New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Has analytic philosophy of religion really become intellectually respectable?

A while ago I read the new theist, a particularly thorough CHE article on WL Craig's natural theology as apologetics. Together with Eric's recent blogpost on religion and changing epistemological fashions, it got me thinking about the role of natural theology in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion, and its wider role in apologetics. What I am wondering is whether analytic philosophy of religion (henceforth aPoR) really is as intellectually respectable as its proponents think it is, and how this connects to the role of natural theology within current aPoR as apologetics. I think these questions are related, somehow, although I would have to think more about how they relate. As someone who does aPOR and who has received Templeton funding, I am obviously not a neutral observer, but I hope to provide some balanced observations nonetheless. 

Brazilian music on Fridays: music from Pernambuco

One of the places I visited while in Brazil recently was Recife, the capital of the state of Pernambuco (unfortunately, a very brief visit this time). Pernambuco is culturally very rich, both in terms of folk culture and in terms of education (including one of the oldest institutions of higher education in Brazil, the Law Faculty of Recife), and more relevant for BMoF readers, it hosts a lively musical tradition. The ‘King of Baião’ Luiz Gonzaga is a Pernambucan, and the region has a number of other characteristic rhythms such as frevo and maracatu.

So to showcase this great musical tradition, I’m posting here  songs by three of my favorite musicians from Pernambuco: Alceu Valença, Chico Science and Lenine. All three have made previous appearances here at BMoF, but good music is always worth listening to again! (At least I’m picking different songs…)

On the ethics of chemical weapons

Over lunch my dad asked me why the use of chemical weapons is thought morally worse than other  weapons (some of which capable of tremendous carnage and deaths). I couldn't do much better than, "it's against international law." Upon reflection my answer is not entirely silly (I return to that below). It is worth nothing that as so-called 'weapons of mass destruction' go chemical weapons are by no means the worst in killing potential. First I turn to Owen Schaefer, who wrote a very thoughtful blog post with a purported answer:

It is indeed generally worse to be killed by a chemical weapon than a conventional one.  Chemical agents such as nerve gas typically cause significant suffering before death – choking, vomiting, chemical burns, defecation, convulsions and the like.  For those lucky enough to survive, chronic neurological damage can be expected.  Conventional weapons are not pleasant either, to be sure, and can similarly cause severe burns, painful wounds, infections, loss of limbs and so on.  Nevertheless, the suffering is pretty much inevitable in a chemical attack, whereas at least those killed by conventional weapons may be killed quickly, even instantly.  What’s more, chemical weapons are more dispersive than most conventional weapons, more likely to cause collateral damage to noncombatants.  These factors indicate we have strong pro tanto reasons to prefer, if a conflict is going to occur at all, that conventional rather than chemical weapons be used.--Schaefer.

I doubt this answer will fully satisfy my dad (a Holocaust survivor who has seen his share of horrors). For Schaefer does not really address the hypocrisy charge given the fact that the legal status quo on the use of Nuclear weapons is -- pace this advisory opinion -- far more permissive. (I am no expert, so feel free to correct me.) Because I am skeptical about the 'more likely to cause collateral damage' claim, it appears that the main moral rationale for focused outrage over the use of chemical weapons is that we prefer our mass killing without prior suffering to the killed. It is, thus, in the spirit of the displacement of torture and needless suffering in 'civilized' penal codes (suggested by Foucault) since the late Enlightenment.

It is, of course, no argument against this anti-suffering ethic to note that it fits a common anesthized (or aestheticized) picture of war. Yet, if consequences matter (as they clearly do in Schaefer's analysis), we also need to ask ourselves if we are taking all the relevant consequences into considerations. 

On the Contrast between Mythical and Mistaken History...(yes, it's Thomas Nagel again).

Let's distinguish between Mythical history (Myth) and Mistaken history (Mish).

• Myth uses narratives about the past to indicate conceptual linkages among (various) and within natural and social kinds.
• Mish contains factual errors about the past.
• It's possible that Myth = Mish; but Myth need not be Mish (nor does Mish always need to be Myth).

In reflecting on the public and private responses I have received to my criticisms on Thomas Nagel's abuse of history (here and here), I realize I need some such distinction. (In particular, I thank Mazviita Chirimuuta for making me see what's at stake here!)

