New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

On Praising Kripke

Analytical philosophers are a notoriously argumentative, sometimes savage, bunch, except, apparently, when it comes to reviewing Kripke. In particular, at Stanford ca 2012-3, they must really like their Kripke. NDPR's latest review of Kripke's Collected Papers (by Mark Crimmins) does not quite match the hagiography of this earlier one (by Alexis Burgess) [recall my post], but it comes close. Here's a choice quote: "The reader's delight will grow as hints are dropped that there is a great deal more to come in this series being prepared by Kripke and an ace team of philosopher-editors at the Saul Kripke Center at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York." 

Yet, the oddity of this review is that in between praising Kripke's "gems," "greatest hits," and "lastingly important contributions," the reader is left wondering what exactly the contribution of "newer essays"  by Kripke is meant to be.

I have never met Kripke. I enjoyed Naming and Necessity, and I understand, I think, why some of his papers "spawned literatures so large that even all of your basement shelves, cleared of the antique house paints, could not hold them." But, folks, it is 2013 not 1983. If I hadn't learned not to project my own rhetorical tricks onto others, I would guess that his purported admirers are praising Kripke in order to bury the legacy.

MLA > APA on HE, academic labor, and alt-ac issues; let's fix that!

Philosophers should read this online issue of MLA Profession, since so far MLA > APA on professional issues. (Don't believe me? Check the date on this APA page.) Which doesn't mean it should stay like that; but it does mean we have a good model. Think of the leading folks writing on US HE issues: Bérubé, Massé, Newfield, Bady, Bousquet: they're all English folks. Let's fix that by developing a robust set of philosophers working on HE in general and philosophy work conditions in particular. IMO, these issues require us to drop the near-exclusivity of focus on the TT sector of the employment system, and to see it as one sector only. The last slides of this presentation tries to do that; the earlier slides are a stab at a brief historical survey. A conversation starter rather than a definitive statement.

A dialogical analysis of structural rules - Part I

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

As some of you may have seen, we will be hosting the workshop ‘Proof theory and philosophy’ in Groningen at the beginning of December. The idea is to focus on the philosophical significance and import of proof theory, rather than exclusively on technical aspects. An impressive team of philosophically inclined proof theorists will be joining us, so it promises to be a very exciting event (titles of talks will be made available shortly).

For my own talk, I’m planning to discuss the main structural rules as defined in sequent calculus – weakening, contraction, exchange, cut – from the point of view of the dialogical conception of deduction that I’ve been developing, inspired in particular (but not exclusively) by Aristotle’s logical texts. In this post, I'll do a bit of preparatory brainstorming, and I look forward to any comments readers may have!

On the enduring Millikan

When I studied philosophy in graduate school [in the 1990s--ES], my peers and I went to classes where we were made to read Kripke and Davidson and Quine and Putnam. Then, duty done, we met together at a coffee shop and discussed the latest paper from Millikan, pens in hand, arguing passionately. I cannot even recall how we found her work and knew we had to study it, but somehow there was consensus among us that she was producing the most exciting philosophy happening right then. Sometimes we were convinced that Millikan got a problem wrong... more often we felt she had offered a solution to some problem that other philosophers had mostly just obscured. But that was not what made us study her work so eagerly. The important thing was that Millikan gave us tools. Her theory of proper functions was something we could actually use. It had wide and general utility...And, as we contrasted her work with what our instructors considered the contemporary canon, we felt certain that Millikan represented the vanguard.

I mention all this because the second striking feature of Millikan's responses to these thirteen criticisms is that she still seems the radical maverick. If it is fair to consider her critics in this volume as representative of current philosophy, then one gets the impression that most of us are still catching up with Millikan....To see her respond to this pressure, however, is very helpful to understanding the details and applications -- and, ultimately, the novelty -- of her approach.--Craig DeLancey, reviewing Millikan and Her Critics [the volume includes a chapter by our very own Mohan--ES]

I sometimes wonder how common DeLancey's experience is of graduate students discovering and debating exciting work unrelated to one's instructors' sense of significance. I often have the disheartening sense that it is more common that graduates recycle the shared and undoubtedly sophisticated commitments of their graduate instructors (despite the now relatively easy access to other people's works). This recycling is often itself very sophisticated with accompanying mini-narratives that bolster the priority claims of privileged participants (see, for example, this interesting review). There is nothing dishonest about this kind of recycling and it allows the generation of progress, but one wonders if more frequent intellectual parricide/matricide wouldn't be healthier for the discipline.  

