New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

On complicity, structural violence, and ideological blinders

Post WWII, Hanah Arendt made a valiant effort to turn moral and political attention to the ways that unexceptional individuals performing actions that, when looked at locally, were unexceptional yet contributed to exceptionally evil systems. Sadly, current attitudes across the professions, literature, the press, and philosophical ethics suggest that her efforts were a failure. And that is, in my view, a bad thing.  The overwhelming majority of the violence in the world today is what Galtung has labeled "structural violence" - roughly, the point is that far greater harm is done to people as the result of complex social forces than by individual actors. And in my view it is a scandal of philosophy that this is not a central issue in applied moral and political philosophy. (Of course there are philosophers who address such things.  But I doubt that anyone could claim that such work is generally treated as central to philosophy.)

NewApps Logic

Gregory Wheeler at Choice & Inference has a very funny post HERE which concludes:

New Apps, a second generation philosophy tabloid, is characterized by the BUM system KDB, which is Deontic Leiter Logic in a single-agent format, or Shame Game Logic in multi-agent form.  This is Leiter Logic but with a commitment to moralizing about other people’s obligations or perceived failings, either as individuals or as abstract categories. 

Ha! The good news is that KDB is proven sound and complete in Chellas (1980).

The bad news is that the results concern propositional KDB which is not expressively rich enough to get any kind of meaningful self-reference. What about all the times I publicly moralize about my own obligations and perceived failings, both as an individual and abstract category? What about the times I've moralized about my penchant for moralizing about obligations and failings? I'm not a good enough logician to know if higher-order KDB can handle this without paradox. . .

In any case, I think it is clear that Wheeler has done us an injustice. At least more expressively rich versions of KDB should be called "NewApps Logics" and the stuff over at Leiter Reports (KB) "Alethic NewApps Logic." Additionally, I must insist on my share of residuals when the military-industrial complex makes nefarious use of the framework.

Seriously though, when I signed up for this philosophy tabloid business I thought I was going to be able to write posts about Elvis sightings, gigantic grasshoppers, and batboy's Idaho lair, etc. What happened? I blame John Protevi. 

Philosophers Carnival #154 is. . .

HERE. Nick Byrd rocked this one out. There's tons of cool posts and a really cool layout, with different sections: essays, discussions, concerning academic philosophy, and news. 

Joe Bob says check it out.

On the Alleged Evils of Formal Philosophy

Eric has been needling "formal philosophers" recently, getting them implicated in the Cold War here, and in the "surveillance state" here. Very naughty.

First, let me say a couple of things in defence of the Rand Corporation, the US Department of the Navy, and formal philosophy. Then, I want to scratch my head a little about some of the reaction that Eric has been getting.

About all of those cold war institutions, here's a point worth pondering. The Rand corporation and the Navy both did a lot of research on how to fight war. Rand in particular did a lot of research into how the war should be kept cold. The theory of Mutually Assured Destruction was one outcome. Was this a bad thing? Perhaps, but at least we are all still here. In this case, perhaps, the bad was an enemy of the worst.

Maybe you disagree, dear reader. But at least you have to concede this: Rand and the Navy sponsored a whole lot of pure research. Perhaps they did this, because they thought it might be relevant to war. Does this make the research bad? Chomsky got a grant from the Navy. I don't see him disowning Syntactic Structures. (I am always ready to be refuted: tell me Chomsky has disowned his book. Oh and by the way, what do you make of the title? SS?) 

There we go again, Thomas Nagel makes up his history.

The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose. The physical sciences as they have developed since then describe, with the aid of mathematics, the elements of which the material universe is composed, and the laws governing their behavior in space and time.--Thomas Nagel in the NYT.

I have blogged about a variant of this mythological (I think Heideggerian) history before.  (This is not to be confused with other blogging at NewAPPS on Nagel's recent views, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) If all you know is Descartes then this myth might seem plausible. But the Cartesian 'crucial limiting step' was successfully rejected throughout the seventeenth century. Many philosophers are familiar, of course, with Leibniz's monads, but may dismiss Leibniz as not really contributing to the scientific revolution (as opposed to mathematics and mathematics). So, let's focus on Newton. When he thought through the metaphysics of body (in critical response to Descartes), he embraced the idea that an extended body had to be the kind of thing that was capable of exciting various perceptions in the senses and imagination of minds (this is from a piece known as "De Gravitatione;" I am linking to a very nice treatment by Zvi Biener and Chris Smeenk.)  While this doctrine is not stated in the Principia; there are glimpses of it in the General Scholium (added to second edition) and in his Opticks. Newton is not ideosyncratic; as I learned from my PhD Student, Marij Van Strien, through the second half of the nineteenth century leading physicists (including Maxwell) were tempted by anti-reductionist conceptions such that mind was not excluded from their inquiry.