Myth and Mish are both compatible with (i) messy history, that is, one that suggests the past is (always more) complex and ambiguous (etc.) and (ii) clean history, that is, one that extracts some determinate claim about the way it was (other than being messy). In practice, Myth tends to be clean (but, say, Foucault practices the genre, in part, by being very messy). Mythical history (be it Mish, clean, messy, or not) is philosophially interesting because it can structure how we think about the world and the way we conceive of the nature of the the problems at hand (or overlooked).

Facebook and the ethics of bragging

[WARNING: light philosophical content ahead]

I’m a newcomer to the world of Facebook, having joined only in June of last year. I resisted for as long as I could, until I gave in to the pull of being kept abreast of what people are up to, posting pictures of my kids for family and friends scattered around the world, and possibly also some less noble motivations. For the most part, it’s been a pleasurable experience: I came to realize that there is a lot of meaningful philosophical interaction going on on Facebook (whereas mathematicians, for example, seem to prefer to hang out at G+), and got in touch with many philosophers who I had little to no contact with. But as any newcomer to anything, I had to learn the rules of the game, in particular what to post and what not to post. (Which is not to say that I’ve achieved mastery level at this point; far from it, as discussed below the fold.)

Economics as/and science; on treating Milton Friedman as the villain

The fact that the discipline of economics hasn’t helped us improve our predictive abilities suggests it is still far from being a science, and may never be....Over time, the question of why economics has not (yet) qualified as a science has become an obsession among theorists, including philosophers of science like us...What is economics up to if it isn’t interested enough in predictive success to adjust its theories the way a science does when its predictions go wrong?--Alex Rosenberg and Tyler Curtain, in the New York Times.

Sometimes I receive the following back-handed, compliment-question, "Why do you do history?  You might make a decent real philosopher." A part of the answer is that the second-order stories we tell ourselves -- often handed down by mentors and supervisors, and senior peers -- about where we come from and what we do often are just as interesting and important as the first-order activities; they may also influence us and others in ways that are often hard to spot. This by way of introduction because in what follows I primarily challenge the conceptual oppositions (and associated historical myths) in Rosenberg and Curtain's Opinionater piece (allowing that the genre they are writing in need not require scholarly precision). Perhaps, my challenge allows some clarity about the first-order issues to emerge.

The main stated point of Rosenberg & Curtain (hereafter RC) is that "the task of the Fed’s next leader will be more a matter of craft and wisdom than of science." Surprisingly enough, given that RC are philosophers, they spend very little words on conceptualizing the nature or origin and causes of such "craft and wisdom," even though at the end of their piece they boldly assert that "the Fed chairman must, like a first violinist tuning the orchestra, have the rare ear to fine-tune complexity (probably a Keynesian ability to fine-tune at that)." We are not told why of all the crafts and skills, the fine-tuning violin is the most appropriate exemplar for a Fed chairman. Even if we grant the fruitfulness of the tuning metaphor, a fine-tuning violinist possesses a skill that may not  require (much) wisdom; she tunes an orchestra that is oriented toward a common goal with skilled performers. The Fed-chairman deals with a more heterogeneous population with ends that are -- I hope -- not unified.

In fairness to RC, most of their piece is focused on a self-described "obsession:" is economics 'science?' So, let's turn to that first.

So now Québec's language law is fine . . .

The political situation around Québec’s proposed Charter of Values—the bill that would ban turbans and head scarfs in public contexts, e.g. as worn by teachers—is now reaching absurdity. (I wrote about it here.) Some decades ago, the province suspended individual rights by passing the language law, Law 101 as it is called (because of its then position on the order paper of the Québec Parliament). It was a controversial move that balanced the rights of individuals against the interests of a collective, and (as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms permits) suspended the former. This is permitted by the famous “notwithstanding clause” of the Canadian Charter: “Parliament or the legislature of a province may expressly declare in an Act of Parliament or of the legislature, as the case may be, that the Act or a provision thereof shall operate notwithstanding a provision included in section 2 or sections 7 to 15.” Québec invoked the notwithstanding clause in Law 101.

Fair enough. You can expect that in such a situation some will argue in favour of the supposed interest of the collective (i.e., the preservation of French in Québec) and others will argue in favour of the individual’s right to speak the language of her choice, which one might think was guaranteed by the freedom of expression provision of section 2 of the Charter. This is why the present situation in la belle province is approaching absurdity: the rhetoric of opposing the proposed Charter of Values seems unanimously to include praising Law 101.

