employees who are clearer about when they are acting in good faith and refuse to play the game of stringing along other companies.

My friend was really emphatic about the above and in fact tells his employees not to come to him for counteroffers, and whenever one of them gets a job offer says "that sounds like a very good opportunity, you should think carefully about it."

The thing is, everything he said makes sense to me as applied to the practice in academia. I should also say that in our case the counteroffer practice seems to have leaked down from the job hopping administrative class (the average tenure for a provost is under three years, at which point they take another job) and is one of the ways they inflate their salaries so much beyond market value.

I think in some ways academia is where bad management ideas come to die. Anyone who has been subject to "strategic planning" or "assessment" knows that any business that went in for such nonsense would get decimated by competition that didn't. I think that this business of counteroffers is something similar. When I've seen it happen the relevant administrators all too often act like bad movie imitations of business people.

Am I missing anything? This is I hope merely academic (in the pejorative sense) for me since one of my prayers is that I'll never be a chair.

The Sampler and the Hog

Commenting on my post on restaurants yesterday, Jeff Bell reminds us that:

Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau was pivotal to the emergence of the restaurant for it was he who first proffered bouillon broths as a restorative - restaurer in French and hence restaurant. In this way, Roze was able to circumvent the challenges of the guild to the selling of broths and sauces. 

Barbara Santich tells a complementary tale in the Oxford Companion to Food:

At this time [i.e. around 1760] the word 'restaurant' meant a restorative beverage, such as a thin soup. Places supplying such foods were known as 'bouillons'. In 1765 the owner of one of these, a man by the name of Boulanger, added to his menu a dish of sheep's feet—pieds de mouton à la sauce poulette (a kind of white sauce enriched with egg yolks). He was immediately attacked by the corporation of traiteurs, who accused him of selling a ragout, a dish they considered theirs by right.

As I recalled yesterday, Boulanger was vindicated because the sheep's feet had not been cooked in the sauce—it was a sauced dish, not a ragout.

The Gendered Citation Campaign (GCC2)

For more information, here.

Consider the Restaurant

Is the experience of eating confined to putting something in your mouth and savouring it? Of course not. There is the occasion, its ambience, the accompanying conversation, the wine, the familiarity or the novelty of the place where you eat. All of these can make food a much larger experience.

But what about food itself? What influences the design and preparation of cuisine? Is it simply flavour and nutrition?

Think of the restaurant. You shouldn’t take this amazing institution for granted; it was invented in Paris as late as the late eighteenth century. The essential feature of the modern restaurant was, as Brillat-Savarin said, that it allows people to eat what they want, when they want, how much they want, knowing in advance how much this would cost. Think about this: this degree of choice was nowhere available. Before the modern restaurant you would go into a tavern and eat what was on offer that day; you would go typically because you were travelling. Today, you drop in because you have a desire to exercise a choice between things that people may eat everyday in Pnomh Penh, but are impossible to whip up at whim.

I Have A Theory

My theory, which is mine, is that Steven Pinker's research assistant is playing a joke on him here by intentionally misspelling the name of the addressee and by slipping in the word "activists." Well played, unknown RA, well played.

Against Williamson's anti-grand-narrative

The usual stories about the history of twentieth-century philosophy fail to fit much of the liveliest, exactest, and most creative achievements of the final third of that century: the revival of metaphysical theorizing, realist in spirit, often speculative, often commonsensical, associated with Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Kit Fine, Peter van Inwagen, David Armstrong, and many others: work that has, to cite just one example, made it anachronistic to dismiss essentialism as anachronistic. On the traditional grand narrative schemes in the history of philosophy, this activity must be a throwback to pre-Kantian metaphysics. It ought not to be happening; but it is. Many of those who practice it happily acknowledge its continuity with traditional metaphysics; appeals to the authority of Kant, or history, ring hollow, for they are unbacked by any argument that withstood the test of recent time.--Timothy Williamson (2004).

Philosophy is not easy.

Judging where 'we' are 'in' philosophy's development is also not easy. The twenty-year data-set (1993-2013) deployed by Healy (here and here) cover much of my time in philosophy. My progress through the discipline (Tufts BA, Chicago PhD, Wesleyan, WashU) meant that until I arrived at Syracuse in 2005, I was oblivious about the dominance of David Lewis. Obviously, I had read some Kripke and Lewis along the way; if my memory doesn't deceive me, Van Inwagen had visited Tufts to give a lecture, and, while I found him impressive, I had thought Dennett had gotten the better of the exchange. Ever since 2005 I have been playing catch-up on recent metaphysics (which I adore). I have been taking comfort from the fact that around the same time even Brian Leiter missed how significant Lewis's legacy was radically reshaping philosophy. For Lewis and the "wave of "old-fashioned" metaphysical theorizing," (Leiter: 6) he inspired is, in fact, a very minor presence in Leiter's entertaining volume (2004) The Future For Philosophy, from which I quoted Williamson above (recall my post, and Mohan's).