Putting the 'we' back in social cognition and understanding autism

There has been a lot of empirical and philosophical research on social cognition, in particular, on our ability to share attention with others, to put ourselves in the perspective of others, and to understand other people's intentions. As Gallotti and Frith point out in their recent article "Social cognition in the we-mode", many theorists still conceptualize social cognition in terms of individual minds and their capacities. Gallotti and Frith propose that interacting minds result in an irreducible 'we' mode, a collective mode of sharing minds that expands each of the participating minds' potential for understanding and action. This shift in social cognition research moves away from looking at social cognition in disembodied minds, but rather examines how people can augment their abilities by acting together with others. This can shed light on the persistence and role of cognitive variability in humans, which I believe has also been studied too much in terms of individual cognition, and not enough in terms of interacting minds.

Take, for instance, people on the autistic spectrum. The prevalence of autism is quite high (although the high prevalence recently might largely be due to improved detection and early diagnosis). There have been numerous attempts to try to identity the underlying causes, such as (recently) older fathers, inducing labor, or genetic factors. Autism is also sometimes regarded as an extreme outlier in the normal range. In all cases, the underlying idea is that autism is abnormal, something that needs to be prevented, and failing that, treated so that the patient behaves in a way that approximates neurotypical children and adults. Terms like 'autism epidemic' and the recent scare over the alleged (now debunked) link between autism and the MMR vaccine reinforce this negative image of autism, something to be prevented at all costs. 

While people with autism and their families undeniably face many challenges, looking at cognition in the "we" mode may shed new light on the phenomenon and may help explain its prevalence.

Social media, mood graphs, and immaterial labor

Evan Selinger has an important piece up at Wired on the way social media are constructing mood graphs based on our use of emoticons.

We already know that with a social graph at its disposal, a mood graph would give Facebook an incredible edge over its competitors for customizing ads and recommendations, as well as predicting users’ future feelings. But consider this: Even if you’re someone who doesn’t share anything, Facebook could potentially reverse-engineer your emotional persona by filling in the blanks from your like-minded friends’ emotional states. In other words, the more your friends emote and translate their soulful moments into basic data points, the more Facebook can determine what makes you tick, too.

In short, thanks to persuasive interface design and non-transparent algorithms, we may be providing emotional labor without even knowing it.

Couple the social media framing and exploitation of self-offered emotional labor with the construction of "soft skills" profiles from MOOCs and we see some of what the Autonomia people are after when they talk about the social factory.

The political implications of formal philosophy?

[E]veryone who works as a mathematical philosopher [a] knows some papers in which the respective authors hide behind the symbols—where mathematical clothing is meant to conceal lack of philosophical content. Or [b] where mathematics does not do much other than complicate some states of affairs that could, and should, have been described in more elementary terms. Or [c] where a mathematical method is applied blindly without any awareness of its potential limitations. In other words: just like all other tools, mathematical methods can be abused. But clearly that should not stop us from putting them to good use in philosophy.  (Leitgeb, "SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHY, MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHY, AND ALL THAT" 274-5) [a-c, added to facilitate discussion.--ES]

The forthright paragraph above is the main one devoted to substantiating one of the aims announced in the abstract of Leitgeb's (2013) nine-page manifesto, that is: "it aims to undermine some worries about mathematical philosophy."* Clearly, Leitgeb's "clearly" skips over an argument and a lot of potential concerns.  For, the potential abuses of mathematical methods developed, explored, and taught in philosophical circles are not exhausted by [a-c]. (To be clear: elsewhere in his piece, Leitgeb addresses other concerns about the use of mathematical methods in philosophy --  including a very interesting engagement with Kantian concerns -- , but these do not concern me here.) Moreover, without evaluating the significance or costs/benefits of the unmentioned potential abuses, it is unclear how clear Leitgeb's "clearly" really is. (Note, too, that even if one were to grant that mathematical methods primarily have good uses inside philosophy (and we ignore concerns over non-philosophical abuses/applications), it still might be the case that they displace better methods within philosophy, or are oversold. I leave this aside.) First a brief historical detour.

Formal philosophy has a long-standing relationship with the war-making machinery of the modern state. During the cold-war the main conduit for this activity was the Rand Corporation, when it was primarily funded by, first, the Douglas aircraft corporation and then the U.S. department of defense (I think it still is); many of the most celebrated formal philosophers (and economists, artificial intelligence, operations researchers, cybernetics etc.) passed through Rand at point or another. (This started, I think, with Olaf Helmer -- a student of Reichenbach [later also prominently involved at Rand] and a member of the original die Berliner Gruppe.) Even today, if you scan the CVs of senior figures in the field you will find stints as visiting reseacher, fellow, (etc) at Rand. Undoubtedly, in addition to a nice pay-check and a wonderful research environment, for many it must have seem a noble calling in the fight against Totalitarianism. For some it meant working on topics related to improving education, linguistics, data-storage and other potentially beneficial civilian enterprises. To the best of my knowledge, Daniel Ellsberg (the great decision-theorist and leaker of the Pentagon papers) was the first of the Rand-funded insiders to question publicly this cozy nexus during the Vietnam war.