Ridicule in philosophy, a preliminary analysis...or on philosophical style

Some of our very best philosophers engage in effective, polemical ridicule:

Carnap on Heidegger

Burnyeat on Strauss

But there is also:

Derrida on Searle 

Now, reflection on this very small sample (add your favorite example in comments!) inclines me to delimit a certain genre of philosophically effective ridicule (as opposed to mere character assassination); this genre, relies on the magnification of a core philosophical commitment of the opponent and thereby render the whole project  preposterous or laughable. I label this a 'Swiftian-Rabelaisian strategy.' Nietzsche's writings are littered with attempts at Swiftian-Rabelaisian strategy, although he often suggests that the contrasting strategy -- ridicule by way of minimization (e.g., Berkeley on minute philosophers) -- comes  more naturally to him. 

Of course, such a Swiftian-Rabelaisian strategy is compatible with the existence of effective arguments against the ridiculed opposition (as well as the existence of argumentative rejoinders).  It is also compatible with holding a rather austere (what we may call, adopting a phrase from Derrida) 'ethics of writing'. Given the sample, I hasten to add that even if the meta-ethical-writing-principles were shared, the enacted norms of writing may differ widely. We should distinguish the Swiftian-Rabelaisian strategy from other forms of ridicule (which, say, rely on misrepresentation, incredulous stares, silencing techniques, etc.).

I conclude my preliminary analysis by way of a suggestion; in some possible world it ought to be possible to execute the Swiftian-Rabelaisian strategy under, as it were, the radar without, say, being funny. To give a hint of an example: when Locke takes on the stance of an 'under-labourer' he magnifies some privileged others (Boyle, Sydenham, Huygens Newton). Nobody would ever accuse Locke of being a funny writer,  but it would be amusing if he were capable of an inside joke. 

Cleanthes' Irregular Argument, reconsidered....

Let me here observe too, continued CLEANTHES, that this religious argument, instead of being weakened by that scepticism so much affected by you, rather acquires force from it, and becomes more firm and undisputed. To exclude all argument or reasoning of every kind, is either affectation or madness. The declared profession of every reasonable sceptic is only to reject abstruse, remote, and refined arguments; to adhere to common sense and the plain instincts of nature; and to assent, wherever any reasons strike him with so full a force that he cannot, without the greatest violence, prevent it. Now the arguments for Natural Religion are plainly of this kind; and nothing but the most perverse, obstinate metaphysics can reject them. Consider, anatomise the eye; survey its structure and contrivance; and tell me, from your own feeling, if the idea of a contriver does not immediately flow in upon you with a force like that of sensation. The most obvious conclusion, surely, is in favour of design; and it requires time, reflection, and study, to summon up those frivolous, though abstruse objections, which can support Infidelity. Who can behold the male and female of each species, the correspondence of their parts and instincts, their passions, and whole course of life before and after generation, but must be sensible, that the propagation of the species is intended by Nature? Millions and millions of such instances present themselves through every part of the universe; and no language can convey a more intelligible irresistible meaning, than the curious adjustment of final causes. To what degree, therefore, of blind dogmatism must one have attained, to reject such natural and such convincing arguments?--Hume, Dialogues 3.

In her post yesterday, Helen de Cruz asserted that Cleanthes "makes an important empirical claim, namely that belief in a designer flows spontaneously, irresistibly and non-inferentially from our consideration of order in the natural world."  Because Helen only quoted the sentence on with "anatomise the eye," she left me the straightforward rejoinder that according to Hume such anatomizing always presupposes expert judgment/taste/cultivation. In response, the up-and-coming Hume scholar, Liz Goodnick, pointed to more evidence for Helen's position. (I think it is a bit misleading to call that evidence "Later in Part III,"--it is the very same paragraph, and part of a single, non-trivial argument, but strictly speaking Goodnick is correct.) I am afraid that in larger context the claim by Helen and Liz cannot be sustained, or so I argue below the fold in some detail (apologies). 