Spotting self-serving narrative is easier. Here's a formula: when folk that pride themselves on "logical rigour and semantic sophistication," (Williamson: 128) trot out metaphors ("the test of recent time"), you have a good chance of being served disciplinary-boundary-engendering myth. Above Williamson implies that somehow (Kantian) arguments against metaphysics were shown wanting (by argument). Williamson does not even provide a pro forma reference to an authoritative place where metaphysics was made safe from Kantian criticism. Given that it would be surprising if the Wykeham Professor of Logic were merely bluffing, I welcome suggestions from readers that can direct me to the appropriate place where I can find a decisive refutation of transcendental idealism (say, as reformulated by Langton or Allison).

my proposal for the song of summer 2013

After this week of Paula Deen making all of us Southerners look like troglodytes, it's nice to see a song like this:

This is so evocative of the weird kids I played in bands with growing up in Alabama. The important thing to realize is that Froggy Fresh is in on the joke, but (like Will Farrell) absolutely committed to its proper delivery. 

If anyone else has any counterproposals for official songs of this summer, please share with links. In any case, there is no longer any reasonable debate about the cause of James' crying.

It Must Give Pleasure

Argument is, of course, the life-blood of professional philosophy. I wouldn't want to do away with argument, or professional philosophy; I am no traitor to my trade! But when I am told -- as is often the case -- that  argument is intrinsic to philosophy, I get rebellious.  Take, for example, this poem:

"To sing jubilas at exact, accustomed times,
To be crested and wear the mane of a multitude
And so, as part, to exult with its great throat,

To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on
The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart
That is the common, the bravest fundament,

This is a facile exercise. Jerome
Begat the tubas and the fire-wind strings,
The golden fingers picking dark-blue air:

For companies of voices moving there,
To find of sound the bleakest ancestor,
To find of light a music issuing

Whereon it falls in more than sensual mode.
But the difficultest rigor is forthwith,
On the image of what we see, to catch from that

Irrational moment its unreasoning,
As when the sun comes rising, when the sea
Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall

Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.
Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.
We reason about them with a later reason." Wallace Stevens

a cursory defense of LEMM as "core analytic" philosophy

Yesterday Roberta Millstein (HERE) raised the question of why the H4 journals  (Nous, Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Review, and Mind) have such a central place in the pantheon of analytic philosophy. While I am convinced by her that it is misleading at best to refer to these as "generalist journals," I am not convinced that this should undermine their centrality.

I think that any journal in analytic philosophy with the H4 level of centrality will of necessity privilege Language, Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Mind. This is because if ones philosophical practice presupposes (independent of whether one takes the presupposition to be true as a philosophical proposition!) a strong distinction between form and content, then following asymmetry holds.

All areas of philosophy will have to make linguistic, epistemic, conceptual, and metaphysical presuppositions relevant to the truth of their claims. But if form is independent of content in certain ways, this dependency is asymmetric. For example, aesthetic presuppositions might render a philosophical paper more or less fun to read, but would not be relevant to the truth of the claims (it's not anti-symmetric, because the paper might be on the metaphysics of beauty).

So LEMM is "core analytic" precisely because all analytic philosophy is asymmetrically dependent upon it.

I should note that at the end of the day I don't think that form and content are seperable in the way I presuppose that they are in the way I conduct my research. However, I think that the false presupposition is a necessary fiction for the proper unfolding of the dialectic (or rather that there need to be institutions in science (Fichtean sense of "science" here) generally where much of the work makes the presupposition).

This is also why I am not looking for some kind of Hegelian synthesis between analytic and continental philosophy (even though there is massive overlap with respect to individual works; see this related post, for what I take to be distinctive of continental philosophy as a practice), but still think that that we must learn from one another. But this is the subject for other posts. Here I just wanted to defend the centrality of LEMM to analytic philosophy.

Bob Newhart on Leiter's "party line continentals" shenaningans

Leiter picking at Graham Harman again HERE (Harman's response HERE). Neither leave comments open.