Some of this history has been told (by Amadae, Mirowksi, and more focused on philosophy, George Reisch, who is also philosophically sophisticated), but the full story of scientific philosophy's entanglement with the military-industrial complex has not been explored either from within formal philosophy or without. (I would love to learn otherwise.) This is not to deny -- on the contrary -- that there have not been conscientious and heroic formal philosophers who have individually distanced themselves from such funding. I was raised philosophically on inspiring, even heroic accounts about Carnap's pacificism and resistance to loyalty oaths, and about Malament's stance during the Vietnam War. (I would love to learn more!) Clearly, there is nothing within formal approaches that prevents a politically self-aware stance; in fact, I am very impressed by the ongoing, political role of some formal philosophers in their attempts to warn about and limit the reach of the surveillance state.

Do Descriptivists and Kripkeans differ on love?

The Experimental Philosophy blog reports on a paper by Christopher Grau and Cynthia Pury that purports to show that people's attitudes toward love correlates with their intuitions about reference.

People's attitude toward love correlates with their intuitions about reference!

Read the paper there.

- See more at: http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/xphi/2013/08/reference-love-and-kripke.html#sthash.QzvG4bgg.dpuf

Kripkeans could be more likely to feel that love is about a specific individual and that the loved one could not be replaced by another individual with relevantly similar characteristics. In contrast, descriptivists could be more likely to feel that love is about an individual with specific characteristics, and that the loved one could be replaced with a relevantly similar individual.

In fact, this is exactly what Christopher Grau and Cynthia Pury report in an exciting new paper (forthcoming in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology)! People's attitude toward love correlates with their intuitions about reference!

Read the paper there.

- See more at: http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/xphi/2013/08/reference-love-and-kripke.html#sthash.QzvG4bgg.dpuf

Kripkeans could be more likely to feel that love is about a specific individual and that the loved one could not be replaced by another individual with relevantly similar characteristics. In contrast, descriptivists could be more likely to feel that love is about an individual with specific characteristics, and that the loved one could be replaced with a relevantly similar individual.

In fact, this is exactly what Christopher Grau and Cynthia Pury report in an exciting new paper (forthcoming in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology)! People's attitude toward love correlates with their intuitions about reference!

Read the paper there.

- See more at: http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/xphi/2013/08/reference-love-and-kripke.html#sthash.QzvG4bgg.dpuf

Kripkeans could be more likely to feel that love is about a specific individual and that the loved one could not be replaced by another individual with relevantly similar characteristics. In contrast, descriptivists could be more likely to feel that love is about an individual with specific characteristics, and that the loved one could be replaced with a relevantly similar individual.

In fact, this is exactly what Christopher Grau and Cynthia Pury report in an exciting new paper (forthcoming in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology)! People's attitude toward love correlates with their intuitions about reference!

Read the paper there.

- See more at: http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/xphi/2013/08/reference-love-and-kripke.html#sthash.QzvG4bgg.dpuf

Kripkeans could be more likely to feel that love is about a specific individual and that the loved one could not be replaced by another individual with relevantly similar characteristics. In contrast, descriptivists could be more likely to feel that love is about an individual with specific characteristics, and that the loved one could be replaced with a relevantly similar individual.

In fact, this is exactly what Christopher Grau and Cynthia Pury report in an exciting new paper (forthcoming in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology)! People's attitude toward love correlates with their intuitions about reference!

Read the paper there.

- See more at: http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/xphi/2013/08/reference-love-and-kripke.html#sthash.QzvG4bgg.dpuf

Kripkeans could be more likely to feel that love is about a specific individual and that the loved one could not be replaced by another individual with relevantly similar characteristics. In contrast, descriptivists could be more likely to feel that love is about an individual with specific characteristics, and that the loved one could be replaced with a relevantly similar individual.

In fact, this is exactly what Christopher Grau and Cynthia Pury report in an exciting new paper (forthcoming in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology)! People's attitude toward love correlates with their intuitions about reference!

Read the paper there.

- See more at: http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/xphi/2013/08/reference-love-and-kripke.html#sthash.QzvG4bgg.dpuf

Kripkeans could be more likely to feel that love is about a specific individual and that the loved one could not be replaced by another individual with relevantly similar characteristics. In contrast, descriptivists could be more likely to feel that love is about an individual with specific characteristics, and that the loved one could be replaced with a relevantly similar individual.

In fact, this is exactly what Christopher Grau and Cynthia Pury report in an exciting new paper (forthcoming in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology)! People's attitude toward love correlates with their intuitions about reference!

Read the paper there.

- See more at: http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/xphi/2013/08/reference-love-and-kripke.html#sthash.QzvG4bgg.dpuf

Kripkeans could be more likely to feel that love is about a specific individual and that the loved one could not be replaced by another individual with relevantly similar characteristics. In contrast, descriptivists could be more likely to feel that love is about an individual with specific characteristics, and that the loved one could be replaced with a relevantly similar individual.

In fact, this is exactly what Christopher Grau and Cynthia Pury report in an exciting new paper (forthcoming in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology)! People's attitude toward love correlates with their intuitions about reference!

Read the paper there.