Best practices for the new academic year

Tips from the history of pedagogy.
(H/t to Jocelyn Waite)

Are we intuitive Intelligent Design creationists? Insights from Hume and the cognitive science of religion

In many respects, Hume was a cognitive scientist of religion avant la lettre: his Natural history of religion, Enquiry and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion contain bold hypotheses about the origins of religion in human nature (NHR), the reason why people believe in and transmit miracle stories (Enquiry, On Miracles), and the intuitiveness of intelligent design/creationism (NHR and Dialogues). Many of these hypotheses are still being explored by current cognitive scientists of religion (CSR for short) who share Hume’s taste in making bold conjectures about the cognitive, historical and cultural factors that underlie widespread religious beliefs and practices. Recent Hume scholarship asks whether Hume thought that belief in creationism/intelligent design is a natural belief. The answer is not at all obvious, since Hume voices several seemingly conflicting opinions. In this blogpost I want to argue that Hume’s ideas about the intuitiveness of creationism/IDC are very relevant to cognitive science today, and that belief in intelligent design is not a natural belief, but that some of its constituent beliefs are. 

On Leo Strauss and the Philosophers

"Strauss' interpretation of Plato is wrong from beginning to end." M.F. Burnyeat.

Although we philosophers are thought of as a cerebral bunch, our loathings can be pretty intense. I need not mention the hundred-year, fraternal civil war, which around here we label a 'divide,' between analytic and continental philosophy; we are not known for our fondness for what passes as 'theory' among literature and cultural studies departments (and I have experienced plenty of uncivil behavior from folk in, say, science studies in return).  But when professional philosophers are not just puzzled by the Straussians they encounter, we reserve a special kind of bile and invective against them, especially as Strauss's students found their ways into advising Goldwater and Reagan (and beyond); once I was halted in my invective against Wolfowitz by (The University of Chicago's) Ralph Lerner's, 'Paul once sat in that chair, and was no less passionate than you.' Undoubtedly a few of us were at least mildly irritated by reading Steven Smith's very respectful review of books on the legacy of Strauss in a recent New York Times Book Review--"doesn't he know that 'Strauss is not a Philosopher!'"?

In his famous essay, Burnyeat (a former teacher) overreached.  Invoking  "ordinary scholarship," Burnyeat treats Plato (surprisingly Popperian) as a "radical utopian," primarily relevant for opening up "a reasoned debate on the nature and practicality of a  just society" (emphasis in Burnyeat). Given that Burnyeat was in no sense an ordinary scholar, who also searchingly pioneered the historiographical construction of the classics, these lines are painful read; Burnyeat reduces the significance of Plato's political philosophy to being a forerunner of Rawls. Those of us living in the shadow of the surveillance state may find Strauss' "anti-Utopian teaching" ("invented" or not) about Plato a useful touch-stone, sometimes. For in Republic and Laws surveillance are ever-present and its limits thematized. The cause of Burnyeat's overreach is that Plato's Laws has always been a blind-spot to him (and until recently ordinary analytic scholarship).

At some level, Burnyeat must have known he overreached, because he allowed the original and reprinted version of the piece to have a clear reference to a famous short story by Oscar Wilde, -- which may be read as an allegory on philosophical madness [Murchison is introduced as a truth-teller] ! -- that ends with that enigmatic "I wonder."

No hard-sell of philosophy?

At a banquet dinner in honor of Adam Smith's 300th birthday I ended up sitting next to the local Head of the Chamber of Commerce of the Fife (the region that includes Smith's birth-place, Kirckaldy). She complained that despite the economic recession and unemployment there were still plenty of jobs that could not be filled. I suggested maybe her members should pay higher entry-level wages; she insisted that the difficulty was finding conscientious people in her depressed area. On her telling too many kids did not have the bourgeois virtues of steadily showing up on time, being dressed in representative fashion, and good manners to engage customers.  We found some middle ground that the area needed better vocational training (the banquet was hosted at Adam Smith college).

I was reminded of this because recently, Marcus Arvan proposed the following sales-argument to recruit more philosophy majors:

The thing, though, is this: the assumption that seems most causally responsible for all of this -- the assumption by students and their parents that a philosophy major is a "bad deal" -- is patently false.  Philosophy majors:

• Enjoy some of the highest salaries of all majors, higher in fact than most majors (e.g. business, nursing, etc) traditionally associated with jobs and industry,
• Have the best med-school-acceptance rate of all college majors, and
• Have some of the highest LSAT, GRE, and GMAT scores.