On science and ideology (and economics)

A few weeks ago, Kevin Vallier wrote a thoughtful, agonized blog-post (at BHL) on to what degree 'non-ideological' political theory is possible. Before I could pen a response, David Sobel  created a robust discussion at Pea-Soup on the related question if it is "inappropriate to hold moral principles in a way that is immune to empirical falsification." Now, both Kevin and David flirt with treating 'ideology' and 'empirical' as contraries; admittedly, both introduce a great deal of sensible qualification and hesitate endorsing the conceptual opposition. Even so, David channels the ghost of Popper and treats the empirically 'falsifiable' as the opposite to the 'ideological.'[+]

Shortly thereafter, the influential economist, Raj Chetty, published a widely discussed op-ed piece in which he tacitly assumes that in virtue of being properly empirical his favored approach to economics is scientic and, therefore, cannot be ideological. In my response, I point out that even if one fully accepts that the new trend in data-mining economics, which exploits so-called 'natural experiments,' is based firmly in fact, it could still be ideological. For it presupposes background stability in one's institutions and norms. Much of the very best of contemporary economics is 'empirical' in this sense; it relentlessly explores the impact of policy within a given framework. (The idea that current, mainstream economics is somehow very formal and far removed from empirical reality is seriously outdated.) This status-quo bias of Chetty's mainstream approach remarkably friendly to existing background institutions and norms (recall also this post on Gul and Pesendorfer). 

But was I correct in using 'ideology' in describing economics?

In what sense(s) is the Black Pete tradition racist, if any?

The debate around the Black Pete tradition in the Netherlands rages on: while many outspoken voices have presented different arguments on why the tradition should be at the very least severely modified (I recommend in particular the pieces by Asha ten Broeke), a very large portion of the population has expressed its support and fondness for the tradition as is, in particular by ‘liking’ a Facebook page, a ‘Pete-tion’, defending the continuation of the tradition. As of now, more than 2 million Facebook users have ‘liked’ this page, and last Saturday supporters gathered for a rally in The Hague.

Interestingly, in its most recent update, the Pete-tion FB page (Pietitie, in Dutch) proudly announces that it is ‘against racism, let us be clear on that’. Now, what they mean by ‘racism’ here must surely be different from what Black Pete critics mean when they describe the tradition as racist. More generally, and as often the case, it seems that those involved in the debate may at least to some extent be talking past each other because different meanings of ‘racism’ are floating around. (To be clear, I do not think this is a merely verbal dispute; there does seem to be a core of true disagreement.) Well, one of the skills we philosophers pride ourselves on is the skill of language precisification and conceptual analysis. So in what follows I’ll attempt to distinguish some of the different meanings of racism underpinning the debate, in the hope that such a clarification may somehow contribute to its advancement. (Full disclosure: what I really want to accomplish is to convince my many intelligent, well-meaning friends who do not see the racist component of the tradition that it is there, and that it is problematic.)

The Aesthetic Appreciation of Natural Disasters

[this post originally appeared in Aesthetics for Birds as a guest post] Hayao Miyazaki's animation movie Ponyo features a tsunami. The tsunami is shown in its full threatening and destructive power, yet is rendered with a great aesthetic sensibility. On several occasions, Miyazaki expressed his aesthetic delight in natural disasters, and defended it as follows:

There are many typhoons and earthquakes in Japan. There is no point in portraying these natural disasters as evil events. They are one of the givens in the world in which we live. I am always moved when I visit Venice to see that in this city which is sinking into the sea, people carry on living regardless. It is one of the givens of their life. In the same way people in Japan have a different perception of natural disasters.

Miyazaki is not the only artist to find inspiration in natural disasters. William Turner depicted with gusto a hapless steamboat, struggling in a snowstorm. That we find aesthetic delight in natural disasters is puzzling. Why do we sometimes delight in natural disasters? And is it morally appropriate to do so? These questions have not often been addressed because both aesthetics and psychology have tended to focus on positive and pleasurable aesthetic properties of nature, such as the delicacy of a flower, the slow twirling of autumn leaves, the majesty of a waterfall. But we are not only be moved by nature (as Noël Carroll describes our intuitive and visceral response to nature) in its delicate, pretty form, but also in its destructive form.