- See more at: http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/xphi/2013/08/reference-love-and-kripke.html#sthash.QzvG4bgg.dpuf

Kripkeans could be more likely to feel that love is about a specific individual and that the loved one could not be replaced by another individual with relevantly similar characteristics. In contrast, descriptivists could be more likely to feel that love is about an individual with specific characteristics, and that the loved one could be replaced with a relevantly similar individual.

In fact, this is exactly what Christopher Grau and Cynthia Pury report in an exciting new paper (forthcoming in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology)! People's attitude toward love correlates with their intuitions about reference!

Read the paper there.

- See more at: http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/xphi/2013/08/reference-love-and-kripke.html#sthash.QzvG4bgg.dpuf

Kripkeans could be more likely to feel that love is about a specific individual and that the loved one could not be replaced by another individual with relevantly similar characteristics. In contrast, descriptivists could be more likely to feel that love is about an individual with specific characteristics, and that the loved one could be replaced with a relevantly similar individual.

In fact, this is exactly what Christopher Grau and Cynthia Pury report in an exciting new paper (forthcoming in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology)! People's attitude toward love correlates with their intuitions about reference!

Read the paper there.

- See more at: http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/xphi/2013/08/reference-love-and-kripke.html#sthash.QzvG4bgg.dpuf

People's attitude toward love correlates with their intuitions about reference!

Read the paper there.

- See more at: http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/xphi/2013/08/reference-love-and-kripke.html#sthash.QzvG4bgg.dpuf

It's a structure, not a crisis

Comments on this thread, which began as a discussion of accusations of tokenism against women graduate students, veered off into discussions of (the perception) of effects of AA on "the job market."

A couple of comments caught my eye. One (#34) was that "Your fellow graduate students are not your competition, they are your colleagues.... Unlike your faculty advisers, your fellow students will know what it's like to be a graduate student at this school at this time, facing this job market. And they will (or should!) also be an important part of your professional network as you do enter into the job market." Another (#37) was that "people born in the 80's already have a (fairly understandable) generational grudge against the baby boomers."

I want to make two points here, about when the post-PhD TT "job market" changed, and who competes against whom.

"Student loans aren't hope. They're despair."

That's the closing line to this very important article from Matt Taibbi. Everyone in HE in the States (and in countries heading toward a US-like system) should read the piece. The take-away is something like this: "it's not the interest which crushes student loan debtors, it's the principal."

This is why the issue of student-loan interest rates pales in comparison with the larger problem of how anyone can repay such a huge debt – the average student now leaves school owing $27,000 – by entering an economy sluggishly jogging uphill at a fraction of the speed of climbing education costs. 

Other important excerpts below the fold. 

Evolutionary Psychology in Hollywood

Jason Read's latest post points to this quote from Neil Blomkamp, the director of Elysium:

You'd literally have to change the human genome to stop wealth discrepancy.... We have biological systems built into us that were very advantageous for us, up until we became a functioning civilisation 10,000 years ago. We are literally genetically coded to preserve life, procreate and get food – and that's not gonna change. The question is whether you can somehow overpower certain parts of that mammalian DNA and try to give some of your money out, try to take your wealth and pour it out for the rest of the planet.

Our Betrayals of Bradley Manning

Peter Ludlow reports on the Manning case at the Huff Post.

Sometimes Junior Men are a Part of the Problem, alas.

Our friends at Feminist Philosophers have a depressing post about the contribution of junior men in creating an inhospitable climate to junior women in the profession. I have to admit that I often assume -- or at least hope -- that our discipline's general 'climate' issues are, in part, generational.  But, of course, some younger scholars are clearly responding to signals from senior men about what's tolerated in the discipline, so the generational mores can be easily passed on to future cohorts without conterveiling efforts.

But the culture among PhD students is, in part, also sometimes beyond the grip of supervisors and faculty.  In particular, one should not be blind to the fact that with uncertain job-prospects, other PhD students are also in some respects one's competition for scarce jobs. So, it might appear rational to try to reduce competition for these jobs by discouraging talented peers (even if immoral). Now, one way to discourage this is to make team-spirit among philosophers more rewarding (and to ensure  that non-in-group-males are welcomed on the team).

I welcome other suggestions on how to think about this issue.

Formal Philosopher(s) to Surveillance State: "hire and fund us, we are your best friends"

One formal philosopher sees a bright future ahead:

First, from the point of view of the philosophy of science, data science arguably does offer a new mode of inquiry insofar as we are now routinely handling population datasets directly, or sample sizes so immense that they behave like population data. In this setting, inferential methods of statistical reasoning are used for an altogether different task, namely, as a form of quality control for the direct methods applied to these huge data sets. Second, there is now a realignment of interests that will make for new bed fellows.  The fundamental needs of business and science resemble one another more closely on this score than they have on practically any other in the past, (with the exception of chemistry, perhaps) which means, among several things, that some scientific innovations will come from the business community. Third, one of the skills required by this emerging field, in addition to statistical and programming savvy, is an ability to synthesize results and, all at once, to convey the story and the limitations of the story. This is something that formal/scientific philosophers are particularly good at. Last, but not least, as we see in the news, the collection and storage of society’s “data exhaust” by governments and private companies is easily repurposed for countless tasks, some for the public good, others less so.--Gregory Wheeler.