In short: we are useful, and we give students and parents what they want -- they just don't know it.  If parents and students did know how useful a philosophy degree is, we just might be able to steer more students our way, have more majors, more donors, and more academic jobs.--Marcus Arvan

Jason Brennan, who teaches ethics, thinks this is unethical: 

Stanley Fish is to Richard Rorty what Ayn Rand is to Friedrich Nietzsche

During deconstructionisms's heyday Is there a text in this class? served an important function, and in graduate school I quite enjoyed him as David Lodge's Morris Zapp character, though the joke is vastly less funny now that I'm in the biz for real. 

Anyhow, TNR's Russell Jacoby (HERE) has Fish's monotonous schtick dead to rights:

The new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders missed this obsessive-compulsive disorder of literary professors: repeating sans cesse the pedestrian observation that everything is contextual and contingent. Fish has taken this historicist principle and run with it forever. He is still agog over it.

Jacoby also has a pretty nice discussion of just how unhelpful are Fish's attempted application of this observation to issues concerning the university. Though I disagree with Jacoby's dismissal of the academic study of pop culture, his conclusion does not rest on it.

Fish has been unable to uphold the liberal arts as anything more than a vehicle to provide jobs for liberal-arts professors, who do what they do. After all, the liberal tradition has served him and his friends quite nicely. “I believe fully in the core curriculum,” he wrote in one of his Times columns on the crisis of the humanities, “as a device of employment for me and my fellow humanists.” Bully for him. But if this is the best defense of the liberal arts by one of its most celebrated practitioners, who needs it?

Feh. . . Kurt Cobain didn't die so that fatuous millionaires could thumb their noses at the rest of us ad infinitum in the pages of the New York Times. Thank God for the Stone.

Crowd-funding €25,000,000 for Philosophy?

A group is trying to raise €25,000,000 for philosophy: 

Different institutions are participating in this project, they already are part of the project: Various professors and students from the Humboldt University in Berlin, Eindhoven University of Technology, Radboud University Nijmegen, Utrecht University, University of Bern, Georg Simmel Centre for Metropolitan Studies, University of Luxembourg... and many more. [Emphasis in original--ES.]

Almost no names are mentioned except a certain "Sandra A.V. Vos", who seems hard to track down to a particular philosophy program; it seems a bit...opportunistic.

Charles Taylor Speaks Out

Charles Taylor, the philosopher, was co-chair of a commission appointed by the last Liberal Party government of Québec to study "reasonable accommodation" of ethnic groups of non-Québec origin. (When I Googled "reasonable accommodation," a bunch of reports about average rentals showed up. Would that it were that simple!)

The report of that commision was conciliatory towards the French-speaking majority, and even (somewhat) to Québec nationalists. It was anything but radically libertarian, endorsing, for example:

French as the common public language. The intercultural approach would hardly have any meaning if Quebecers were unable to communicate with each other in the same language.

Nevertheless, the Bouchard-Taylor report was hardly the kind of stuff that the present separatist government wants discussed in the public forum.

"The working conditions of instructors are the learning conditions of students"

A guest post from Ed Kazarian:

President Obama has just released his Plan to Make College More Affordable and the critiques have been coming fast and furious (for instance). A major feature of the plan is the requirement for collecting and presenting data on student outcomes; adding a requirement for faculty work conditions data would make this a much better plan. Here's how.

Much of the student data the President is asking for—graduation rates, average debt loads and earnings of graduates, percentages of students who pursue advanced degrees, and the income levels of students who attend an institution—is already easily available and factors into many of the rankings that are currently published.

But the narrow focus on student data elides the factor that may well count the most when it comes to good student outcomes: faculty working conditions. As the slogan goes "the working conditions of teachers are the learning conditions of students."

Religion and Changing Epistemological Fashions

The view that being a committed theist must necessarily cloud one's judgment, or at the very least undermine one's claim to rational objectivity, has been influential and powerful since the Enlightenment. To a remarkable extent, Christian thinkers went along with it, in the hope of attaining a Cartesian-like virtuous epistemic freedom from all presuppositions. That era is passing, since in both analytic and phenomenological philosophical traditions, a change in epistemological fashion has led to greater acceptance of religious experience and greater awareness that atheist and secular humanist points of departure involve just as much substantive theoretical commitment as theistic ones.--James G. Murphy.

Christian thinkers didn't just "go along with," they helped promote the idea that commitment to theism and rational objectivity were seperable, in part, in order to secure the Christian mysteries from rational criticism and maybe, in part, to ensure that commitment to theism  did not depend on highfullitin reason so that it would remain out of reach for ordinary people.