'...must show evidence of teaching excellence...'

There is a growing body of evidence that student evaluations not only 1) do not measure teaching effectiveness, and may well be negatively correlated with it, but also 2) that women and other visible minorities fare worse across the board on them. In other words, they're ineffective at measuring what they are frequently seen to measure and highly discriminatory in what they do measure.

The current state of the research is nicely summarized by Philip Stark in this post at The Berkeley Blog, which should be read in its entirety. Even having previously known about much of what Stark discusses, I was particularly stunned by the following:

• students’ ratings of instructors can be predicted from the students’ reaction to 30 seconds of silent video of the instructor: first impressions may dictate end-of-course evaluation scores, and physical attractiveness matters

• the genders and ethnicities of the instructor and student matter, as does the age of the instructor

It's enough to make one wonder how we have allowed the practice of conducting these evaluations to go on for so long and why anyone takes them seriously at all.

Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Volver a los diecisiete’

Short BMoF today, but with a real gem, and again (after the Venezuelan Los Amigos last week) something coming from one of our dear neighbors. ‘Volver a los diecisiete’ is one of the classics composed by the Chilean iconic singer Violeta Parra, and here it is sung by a stellar group of people: the great Argentinian singer Mercedes Sosa, Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso, Milton Nascimento and Gal Costa. (This extraordinary confluence took place at a music TV show that Caetano and Chico used to host back in the 1980s – those were the days…) It's a South-American classic, which I listened to countless times in my childhood (it was especially popular among academic lefties like my parents), and which remains timelessly beautiful.

CUNY, Adjuncts and Faculty Unions

One remarkable dimension of the story making the rounds about  CUNY failing to pay some of its adjuncts is that these faculty are represented by a union. Approximately 400 faculty missed one paycheck, and 100 more than one. None of these faculty have yet been given their full back pay, nor will they until the end of the term. And their union representatives have, at very least, proven incapable of forcing the university to treat the adjuncts in a fairer and more reasonable manner.  

It's worth dwelling on this for a moment. If ever there was a clear cut case for a strong union push, including for a union supported walkout, this is surely it. And yet, nothing. Not even an effective demand that the university absorb whatever supplemental costs may be involved in paying some of their most economically precarious faculty what they are owed in a timely fashion. 

This situation is evocative of some of the ways that existing unions have failed adjunct faculty, and it raises some questions about how—or whether—things might improve in this regard.

Spinoza, Newton and the Clarke/Toland debate

“No variation of things arises from blind metaphysical necessity, which must be the same always and everywhere.” [A cæca necessitate metaphysica, quæ utique eadem est semper & ubique, nulla oritur rerum variatio.]--Isaac Newton, General Scholium (1713), Principia.

This week we're celebrating three hundred years since Newton published the General Scholium, attached to the second edition of the Principia. The passage above was only inserted in the final (1726), third edition. The argument of the sentence seems to be something like this:  

• A1: (Metaphysical) Necessity <--> Homogeneity
• A2: Homogeneity and Variety are disjunctive alternatives (suppressed premise) 
• P: We observe variety
• Therefore, no metaphysical necessity

From textual context it is very clear that Newton wants to defend the legitimacy of final causes. In particular, in circles around Newton it was common to refer to Spinoza as having defended the system of “Blind and Unintelligent Necessity” (S. Clarke (1705) Demonstration, 12.102); or “A Blind and Eternal Fatality” (S. Clarke, Demonstration, Intro.8); or "blind mechanical necessity” (H. More, Confutation of Spinoza, 91). In fact, More refers to Spinoza as that “completely blind and stupid philosophaster” (H. More, 91; recall!) So, because Spinoza's denies final causes, the necessity he defends is unguided and undirected, that is, "blind." In the quoted passage above, Newton is, thus, offering an empirical argument against a metaphysical thesis: observed variety is not compatible with Spinoza's proposed system of nature. Moreover, the General Scholium argues more generally that we do not just observe variety, we observe quite determinate and peculiar variety (of the sort that leads Newton to offer his famous argument to a designer).