Of course, down the road nobody should hold the technocratic philosophers accountable for their role(s) in serving the (commercial) surveillance state faithfully.

UPDATE: On Facebook I am being read as if I am accusing the personal integrity of all formal philosophers; that's unfortunate because (a) I am perfectly willing to believe that not all of formal philosophy is useful to the data-miners, and (b) I would prefer to generate a discussion about the potential abuses of philosophical technologies (rather than prompt 'not-me' reflexes).

Ancient, Early Modern, and Philosophy of Physics are the Specialist areas of Philosophy

The following three sub-fields are highly specialized: Ancient philosophy, seventeenth/eighteenth century philosophy, and philosophy of physics. The following sub-fields have a low level of specialization: metaphilosophy, philosophy of religion, philosophy of probability, philosophy of the social sciences, decision theory, and philosophy of race and gender. Highly specialized sub-fields tend to require extensive knowledge in some area beyond the typical training of a philosopher, and outside of philosophy proper.--Brad Wray.

Brad Wray, a Kuhnian-naturalistic philosopher of science,  has mined the PhilPapers data with an eye toward "the degree of specialization in each area of specialization" in the discipline. (Wray is a bit too confident that this is a "representative sample of the profession;" I worry about selection and, especially, geographical effects; even so the numbers are pretty large (3,226 people in total and 1,803 'philosophy faculty or PhD') so that the results can be illuminating if used with caution.)

Wray: "The degree of specialization of an area is a relative measure of how specialized a particular area is" and is calculated as follows: "The number of people who claim the area as their primary area of specialization/The number of people who claim the area as an area of specialization." I have posted a chunk of the abstract, which contains the core results, in the epigraph above. One of Wray's finding would not have surprised Adam Smith: "an analysis of the data suggests that the size of a specialization is correlated with the degree of specialization."

Wray's crucial result (which seems to have been explored at the prompting of a referee) is this one: "a high degree of specialization is the exception, not the norm in philosophical specialties. Many specialties seem to depend, to a significant degree, on the involvement of many who work in the area but who do not identify the area as their primary area of specialization." Of course, this says nothing about the way in which specialists set the agenda with a specialization.

Either way, this data suggests that there are still quite a few generalists in philosophy (it is amusing to me that I work in a 'specialist' area because us 'early modernists' cover two hundred years of systematic philosophy with ongoing discussions pertaining to M&E, value, science, and increasingly philosophy of religion). The question as to what degree Wray's pattern is born out by publication and citation-data is worth exploring in the future.

Feminist Philosophy Archive Project (FPAP)

The Feminist Philosophy Archive Project project began when the Association for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (FEAST) and the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) wanted a way to handle SWIP archives, dating to 1971. While the SWIP archive is the immediate goal, the ultimate goal is an inclusive and international Feminist Philosophy Archive (FPA). 

The coordinators of FPAP are Samantha Noll of Michigan State (email), and Christina Rawls of Duquesne (email); the advisors include Alison Jaggar, Joan Callahan, Ann Garry, and Sandra Harding. A website is in progress but a listserv is already in operation. To join it, please send an email to: [email protected] and in the body of the email include the message Subscribe FPAP .

Darren Young comes out.

My former student, friend, and co-writer Neal Hebert is writing a fascinating dissertation in Theatre about how various versions masculinity have been formed and contested in Professional Wrestling (e.g. Georgeous George, the Exotic Adrian Street, Golddust, etc.) .

I don't know if the video at right is a shoot or part of some brilliant new work, but in either case Neal's going to have some extra writing to do. 

Even though the owners of WWE are pretty Republican they are smart enough to know that the business will die if they try to make a point at the expense of making a buck. So you can track public opinion about all sorts of things by following various subversive wrestling storylines. This one will be a doozy.

I don't think it's a work. Current industry baby face John Cena has publicly spoken in favor of Young and stated that his brother is gay. I would love if that entered into story line and actually made Cena three dimensional, not just the sort of post 9/11 theatrical manifestation of vapid American good intentions that he's hitherto been. I think that there's a real possibility that just as tea party anti-immigrant characters are now heels we are going to see some homophobic heels for the first time in the history of the sport.

In lots of places the Humanities Subsidize the STEM subjects

I assume most of our readers also read (or monitor) Crooked Timber. But for those that don't, this is an important article (it's about the UK, but I am pretty confident the point generalizes).