This is not to deny that "we have come a long way from the mid-20^th century, when much Anglophone philosophy doubted that talk about God, let alone talk about religious experience, could even be meaningful." However, this is not wholly due to "change in epistemological fashion."  The idea that there are 'epistemological fashions' implies, I think, that such changes just happen due to changes in taste and group social dynamics. Undoubtedly some of that plays a role. But the changes were, in part also due to a growing realization that trying to argue against positions in virtue of their purported lack of meaning was simply an instance of bad faith, not to mention a strategy often bordering on the self-contradictory. Substantive disagreements should be argued substantially.

But this does not exhaust the origins of the epistemological changes. I can think of a few at least two more sources:

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Eu sei que vou te amar'

So BMoF is back after the summer break. I always have wild plans of restocking on all the latest releases when I’m in Brazil over the summer (well, winter there), but this time in particular the harvest has been somewhat meager (I seem to have been busy with other things). But I did buy one album that I’ve been enjoying quite a bit since: Vanessa da Matta canta Tom Jobim. Tom Jobim is without a doubt the most remarkable composer of all times in Brazilian music, as attested by this collection featuring nothing but memorable songs, one after another.

One might think that there isn’t much left to be done in the ‘interpreting Tom Jobim’ department, and yet Vanessa da Matta achieves quite a few surprising versions of these beautiful classics. Today, I’m posting her version of ‘Eu sei que vou te amar’ ('I know I will always love you' -- lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes), which is surprising in that it’s almost humorous, in a slightly mocking, bolero style. For the contrast, I’m also posting the über-dramatic (and awesome) version of the song by Caetano Veloso (from his 1978 album Muito). Which one do you like best, people?

"The long digression regarding the work of Richard Wagner is hardly appropriate; again, the author’s personal animosities are unpleasant to have to wade through."

Dear Professor Nietzsche,

Thank you for considering The Journal of Morals and Ethics for your MS “On The Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic” submitted 2/14/87.... I found your MS extremely interesting, and it contained much of value, but after considering referee reports have decided that on balance it is not appropriate for the Journal. I hope this does not deter you from seeking to publish with us in future. Below I have appended reports from readers. 

... The author seems intent on needlessly denigrating scholars in the field: English “psychologists” (I assume the author means philosophers; he has a tendency to confusingly elide the two terms) are referred to early on as “cold, wet, boring frogs”. I do not see the value of this. Quite aside from the fact The Journal has a large number of English subscribers, it does not behoove the author to engage in such ad hominem remarks. A German, one would have thought, would have learnt not to throw stones when sitting in such a large glass house.

(More here.)

Harare on the St Lawrence

Québec is at it again, viciously suppressing its minorities.  From the proposed Charter of Provincial Values:

• Public employees, including civil servants, judges, police, doctors, nurses and teachers, would be forbidden from wearing “conspicuous” religious symbols such as the Jewish kippa, the Muslim hijab and the Sikh turban.
• Women and girls would have to remove their veils in order to attend public schools or receive health care.
• The “charter of values” would also apply to the private sector.  It would amend the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms to include the principles of equality of women with men, the religious neutrality of the state and the secular character of public institutions.

However, the large cross in the provincial parliament (see above), and crosses generally, will be allowed—as personal adornment, on nuns' habits, and on the tops of churches.

“Erring on the Side of Life”

Earlier this week, U.S. District Court Judge Thelton E. Henderson ruled that prisoners on hunger strike in California may be force-fed, even if they have signed an advance directive to refuse medical resuscitation.

Joyce Hayhoe, a spokesperson for California Correctional Health Care Services, commented on the decision: “It's better to err on the side of life.” 

She cited claims made by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) – and refuted by the Hunger Strike Mediation Team – that some prisoners have been coerced into signing Do Not Resuscitate orders by prison gang members. 

These claims form part of the CDCR’s broader public relations campaign to discredit the strike action by representing it as a “gang power play.”  I have critiqued this representation elsewhere, arguing that the term gang and the CDCR’s policies for gang validation and debriefing, function as a mechanisms of social and civil death, criminalizing both the collective resistance and the collective existence of people behind bars.

 

A compendium of nostrums, scams, buzz words, and trial balloons, with an awesome mixed metaphor

Obama's new HE policy includes this gem:

A rising tide of innovation has the potential to shake up the higher education landscape.