Grading: in academia and martial arts

Consider the typical way we grade students in a course. We give a number of assignments. We grade each. Then we average those grades to get a course grade. That course grade is then taken by various outside agents - employers, grad schools, etc. - to be a measure of accomplishment. But there is one very obvious irrationality in this system. Consider two students: student 1 has had the benefit of excellent prior training at, say, a top private HS.  2 has gone to much weaker schools. Maybe 1 has already had some philosophy and certainly has good training in writing papers. 2 does not. Thus, on the first assignment, 1 ends up with a much better grade than 2 because the paper is just plain better. Over the course of the term, however, 2 improves at a vastly higher rate and by the end of the term they are doing work at the same level. Even those professors who include "improvement" as a factor in the final grade are likely to give 1 a higher grade than 2.  (Let's assume that 1 does better on all assignments up to the final one, but stipulate that one's assessment at the end of the course is that they are now producing work of equal quality.)

On leaving academia, interdisciplinarity, co-authorship, and other things

Zachary Ernst, we're sorry to see you go.  But you've left us with some important issues to mull over, here.

These even includes some issues that are under faculty control, like the following:

Furthermore, my department also considers single-authored work to be more significant than co-authored work. Frankly, I find this policy totally absurd, but it's not that uncommon. Because a lot of interdisciplinary work will appear in unfamiliar (to one's colleagues) venues, and be co-authored, that work is downgraded, not once but twice. The effect is that when it comes time to decide on salary raises, a faculty member with broad, interdisciplinary research interests is at a severe disadvantage. To put the point bluntly, interdisciplinary researchers get paid less.

Is philosophy really so insular that we can't respect interdisciplinary work?  That we can't recognize the extra effort (not less effort) that it takes to collaborate?  I am afraid that I know the answers.

The scandal of a snafu is as much the "sn" as it is the "afu": On the non-payment of adjuncts at CUNY

An email landed in my inbox this morning about widespread non-payment of adjuncts in the CUNY system. I'll reprint it below the fold. IANAL, but those who are might want to comment on this in light of NY's "Wage Theft" law.

Here, though, read how Anthony Galluzo, one of those affected, describes his situation: 

I'm supposed to be paid--finally--tomorrow, although classes started the last week of August. The explanation? Well, I was hired late--the week before said classes began--and there is a state mandated pay schedule. Fantastic. A system apparently designed with long term employees in mind, hence the glacial in-processing, even though it now runs on casualized permatemps hired at the last minute. This scenario was compounded by the fact that the secretary in the English department only submitted materials for one of my courses. I am teaching three. A fluke that happens all too often, as I've since learned from other adjuncts. Of the several adjuncts I talk to, I don't know one who was paid on time.

If you've been affected by non-payment, late payment, or partial payment, contact Debbie Bell [email protected]. To offer support of any kind, contact Jonathan Buschbaum. Below the fold, more details:

Economics as a science

A "sardonic" tweet by a "Duke sociologist"* about this year's Nobels in economics generates an op-ed response in the New York Times by a MacArthur ('genius') fellow and Harvard economist, Raj Chetty. [HT Matt Zwolinski] It's been a few decades since an elite economist felt the need to notice a sociologist. Chetty reveals what is at stake: 

the headline-grabbing differences between the findings of these Nobel laureates are less significant than the profound agreement in their scientific approach to economic questions, which is characterized by formulating and testing precise hypotheses. I’m troubled by the sense among skeptics that disagreements about the answers to certain questions suggest that economics is a confused discipline, a fake science whose findings cannot be a useful basis for making policy decisions.       

If economics is not "a useful basis for making policy decisions," its seventy year, lucrative (jobs, funding, prestige, etc.) reign as the the privileged discipline in the policy sciences ends. (The only time I have discussed Chetty's views on the blog, I provided historical context for that claim.) Before I turn to Chetty's argument for why economics is "useful" in the relevant fashion, it is worth noting that he accepts the idea that consensus in methods ("formulating and testing precise hypotheses") and answers ("simple, unassailable finding") is an adequate proxy to a discipline not being a "fake science." Such consensus, need not prevent it being "ideology," too.

Indian Men are the Best . . .

. . . says Lavanya Sankaran, writing in the New York Times Sunday Review. (She should know. She's Indian, after all.) The rapists are cut off from the "domestic tapestry that is intricately woven and vital, it seems, to his own sense of well-being."