Leiter links to an earlier post on "party line continentals," which he defines in this manner: 

For sake of clarity and accuracy, we should really call this sociological phenomenon "Party Line Continentalism" since what it actually picks out is a political effort to enforce a certain philosophical orthodoxy, namely, that which arises from a conception of philosophy and its methods that is largely fixed by Heideggerian phenomenology and developments in mostly French philosophy that involve reactions to Heidegger (such as Derrida, but not only him).

Readers of Ferry and Renault's La Pensée 68 (translated into English as French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Anti-Humanism) will recognize this immediately. Ferry and Renault characterize each soixante-huitard as "Heidegger +" someone else (e.g. Foucault is "Heidegger + Nietzsche," Bourdieu is "Heidegger + Marx," and Derrida is "Heidegger + Derrida's style"), and like Leiter describe it in conspiratorial terms.

I have no idea how fair Ferry and Renault were. What's more relevant here is that their book came out during the Reagen administration! And, no matter how you voted back then, basic fairness should lead you to admit that quite a bit has changed.

In particular, since many of the other  Baby Boomer culture wars seem to be winding down with the forces of truth and beauty winning, can we please just do the same with this one?

I'm very serious.

One thing Adrian Johnston and I have in common is that we were both undergraduates at the University of Texas during the enviable time when the Iowa metaphysicians (Herbert Hochberg, Edwin Allaire) and Sellarsians (in particular, Johanna Seibt, who taught a class on Hegel's Phenomenology while I was there) had an excellent rapproachment with continental philosophers such as Douglas Kellner, Kelly Oliver, Kathleen Higgens, Lewis Mackie,  and Robert Solomon. This spirit of rapproachment at least set the tone for the undergraduates and graduate students there at the time. Even though U.T. is still a great department, for those of us that germinated in that enviornment (especially Mackie's grad. students after he died), it was somewhat traumatic as the academic versions of the late eighties culture wars proved to be so destructive to the pluralism that in part made the place such a fertile place to think (Kellner touches on it in this interview). 

With respect to Leiter's fervent efforts to keep alive the Ferry-Renault critique, I should just say that as an analytic philosopher (there are symbols in my papers) who has been to one SPEP and two continental conferences now, I call shenanigans.

One of us was supposed to post this precisely at 12:04 AM Central Time (USA) last night. . .

but we were too busy propitiating in other various and sundry ways the divinities of the rock and roll pantheon, so we basically ended up in a Simpsons Season 2, Episode 19 type situation. Anyhow, there's still a couple of hours left, so here's one more set of divinities propitiated.

If you've got a libation, now would be the time to pour it.

On so-called "generalist journals" and the JAPA.

It is time to stop pretending that the "H4" journals (Nous, Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Review, and Mind) are generalist philosophy journals.  (I'll get to JAPA at the end).

They are not.  As my co-bloggers have recently pointed out (see e.g, here and here), they focus on metaphysics, epistemology, mind, and language and offer very little coverage of other areas such as aesthetics, history, applied ethics, feminism, critical race  theory, etc. 

Now, some might claim that LEMM are "core" analytic areas on which other areas draw.  However, that is neither true in practice nor in principle. With regard to "practice," it is simply not true that other areas of philosophy must reference these four areas in order to proceed, and they often do not.  With regard to "principle," I can't tell you how many LEMM talks I have been to where assumptions have been made about the nature of science, scientific explanation, or some particular scientific finding (think, for example, of water=H2O, which turns out to be a more substantive assumption than most realize).  Does that mean that philosophy of science is a core area, too?  No, it means that we'd be better off seeing different areas of philosophy as an interconnected network rather than seeing some at the "core" and some as the "periphery." 

Alva Noë on "As we enter the era of Big Data collection and processing..."

"Perhaps you read about the case a few year's ago involving Target. The store began sending coupons for pregnancy related products to a teenage girl. The girl's father was incensed. Were they trying to get her to have a kid in high school? Target's management was embarrassed and apologized profusely. It turned out the girl was pregnant. Target — no one exactly, a computerized pattern detecter — surmised this before she had told her father, based on information about her shopping behavior. It is possible...to know what someone knows before she has made the information public to anyone at all...

Actually, the point is more far-reaching still. What it is to be thinking this or that, what it is to intend this or that, is precisely for one to be integrated, in the right sort of way, in a complex causal or informational network. This is controversial, but it is remarkably well established. Indeed, it is the very foundation of the theory of computation. Computers aren't smart because they have, inside them, clever thoughts. No. What makes the micro-electronic states of a computer intelligent, or just contentful — for example, what makes it the case that a computer is performing this or that task — is the way those internal states are hooked up, causally, and systematically, to the right kinds of inputs and outputs. Computers don't need to understand what's going on inside of them to solve problems."--From NPR, 13.7.