Top that, Elmore Leonard!

Though I guess I shouldn't rock the boat, since this proposal is a game-changer on steroids.

Now all we seem to care about is reproducing the managerial class.

Rick Perlstein's latest at The Nation (HERE) makes for some pretty brutal reading. The first part is worth sharing if you have well meaning family members like mine, who for a decade or so hectored me to cold-call various department chairs so that I could get a job where my children (only potentially existing at the time) would have grandparents nearby.*

After recounting friend after friend debasing themselves in all sorts of ways in often futile attempts to get meaningful employment and/or tenure, Perlstein turns to the superstars he knows.

I think of one academic couple I know, of whom I am very fond, and whose contributions to teaching and scholarship and left-wing activism are exemplary. I don’t begrudge them their gorgeous home with the expansive deck overlooking mountains and ocean; I don’t begrudge one of them for letting slip—we all have moments of hubris—that they make $400,000 between them. I don’t begrudge another such couple the fancy catered dinner parties they’re able to throw in their fancy home, because, hell, I was the guest of honor at one of those dinner parties. In fact, I’ve been the guest of honor, as a visiting independent scholar, at fancy dinners at all sorts of fancy universities, and am invariably fond of my hosts, for the most part decent, dedicated people: 1960s veterans, mainly, who’ve done their best to keep their values intact.

But here’s their problem—a tragic flaw. They’re hardly aware that they’re aristocrats, and that they oversee an army of intellectual serfs. 

Is the flaw really anything approximating a tragic one? Is the dereliction of those at the top (and those of us not at the top but with tenure protection) even really "structural" in the sense of Lance's post on complicity (HERE)? I don't know and would be interested in what people think. Maybe whatever personality traits make it the case that you are going to succeed in this kind of climate also tend to make you uniquely unsuited to do anything helpful once you are there. Perlstein himself describes how Kafkaesque the tenure process is and what this might do to one's soul. I'm sure that delivering the same paper dozens of times a year as an invited speaker does weird things too. Perhaps this is a structural facet along the lines of the manner in which anyone willing to do what politicians have to do to win elections in the United States now is a priori completely unsuited for public office. I don't know. . .

UC Berkeley exonerates Terrence Deacon

This is old news, but still interesting:

"Failure to cite an earlier work with the same subject matter, even an important one, is not by itself research misconduct.".. it can certainly be argued that it would have been an improvement for Deacon to find and cite Juarrero's Dynamics in Action, or for Juarrero and Rubino to find and cite Brian McLaughlin, or for Lissack to find and cite Deacon.  But that is a discussion about academic style and comprehensiveness, not plagiarism or academic misconduct.

The Investigation Committee has exonerated Terrence Deacon by finding that each of the allegations of plagiarism made against him are either without foundation in logic or evidence, or are demonstrably false. As a result, it is the responsibility of the University to make a concerted effort to repair the damage done to a wrongly accused member of our faculty.  In the Internet age, when unsupported and demonstrably false charges can be leveled against an individual and distributed directly to hundreds of people via email and many thousands more through websites, as has been the case with respect to Deacon, repairing reputational damage is an extraordinarily difficult challenge.  For that reason, the University has taken the unusual step of writing this narrative and creating a website where the investigation report is posted and its findings are available to any interested individual.

White House petition for clemency for Bradley Manning

Here. 

WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO:

Restore the United States’ human rights record and grant clemency to Pvt. Bradley Manning!

The prosecution of Bradley Manning starkly contrasts to the US govt's repeated failure to deliver justice for serious human rights violations committed during counter-terror operations of the past decade. Manning, who released classified information exposing potential breaches of international humanitarian law by US forces, was sentenced in military court on Aug 21st to 35 yrs in prison. Manning's severe sentence contrasts with the leniency given those responsible for torture and other types of grave human rights violations he revealed. To reduce this blight on the US human rights record, President Obama should grant Manning clemency for time served, protect whistleblowers, and provide accountability for crimes like those Manning exposed.

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL / PARDON.BRADLEYMANNING.ORG

Elmore Leonard for Philosophers

Elmore Leonard died a few days ago. I've seen his ten first rules of writing at least four times since. (Jackie Collins of all people had a funny and self-deprecating take in the Guardian.) Philosophers can use an adaptation, and here it is.