Nothing odd about it at all

Christopher Newfield reviews Andrew McGettigan's The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education for the Los Angeles Review of Books:

AMERICANS WHO WONDER what the heck is happening to their public colleges can find answers in the British case. While American educational and political leaders deny the negative outcomes of the actions they barely admit to be taking, the United Kingdom’s Tory government has offered explicit rationales for the most fundamental restructuring of a university system in modern history. The stakes are very high. Both countries have been downgrading their mass higher education systems by shrinking enrollments, reducing funding for educational quality, increasing inequality between premier and lower-tier universities, or all three at once.

Oddly, policymakers are doing this in the full knowledge that mass access to high-quality public universities remains the cornerstone of high-income economies and complex societies. The public has a right to know what politicians and business leaders are really doing to their higher education systems, why they are doing it, and how to respond.

Neil Levy writes with an aperçu that works, as do all the best ones, on both form and content levels: "What's supposed to be odd about that? Compare: 'Oddly, thieves take what does not belong to them in the full knowledge that the rightful owners might be upset.' " 

On the Unraveling of Democracy

In the end, that’s the real danger we are now facing. Not just the shutdown, but the rise of the shutdown strategy. By unraveling the threads of our joint commitment to shared governance, it raises the chances those threads will be rewoven into something else: something deeply, and tragically, undemocratic.--Michael Lynch, Opinionator, New York Times, 10/15/2013

Plato's most important observation in political philosophy is that no constitutional system lasts forever.  As Michael Lynch discerns in the important piece that I quote above (it's the concluding paragraph), there are dynamics internal to the democratic process that may lead to its own unraveling. Lynch mentions three distinct ones: (i) if "legislative gridlock" becomes "a fixture of American political life, it will be more tempting, more reasonable, to think that someone should  “step in” to make the decisions. The chorus calling for action — for the president, for example, to go around the Congress — will only increase." (ii) When politics stops being perceived to be about (Madisonian) give-and-take, then the sense of shared identity will unravel. (iii) A permanent albeit powerful minority systematically makes normal state functioning impossible--the so-called regular "shut-down strategy." [In (iii) I blend Lynch and Schliesser.]

In response to (i) the Cato's Institute's Roger Pilon, remarks: "Well, that’s already happening – witness the many lawless changes to the Obamacare law that have been unilaterally imposed by the president, without so much as a notice to Congress. But it’s not because of any shutdown threat. It’s because (iv) respect for constitutional limits is today so atrophied." [HT Jason Stanley on Facebook] From context, it is clear that Pilon is thinking of the growth of the welfare state ("special interest juggernaut poured through with one redistributive program after another, leading to the unsustainable war of all against all we see today.") Given his focus on limitations, it is surprising that Pilon does not express concern about the limitless growth of executive power that leads to permanent foreign wars and the surveillance state. Either way, we can recognize in (iv) Hayek's old road to serfdom thesis. But with this particular twist that, rather than edging our way toward totalitarianism, we have already returned to the state of nature ("war of all against all.") Obviously, if we are in the state of nature then the need for a Hobbesian sovereign to get us out of it will be embraced by all minimally rational agents.

On Norms, blushes, and impartial spectators.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.--Kant
Quaere quid est virtus, et posce exemplar honesti.--Lucan (quoted by David Hume as epigraph to Treatise 3.)

Our bodies can betray us. The main ploy of Seneca’s eleventh Letter is to use the all-too-human-phenomenon of blushing to talk about the limits that nature and our natures put on any philosophical wisdom. Seneca relies on the idea that blushing cannot be controlled even if one has completed an training in philosophical emendation of the mind.  One aim of such a course is a kind of self-mastery, that is, to be composed. Seneca uses blushing as a metaphor for all the ways in which there are limits to our abilities to control nature more generally. Ever since Bacon and Descartes this outlook has been on the defensive, but if we are really heading toward an era of Environmental disasters, recognizing limits may well return to favor before long even if there might be over-the-counter pills against blushing.  

Above, I use the plural “our natures,” not just because in an earlier letter Seneca had already implied there are a variety of kinds of souls (recall), but also because in the eleventh letter Seneca insists that our characters are, in part, the product of varying natural endowments. This sheds some light on the point of the little mystery at the start the eleventh Letter. For, Seneca introduces a third party, Lucilus’s “friend,” but does not reveal his identity. Presumably this is the same “friend” that had acted as (postal) messenger between Lucilus and Seneca  before (recall the third letter). This time Seneca reports a conversation he had with the unnamed friend, and it reveals something about the qualities desired in a philosophical apprentice. It seems the friend has also started a course in philosophical improvement in which Seneca judges that he has progressed.)