Cartoon Versions of Science and the harms they do (in Anthropology)

One can’t help but share in Chagnon’s frustration at the hasty decision of the majority of his disciplinary peers to disown its historical connection to any branch of the complex and variegated scientific tradition. After all, until very recently (and to some extent to this day still in languages such as French and German), a ‘science’ was any relatively systematic body of knowledge, anything the goal or product of which was scientia, and it is only in the very most recent times that the notion has been reduced to the figure of somber men seeking to run the world on the basis of claims of unassailable expertise. Yet the cartoon version of science that Chagnon proposes in response, in its total failure to recognize that there might be special problems of theory-ladenness, power inequality, looping effects, prejudice --in a word, all those factors that make the scientific study of humans a more delicate matter than the study of other domains of nature--, can easily make one wish to take the ‘postmodern’ turn oneself, if only to get away from this astoundingly simplistic pretense of scientificity.--Justin Smith (writing about Napoleon Chagnon’s book, Noble Savages: My Life among Two Dangerous Tribes- The Yanomamö and the Anthropologists (Simon & Schuster, 2013).

Justin is one of the leading historians of philosophy of my generation.  He is also a staunch defender of the fact that "one can in fact approach the subject matter of anthropology naturalistically, using the conceptual tools of European traditions of thought, and still come up with theoretically sophisticated accounts of indigenous beliefs that remain nonetheless sensitive to the actual concerns, to the ‘voices’, of the people being studied." (He also wants to bring some anthropological methods into the history of philosophy.)

Is Philosophy turning the corner on gender issues?

After all of this, it may come as a surprise when I say that I am actually very hopeful about the future of gender issues in philosophy. I don’t think we should be at all discouraged by the fact that there are currently serious gender problems in philosophy.  It’s what we should expect, since we (as a profession) have only very recently begun to pay serious and sustained attention to these issues.--Jennifer M. Saul writing in Salon.

Here's the whole piece.

Analytic Metaphysics & Naturalized Metaphysics, Rivals or *Verstandshuwelijk*?

If this collection leaves it unclear just what naturalized metaphysics comes to, its advocates are at least making a serious attempt to engage with our pre-eminent knowledge-producing disciplines. Newton famously compared his efforts to those of a boy on the seashore who succeeded in picking up a smoother pebble or a prettier shell while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before him. While naturalist metaphysicians are at sea trying to oversee the reconstruction of Neurath's boat, many a contemporary analytic metaphysician remains on the beach embellishing his or her own sand castle, oblivious to the incoming tide.--Richard Healey.

I mentioned Healey's review favorably a few days ago.  Even so, the polemical closing paragraph above, which gives voices to "the deep suspicion" of "many naturalistically inclined philosophers," is unfair and dangerous myth. Before I turn to argue this, some terminological clarification. Healey's review is about a book about "scientific metaphysics" and he calls the practitioners of it, "naturalist metaphysicians," which are contrasted with so-called "analytic metaphysicians." He never settles on definitions, but after some empirical analysis, he writes, "Whatever naturalized metaphysics comes to, it is clearly less enamored with logical analysis of language but pays much closer attention to actual science than a lot of what goes by the name of analytic metaphysics." This is a decent first approximation (and captures nicely the contrast between those that, say, start-from-David Lewis and those that, say, develop their views from grappling with the Scientific Image, or Structure).*

Bradley on Sloth and System (and skepticism)

Neither in form nor extent does it carry out the idea of a system. Its subject indeed is central enough to justify the exhaustive treatment of every problem. But what I have done is incomplete, and what has been left undone has often been omitted arbitrarily.--F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, Preface (xi).

There is no established reputation which now does much harm to philosophy. And one is not led to feel in writing that one is face to face with the same dense body of stupid tradition and ancestral prejudice.--Bradley, Preface (xiii). 

Michael Della Rocca has been encouraging me to get interested in Bradley [and this post was prompted by one of his papers--ES]. (See this book for a polemical introduction to Bradley. [I blogged about it here; Mohan responded;  then I; Mohan here.]) The lines in the first epigraph above are the second, third, and fourth sentences of Bradley's book, explaining why Bradley calls it an "essay in metaphysics." While -- if we allow that being exhaustively treated and the idea of system are close in spirit -- the subject is suitable to systematic treatment, Bradley goes out of his way to deny his book is not. At first sight he seems to suggest that it is not systematic because the book is "incomplete." 

Fair enough. The edition I am looking at is over 600 pages long. But Bradley is also insistent that the in-completion is due to his arbitrary omissions. So, the first paragraph of the book introduces an opposition between the idea of system and arbitrary gaps. That is, the idea of system entails deliberateness about internal structure. I emphasize "idea" because Bradley does not deny that his book is an attempt "to deal systematically with first principles" (xiii); evidently such an attempt does not fall under the idea of system.

How can an agent choose to deploy arbitrary gaps? (To be anachronistic: there is nothing arbitrary about letting a random-number generator create the numbers of a sequence, even if any given number is arbitrary.)

Would Tolkien have written the Lord of the Rings had he been an academic today?

Following up on Jon's beautiful and thoughtful post, I here offer some reflections on the role of free and undirected play in academic and non-academic creativity. Jon remarked that being  focused on a narrow and highly specialized research field may contribute to a sense of unhappiness and lack of satisfaction for academics. We have increasing knowledge of how creativity works, for instance, cognitively: it is a stochastic process that does not thrive only on focused research efforts (although that has its place too), but also on the serendipitous coming together of ideas from different sources. It also thrives by having an overproduction of ideas, from which we can pick and select (this is why some regard creativity as a Darwinian procsess). Some degree of variation (deviation from one's specialized activity) helps the creative process, especially if the other activities are indirectly related to one's main tasks. 