1) Never open a book with weather.

 (The idea was: if you must, say how somebody feels about the weather. Here’s Jean-Claude Izzo honouring the rule in its breach: “It was June 2^nd and it was raining. Despite the rain, the taxi driver refused to turn into the back alleys.” Still, that would have been better if “and it was raining” had been deleted.)

Never open a philosophy paper with what others think. (“Most philosophers think that colour is real. I’ll argue that it is not.” Better to write: “I will argue colour is a figment.”) If you can’t state your own idea without using somebody else as a foil, go on to something else.

2) Avoid prologues.

Coetzee on Whorf and Newton's Mathematical Philosophy

The ideal of a pure language in which a pure, pared-down, unambiguous translation of the truths of pure mathematics can be effected deserves a more extended discussion than I have given it here. But I will limit myself to pointing out that this ideal language is very far indeed from the languages of man as conceived by Whorf; for to Whorf the least visible structures of a language, those that seem most natural to its Speakers, are the structures most likely to embody the metaphysical preconceptions of the language Community. On the other hand, the case of gravitational attraction does not at all demonstrate what Whorf asserts about Newtonian cosmology as a System, namely that the key concepts of the cosmology emerge smoothly from or fit smoothly into, the structures of Newton's own language(s). Instead we find in Newton a real struggle, a struggle sometimes — e. g., in the General Scholium to Book III of the Principia — carried out in awareness of the issues involved, to bridge the gap between the non referential symbolism of mathematics and a language too protean to be tied down to single, pure meanings.--J.M. Coetzee (1982) "Newton and the Ideal of a Transparent Scientific Language," Journal of Literary Semantics.

Among recent philosophy the Whorf hypothesis is primarily an object of curiosity as background to Kuhn's Structure (and maybe Quine's Word and Object), although two of my favorite philosophers, Lieven Decock and our very own Helen de Cruz (and a few others), work on it.  (Undoubtedly part of the lack of interest is recent, philosophical abhorrence of relativism, but the thesis has not disappeared from linguistics and psychology.)* A charismatic economist, Keith Chen, rediscovers a version of it in economics by focusing on the surprising impact of linguistic structure and financial activity (saving rates)--here's a popular video. (HT Hülya Eraslan; I ignore my methodological qualms today.) In the article quoted in the epigraph above (it's his conclusion), Coetzee is interested in the version -- he attributes it directly to Whorf -- that "we see nature along lines laid down by our native languages." I call this version, the "narrow Whorf thesis" (to distinguish it from broader claims about linguistic/cultural relativism and also Whorf's explanation for the narrow Whorf thesis.)

Now, what does the narrow Whorf thesis have to do with Newton and Coetzee?

What do climate scientists mean when they cite 95% odds?

A draft summary of the Fifth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been leaked to the press. Although I don't have access to the draft itself, the reporting alone is interesting, but also potentially confusing to the average layperson. The New York Times tells us that "An international panel of scientists has found with near certainty that human activity is the cause of most of the temperature increases of recent decades," and quotes the document as saying, "It is extremely likely that human influence on climate caused more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010." We are also told that whereas in 2007, "the chances were at least 90 percent that human activities were the cause" of climate change, saying that now in 2013 "the odds are at least 95 percent that humans are the principal cause." Reuters words this slightly differently: "it is at least 95 percent likely that human activities - chiefly the burning of fossil fuels - are the main cause of warming since the 1950s." But what do the phrases "near certainty," "extremely likely," "95 percent odds," "95 percent likely" mean? [the emphasis is mine in all of the above quotes]. In this context, I think they all mean the same thing, but that's not entirely obvious.

Help stop this ham-handed university "wellness" scheme at Penn State before your admins get any bright ideas

Change.org petition here: 

Penn's State's new Health Care policies, which have been rolled out quietly in the middle of the summer, include an excessively invasive "Take Care of Your Health" plan that forces employees, by imposing a massive, $1200 a year surcharge, to submit to poorly and unprofessionally mass-organized blood tests and "biometric screenings." Included in this mandate is an additional mandate, requiring all employees and their spouses/SSDPs, to fill out an incredibly invasive "Wellness Profile" that, if taken, immediately shares ALL of the person's private medical information with WebMD, a third-party agency with a far from comforting record in the area of privacy.

Harvard Business Review (I know, I know, still, stopped clock and all that):