Everything's fine and dandy with "running the university like a business" until a real business analyst gets ahold of your balance sheet

The article is on Temple University, but I can't believe their financial problems are unique; readers are invited to comment on analogous situations at other shools:

"Poor operating performance and weak cash flow margins" at Temple University Health System will create "operating and liquidity pressures" that will suck up a lot of Theobold's time, writes Moody's analyst Diane Viacava and her team in a report to clients. Temple may end up needing to bail out its hospitals if Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett's administration keeps cutting healthcare payments, Viacava adds.

Temple hospitals suffer "deep operating deficits", and Moody's cut their rating to Ba2, and threatened further cuts, in July. Viacava says Temple data shows operating margins in the last fiscal year fell below 2 cents on every dollar, down from more than 4 cents a year earlier, and are still dropping. 

Total Temple debt has more than doubled, to $1.26 billion, in the past five years.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Los Amigos Invisibles

It’s been a while since I last posted something that is 'technically speaking' not Brazilian (in the past, I posted on Cuban piano player Roberto Fonseca, Cape-Verdean diva Cesária Évora and Argentinian hero Spinetta), so today I’ll be posting a couple of songs by the awesome Venezuelan band Los Amigos Invisibles. I first got to know their music back in 1999, when I stayed at an apartment full of Venezuelans for a week in Florence (long story…). All they played, day and night, was Los Amigos’ second album The New Sound of the Venezuelan Gozadera (1998), and I immediately fell in love with the music: it’s disco, Latin, fun, groovy, funky, all in one! What more can you ask for? 

Since then, I continued to follow their career, and in 2006 attended one of their concerts at the SoB venue in NYC (Los Amigos relocated to NYC after the success of their 2003 album, The Venezuelan Zinga Son). They keep producing great music; their latest album was released earlier this year, and coming to think of it, why don’t they come play here in the Netherlands? 

I’m posting here my favorite song from The New Sound…, ‘Ponerte en cuatro’ (yep…), my favorite song from the album following it (Arepa 3000), ‘La vecina’, and to justify their appearance here at BMoF, one of their songs with Brazilian undertones, ‘Es la verdad’, from their 2009 album Commercial. So now you really have no excuse not to get up and dance: it’s Friday, and you've just discovered one of the most danceable bands of all times.

Wanting, Liking, Being Pleased

If you were running an organization, would you spend money to reward deeds that your employees are already motivated to perform? Is a special incentive bonus appropriate to induce people to visit Paris in the spring? Sounds like a waste of your money. There could be complex reasons for rewarding people for doing what they enjoy doing anyway, but prima facie it makes no sense.

This simple observation points to a complexity in motivational attitudes that not many ethicists and aestheticians fully take on board. Take the difference between wanting and liking. When you are hungry, you want to eat. But it’s also the case that you enjoy or enjoy eating (at least, when you are hungry). Wanting is a motive that causes you to eat. Liking is a reward for eating.

But wait a minute . . .

Turing as an embodied/embedded kind of guy

Last week I had a post up on metaphorical language in cognitive science, which generated a very interesting discussion in comments. I don’t think I’ve sufficiently made the case for the ‘too much’ claim, and the post was mostly intended to raise the question and foster some debate. (It succeeded in that respect!)

There is one aspect of it though, which I would like to follow up on. One commenter (Yan) pointed out that it’s not so surprising that digital computers ‘think’ like us, given that they are based on a conception of computation – the Turing machine – which was originally proposed as a formal explanans for some cognitive activities that humans in fact perform: calculations/computations. It is important to keep in mind that before Turing, Post, Church and others working on the concept of computability in the 1930, computation/effective calculation was an informal concept, with no precise mathematical definition (something that has been noted by e.g. Wilfried Sieg in his ‘Gödel on computability’.). To provide a mathematically precise account of this concept, which in turn corresponds to cognitive tasks that humans do engage in, was precisely the goal of these pioneers. So from this point of view, to say that digital computers are (a bit) like human minds gets the order of things right; but to say that human minds are like digital computers goes the wrong way round. 