I am currently reading a book on the Inklings, an informal reading group of Oxford dons between the 1930s and the late 1940s. What struck me was that CS Lewis, Tolkien and other members of this group engaged in activities that we now would find completely unproductive, even for a graduate student, postdoc or someone on sabbatical. For instance, some members of the Inklings came together in a reading group where they would translate stories from old Icelandic into English. There were those who could already read Icelandic fairly well (like Tolkien, who had taught himself) - these members of the reading group translated several pages at the time. Others were absolute beginners, like CS Lewis. When he started the reading group, he couldn't read a word of Icelandic and had to use a dictionary for every word. He translated maybe 2 or 3 paragraphs at a time, with help and coaching from his peers who were better versed. The Inklings also wrote their own verse, based on Icelandic narratives, and their own stories, which would ultimately form the basis of the Lord of the Rings. 

This form of free play would be unthinkable in the current UK climate of the REF and other assessment tools, which encourage academics to put their energy into getting their work in high-quality publishers. Would Tolkien be able to write the Lord of the Rings if he were an academic today? I don't think so. 

On optimal trouser rolling strategies

One of the saddest and scariest things about human beings is how we can work so damned hard for year after year and then derive so little satisfaction when things actually come to fruition. I don't know how ubiquitous this is, but it is somewhat pronounced both in academia and the music world, two fields that typically require a nauseating amount of effort for years on end just to make a bare living.

Consider music. There's an overwhelmingly affecting point in the recent Ramones documentary where the original bassist and songwriter (who later died of a heroin overdose) is reflecting on his bulimia and massive intake of anti-anxiety medication; he says something to the effect of "All my dreams came true. Why can't I be happy?" This isn't just rock music either. There is a small literature suggesting that successful orchestra musicians (with a job market very similar to academia) have pretty low job satisfaction when compared to other fields.

In academia I've noticed in particular two kinds of virulently unhappy successful people. The first is the person who just got tenure and all of the sudden faces an overwhelming existential crises, analogous to when deep sea divers come up too fast and their bodies can't handle the depressurization. That is, at every point prior to tenure, from gradeschool through being an Assistant Professor, there is ususally a ton of outside pressure to do specific tasks to get to the next point. And some people who thrive when being told what to do find it horrifying to be any other way. 

This is a weird thing, because the pressure of going through tenure review is itself so harsh. I know plenty of people who actually went on prescription happy pills for the first time in their life during tenure review, only to get off them after the tenure was resolved and move on unscathed. But two people I cherish did just fine during the tenure review only to completely fall apart afterwards. One was institutionalized and is no longer an academic and the other is dead. 

On why even 'mild' harassment is bad

There is much to rejoice in how the ‘McGinn affair’ (apologies for the tabloid-like terminology!) unfolded; in particular, this may well be the first time that a ‘big shot’ philosopher was in fact reprimanded for inadequate behavior of this nature towards a graduate student. (And in my opinion, the central administration as well as the department of philosophy at the University of Miami deserve to be praised for taking the complaint seriously and carrying through with the investigation – something that is by no means a given.) But we’ve also heard some people (as it so happens, mostly senior, male academics) voicing the opinion that the reprimand was disproportionate to what McGinn had actually done. After all, he had ‘only’ sent suggestive emails to the student; he hadn’t even attacked her physically or anything like that. In my opinion, these people severely underestimate the impact that even ‘mild’ forms of harassment can have on their victims, so in this post I hope to be able to provide at least a glimpse of ‘what it’s like’ to be at the receiver end of a harassment episode.

I can’t speak much from personal experience, as luckily I’ve never had to experience the kind of harassment in professional circles that creates a situation of discomfort (or worse). (I have though once been sexually harassed during an intercontinental flight, at age 18, and I remember very well how difficult it is even to muster the courage to complain to whoever is in charge or to the harasser himself.) But I’ve heard enough experiences from others to start having an idea of the devastating effects it can have.

Naturalism's Practical Problem(s)

[This post was inspired by an email correspondence with John Doris.--ES]

The sciences play an important role in (at least) two ways of doing philosophy these days: (a) as an ingredient or constraint in so-called 'naturalistic turns;' (b) as an object of study in Philosophy of X (POX) -- with X = any particular science --  or General Philosophy of Science (GPOS).  This (a-b) is not to deny the existence of other roles of science in philosophy, including: (c) functioning as the exemplary model of doing philosophy--I tend to refer to this as "Philosophy as Normal Science" (PANS; regular readers know I want us diminish PANS) and (d) being a source of discipline of philosophy (as, say, Williamson wishes). In practice, there are lots of blended positions. I will not define "philosophy" or "science", and I recognize that those of us that work in Europe (and, perhaps, elsewhere) are often taught (and paid/evaluated) to think of ourselves as scientists.