The ethically wealthy invite who they like and feel good about it.:)

The Journal of Practical Ethics is a new open access (hurray!) journal hosted by the "Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics;" the Centre "was established in 2003 with the generous support of the Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and Education of Japan." So generous, in fact, that "Authors and reviewers are offered an honorarium." (Wow!) Of course, our moral experts like to keep it clubby: it is "an invitation only, blind-peer-reviewed journal." That puts a different spin on its desire to "promote informed, rational debate, and is not tied to any one particular viewpoint." Subtext: we will reward our friends and approved opinions handsomely; prudent folk are encouraged to keep quiet. [HT Matt Lister, who raised the issue in comments at Crookedtimber.]

Why people are pissed off with the World Cup in Brazil

Do large grants forward scientific progress?

This recent paper by Jean-Michel Fortin and David J. Currie in Plos ONE argues that funding does have a positive impact on scientific productivity and impact, as measured by productivity in terms of publications, and as measured by citations to papers funded by grants. However, surprisingly, the correlation is quite weak, and large grants had a lower impact per dollar than small grants. From the abstract

Impact was generally a decelerating function of funding. Impact per dollar was therefore lower for large grant-holders. This is inconsistent with the hypothesis that larger grants lead to larger discoveries. Further, the impact of researchers who received increases in funding did not predictably increase. We conclude that scientific impact (as reflected by publications) is only weakly limited by funding. We suggest that funding strategies that target diversity, rather than "excellence", are likely to prove to be more productive.

In other words, funding more researchers with a smaller budget may be more conducive to scientific progress than funding only the most "excellent" researchers. Indeed, in an earlier blog post I suggested that it might increase productivity even further if grants were dealt out at random, or distributed evenly among those who request them. At least then, researchers wouldn't spend disproportionate amounts of time writing grant applications.

Unfortunately, as the authors note, the model in grant-making, both through national funding agencies and private, philanthropic organizations, is veering towards large grants that reward mainly "excellence", which also creates a Matthew effect, whereby a researcher's or lab's success in obtaining past grants is one of the measures used in deciding whether or not to award a grant.

It's not (just) implicit bias, but real bias(es)!

I understand why the campaigners at the GCC have embraced implicit bias; the existence of implicit bias is a scientifically robust empirical result. It also allows one to avoid moral finger-pointing about past behavior; the 'culprits' of implicit bias can reasonably claim not to have intended the patterns of exclusion that are exhibited. It is, thus, no surprise that the patterns of exclusion in the Healy 500, are being interpreted by our friends at Feministphilosophers as further evidence  for implicit bias and lazy citation habits in the profession. But we should not be blind to the fact that the Healy data (here and here) on citation and co-citation practices in the H4 ("Nous, the Journal of Philosophy, the Philosophical Review, and Mind), also reveal quite a few intentional patterns of exclusion: no Judith Butler, no Habermas, no Foucault, no Deleuze, no Derrida, etc. Okay, that is to be expected; but also, no Martha Nussbaum, Charles Taylor, G.A. Cohen, no Anthony Appiah, or Alisdair MacIntyre--all of whom wrote influential, widely read, widely cited books in the period under discussion. Given that H4 are supposed to be general interest journals, it is worth noting how poorly represented various areas of philosophy -- aesthetics, history, applied ethics, feminism, critical race  theory, etc. -- are in the citation patterns of H4. This should not elicit surprise. Not all of the excluded areas are, of course, equally welcoming to women and other minorities, so I am not suggesting that the explicit patterns of exclusion map onto the exclusion of women, but some might.

One of the most important nuggets in the Healy data is that philosophy papers cite on average fifteen items. This reveals that in the DNA of our collective research practice we just learn to ignore what others say, except if they are high status boys. Perhaps this pattern is more extreme in the H4 because these really are incrowd/in-house journals and until recently they were edited in that fashion, too. Now claims like these are often hard to prove, and initially I thought about writing a satirical post about the B-list of men (no, not Rawls and Lewis) that are well entrenched in the Healy 500, yet no Ruth Barcan Marcus. But rather than making enemies out of everybody in the discipline, the point may be made more suitably (and more paradoxically) by the the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford University, John Hawthorne.