On the demise of the PSR and The Nature of Analytical Philosophy

One attractive story about the demise of the Principle Sufficient Reason (PSR) is that it was discarded in the founding of analytical philosophy together with the heritage of British Idealism and related polemics against Spinoza (and Bergson) by Bertrand Russell. When Russell was given the option, accept (a) Bradley's Regress or (b) the PSR, he chose neither; and he opted, instead, for (c) submission to scientific fact: "The scientific philosophy, therefore...aims only at understanding the world... without being turned aside from that submission to fact which is the essence of the scientific temper." (On Scientific Method In Philosophy [recall my discussion and Jeff Bell.] If the to-be-explained-facts are brute, then it is possible that even if they can be fully captured by integrated into a theory/model (etc.) some arbitrariness is inevitable (in, say, initial conditions). One might even think that this stance is (informally) justified by the "principle of indifference" that accompanies the embrace of a classical probability theory in one's inductive logic (see, Carnap).

Seneca and Wallace Stevens on Solitude

A naturall foole that could never learn by heart the order of numerall words, as One, Two, and Three, may observe every stroak of the Clock, and nod to it, or say one, one, one; but can never know what houre it strikes...Nor is it possible without Letters for any man to become either excellently wise, or (unless his memory be hurt by disease, or ill constitution of organs) excellently foolish. For words are wise mens counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the mony of fooles...one man calleth Wisdome, what another calleth Feare; and one Cruelty, what another Justice; one Prodigality, what another Magnanimity...such names can never be true grounds of any ratiocination. No more can Metaphors, and Tropes of speech: but these are less dangerous, because they profess their inconstancy; which the other do not.--Leviathan, 1.4

Night nursed not him in whose dark mind
 The clambering wings of birds of black revolved,
 Making harsh torment of the solitude.

 The walker in the moonlight walked alone,
 And in his heart his disbelief lay cold.--Wallace Stevens.

Despite the helpful reminder of 3AM Magazine, we at NewAPPS failed to celebrate the ninetieth birthday of Wallace Stevens' Harmonium. Seneca's mysterious, terse (under 325 words) tenth Letter, brought me back to Stevens' early poetry. Stevens talks of the (nightly) "torment of solitude," faced by the poetic mind (who happens to be a religious skeptic). Yet, Seneca seems to suggest that some of the very best people should seek solitude; in particular they should living with their conscience [conscientia] (recall eight letter). But presumably Stevens's poetic disbeliever is expressing his conscience faitfully.

Mathematicians complicit in surveillance state (hat tip Sully)

As a follow up to the discussion prompted by this post, please see the fascinating article in Nature (here) which chronicles a rift between pure and applied mathemeticians about NSA's paying pure mathemeticians to help breach global internet security standards.

Another great article from Slate can be found here on how strange it is that the NSA has convinced mathemeticians not to share the results that have been useful for NSA's dangerous gutting of internet security. Not only does this prevent people from building a more secure internet, but also (according to the author) represents a betrayal of mathematics itself. The conclusion could not be more apposite:

You can hide a formula, but you can't prevent others from finding it. One might only need a pencil and a piece of paper to do that. And once the secret is out in the open, it’s not just Big Brother that will be watching us—other “brothers” will be spying on us, intercepting our messages, and hacking our bank accounts.

We live in a new era in which mathematics has become a powerful weapon. It can be used for good—we all benefit from technological advances based on math—but also for ill. When the nuclear bomb was built, theoretical physicists who had inadvertently contributed to creating something monstrous were forced to confront deep ethical questions. What is happening now with mathematics may have similarly grave implications. Members of my community must initiate a serious discussion about our role in this brave new world. We need to find mechanisms to protect the freedom of mathematical knowledge that we love and cherish. And we have to help the public understand both the awesome power of math and the serious consequences that await all of us if that power is misused.

I just know I'm right - what to do when you feel this in religious and philosophical disagreement

[note: this blogpost collects some scattered thoughts I hope to organize in article form sooner rather than later, for my British Academy project on religious social epistemology, see here]

There is an ongoing debate what we should do when we are confronted with disagreement with an epistemic peer; someone who is as knowledgeable and intellectually virtuous in the domain in question. Should we revise our beliefs (conciliationism), or not engage in any doxastic revision (steadfastness)? Epistemologists aim to settle this question in a principled way, hoping general principles like conciliationism and steadfastness can offer a solution not only for the toy examples that are being invoked, but also for real-world cases that we care passionately about, such as scientific, religious, political and philosophical disagreements. However, such cases have proven to be a hard nut to crack. A referee once commented on a paper I submitted on epistemic peer disagreement in science  that the notion of epistemic peer in scientific practice was useless. S/he said "It works for simple cases like two spectators who disagree on which horse finished first, but when it comes to two scientists who disagree whether a fossil is a Homo floresiensis or Homo sapiens, the notion is just utterly useless." 