Here I focus on some problems that (a) and (b), especially, share in practice. The source of these is that we philosophers are generally not practicing scientists. (What I am aboout to claim also applies to those that have a PhD in some science, but it may not apply fully to those that also have ongoing research projects within some science.) This means that any science we rely on (in a-d) will be inevitably: (i) dated (science can move very fast as Bertrand Russell emphasized--it is hard enough for the professionals 'to keep up'); (ii) potentially misunderstood (we are -- despite our fabulous reasoning and conceptual skills -- not the experts in the science, after all); (iii) a partial perspective (most sciences are much larger than philosophy and can have a huge division of intellectual labor). Even if one were to ignore the effects of (i-iii) in (a-d) bits of science 'travel' from properly (stabilized) scientific domains/contexts to philosophical contexts; it is, thus, very likely that (iv) science will be partially transformed in translation (one need not be a Quine-ean holist, Kuhnian incommensurabalist to see that any disciplinary appropriation is not prima facie truth or meaning/pragmatics preserving).  In practice, i-iv can be blended--and, perhaps, the list ought to be longer. I call the effects of i-iv, "NAPPs." The idea is that NAPPs is internal to naturalism (and not to be confused with excesses such as scientism or positivism).

Law and Policy

Today was a big day for criminal justice in the US. 

Attorney General Eric Holder announced a ""Smart On Crime" plan which includes asking prosecutors to remain silent on the amount of drugs involved in non-violent, low-level drug offenses in order to avoid triggering mandatory minimum sentences: "For example, in the case of a defendant accused of conspiring to sell five kilograms of cocaine — an amount that would set off a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence — the prosecutor would write that “the defendant conspired to distribute cocaine” without saying how much. The quantity would still factor in when prosecutors and judges consult sentencing guidelines, but depending on the circumstances, the result could be a sentence of less than the 10 years called for by the mandatory minimum law, the official said." This is an interesting use of policy to trump law (which still remains in place, but is more selectively enforced -- which begs the question of why we should have mandatory minimum sentences in the first place, but anyway...). 

Meanwhile, New York's Stop and Frisk policy was ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge.  Here was have a case of law supervening on policy, although it's not clear how effective the ruling will be in curbing the practise by which a disproportionate number of people of color are stopped and searched by police.  I blogged about this policy about a year and a half ago, in response to Adam Gopnik's endorsement of the policy.

Free Improv and the Environment: listening, but also hearing

[This is guest post by Alistair Isaac, who is about to join the Edinburgh department. Recall Mohan's post.--ES]

I'm a long-time fan of a form of music one might call "free improv": improvised sound unconstrained by any traditional melodic or harmonic structure (a movement which grew out of free jazz on the one hand and minimalism and punk on the other—note this usage is more restrictive than wikipedia's definition). One thing about this music which has puzzled me is the large gap between the excitement of experiencing it live and the stillborn dullness of most of it as recorded—especially true of the more minimal varieties, e.g. Sachiko M, Toshimaru Nakamura, Keith Rowe, or Axel Dörner.

Here I draw attention to one relevant factor: the shared experience within a single sonic environment possible only during live performance. When performer and audience are listening to the same sounds, the performer's improvised response can illustrate how she heard those sounds, thereby retroactively affecting the audience member's own experience in the moment. But this dynamic interaction also defeats the possibility of capturing that moment with any mechanical recording device. Consider for example this instance by the Boston-based duo Nmperign:

Note to narcissistic reviewers: start a blog!

It is difficult to make a genuine contribution to philosophy. It is also not always easy to spot a genuine contribution to philosophy and be confident about the source of the contribution. Reviewers play an indispensable role in our shared evaluation of ongoing professional research. Unlike many other forms of  evaluation (tenure reviews, referee reports, bar-talk, Q&As, etc.), they are part of the public record. Reviews can also help maintain and articulate standards, and, perhaps, catch and prevent professional malfeasance. (This is not to deny the many other roles that reviews can play!) 

Reviews should be informative and fair by conveying the content of the book reviewed with particular focus on the contributions to the literature and the strength or weaknesses of the argument. (Obviously, the reviews that are most entertaining to read have a distinct point of view.) Some -- often senior males -- abuse reviews in order to share their views on some topic without being informative or fair. (Recall this post.) In such cases the book review becomes an excuse to share one's views to a philosophical audience without having to deal with pesky referees. (We have blogs for that!) For example,  Jeffrey A. Barrett uses his recent review to offer his take on the broader issues in the philosophy of quantum mechanics. He does so by a clever ploy: he praises the volume ("This is an uncommonly good collection of essays on the metaphysical foundations of quantum mechanics") and, especially, singles out for praise the "fifty-page introduction to the topic by co-editor Alyssa Ney." Yet, he offers no evidence that he has grappled with the other chapters. (He seems to have read Valia Allori's chapter.) Rather, we get a kind of 'meta' reflection not irrelevant to the volume, but also not quite engaged. This is a great shame because given his expertise, I would have been very curious about what Barrett has to say about the chapters under review; it's an exciting field, and it would have been very welcome to hear how an acknowledged expert evaluates the various pros/cons of the proposals on the table.