That referee comment has always stuck in my mind as bad news for epistemology: if we can't use our principled answers in epistemology to apply to real-world cases of epistemic peerage, the debate is of marginal value. There seems to be an easy escape: one common response, both by steadfasters and conciliationists has been that we need not revise our beliefs in complex messy cases if we have reason to believe that we have access to some sort of insight that our epistemic peer lacks. van Inwagen, for instance, muses about his disagreements about some philosophical matters with David Lewis, whom he greatly respects: they both know the arguments, and both have considered them equally carefully. But ultimately, van Inwagen thinks

I suppose my best guess is that I enjoy some sort of philosophical insight (I mean in relation to these three particular theses) that, for all his merits, is somehow denied to Lewis. And this would have to be an insight that is incommunicable- -at least I don't know how to communicate it--, for I have done all I can to communicate it to Lewis, and he has understood perfectly everything I have said, and he has not come to share my conclusions.

As one can see, the notion of epistemic peer simply dissolves here, since van Inwagen just asserted that he has insights in the domain in question that are denied to Lewis. To take another example, suppose you are a Christian faced with a seemingly equally intelligent atheist. According to Plantinga (WCB), this disagreement is not a defeater to your beliefs, as you can confidently assume your dissenting peer "has made a mistake, or has a blind spot, or hasn’t been wholly attentive, or hasn’t received some grace she has, or is blinded by ambition or pride or mother love or something else". But how do we know when we are right? Is the "feeling of knowledge", the conviction we are right, any indication that we actually are right? I will argue here that it is not, and therefore, that simply discounting the other as epistemic peer on account of this is not warranted.

Norwegian Parliament and 2003

Following on Eric's post about the Nobel in economics, a brief comment on the latest Peace Prize.  A number of recent prizes have been truly bizarre - given to Obama in 2009 for, I guess, getting elected and not being Bush; to the EU in 2012 for, I guess, not totally dissolving, and now to the UNs Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons for, I guess, being pressed into service in Syria where they might, at some future date, possibly do something useful as that country dissolves into chaos and mass death. But as an award to the person (well, nevermind) who "shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses" color me skeptical. In particular, it is worth remembering the role this body was assigned by the UN in the leadup to the criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Stockholm to the World: "2008 never happened"

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced its 2013 price in economics, and gave it to Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen, and Robert Shiller. One suspects [as Ross Emmett pointed out on facebook] that Fama and Hansen had been pencilled in for 2008; sadly the world did not cooperate with the original plans, and that Shiller has been added to give the whole thing credibility. (Fama and Shiller have not agreed on much.)

In its press release the Academy claims that "it is quite possible to foresee the broad course of these [stocks and bonds"] prices over longer periods, such as the next three to five years."  Of course it is possible, but it is best to bet other people's money on it. More subtly: the Academy's press release imposes a narrative on the empirical work that makes it seem (misleadingly) that there is an established consensus ("the current understanding of asset prices") that itself allows one to predict three to five years out.

#standwithdnlee

DN Lee has a blog with Scientific American, "The Urban Scientist" ("A hip hop maven blogs on urban ecology, evolutionary biology & diversity in the sciences"). She was contacted by someone at "biology-online.org" to see if she wanted to contribute to them. They discussed terms, and were unable to come to an agreement. The following exchange, along with other parts of the story, is available here (and here and here and many other places you can find on Twitter at #standwithdnlee): 

DN Lee: Thank you very much for your reply. But I will have to decline your offer. Have a great day.

Ofek: Because we don’t pay for blog entries? Are you an urban scientist or an urban whore?

Lee then wrote a blog post about the insult at Scientific American, where, you know, she has a blog. Which Scientific American then took down. (Did I mention that biology-online.org is in the "Partner Network" of Scientific American? Scientific American's editor-in-chief, Mariette DiChristina then tweeted her -- inadequate -- explanation of the deletion.) 

My suggestion is that we all contact DiChristina (I can't find an email; here's her Twitter name: @mdichristina) and ask that she condemn Ofek's actions, and restore Lee's reponse post.