New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Improving the Climate in Philosophy

It's always nice when you hear about people doing positive things to improve the climate in philosophy for women and other underrepresented minorities.  Feminist Philosophers has details about a new blog that aims to do just that.  You can ask questions and get advice, or see what issues are arising in for others and how they might be dealt with.

Burying the lede in the age of neoliberalism, vol. 7591

This CHE story focuses on the college wage premium, but doesn't make enough out of the point made at the end of this paragraph:

Nevertheless, the researchers had good news for colleges at the bottom line: Yes, college is still a worthwhile investment for both individuals and society. When the California Master Plan for Higher Education was enacted, in 1960, only 10 percent of Californians had a college degree, and the earnings gap between degree holders and non-degree holders was 35 percent. In 2010, they say, that earnings premium was 43 percent—higher than in the past, but still half the figure cited in the College Summit report. But, the researchers point out, the wage gap is higher now not because wages for college-degree holders have gone up, but because wages for people with only a high-school degree have gone down.

See also:

And the researchers note that getting that college degree has become increasingly risky, mostly because of the cost of education. As late as 1990, both men and women graduating from California public colleges would have almost no chance of “financial distress,” or what the authors define as having student-loan repayments in excess of 15 percent of their income. In recent years, however, those burdens have become more pronounced. Thirty-year-old men graduating from the University of California system have a 38-percent chance of financial distress, and women have a 55-percent chance.

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Coetzee has taken our measure...

From a recent essay by John Coetzee [HT Joshua Miller]:

The response of the political class to the university's claim to a special status in relation to the polity has been crude but effectual: if the university, which, when the chips are down, is simply one among many players competing for public funds, really believes in the lofty ideals it proclaims, then it must show it is prepared to starve for its beliefs. I know of no case in which a university has taken up the challenge.

The fact is that the record of universities, over the past 30 years, in defending themselves against pressure from the state has not been a proud one. Resistance was weak and ill organised; routed, the professors beat a retreat to their dugouts, from where they have done little besides launching the intermittent satirical barb against the managerial newspeak they are perforce having to acquire....

Well, some things were better before they restored the Republic (hat tip Rod Dreher)

From Roland Deschane's "WARS on Kinkaide" (here).

McGinn, when in glass houses...

Colin McGinn is a famously polemical reviewer. Yet, when he gets administered a taste of his own medicine (recall), he resorts to name-calling: "absolutely hysterical, ad hominem, and completely devoid of any sense of critical decency."[HT Wayne Myrvold] I leave it to readers to judge this "hysterical."

In his rage he seems to have misread McKenzie's review.  He falsely claims (without evidence) that "She pours scorn on my contention that physics is epistemologically limited in important ways—that physicists (and everyone else) are deeply ignorant of the intrinsic nature of the material world. She contrives to make it sound as if this view is an eccentricity dreamt up by me alone." If true, this claim would be astounding because McKenzie is a product of Leeds philosophy--one of the strongholds for views that (in some of their guises) deny knowledge of intrinsic nature of the world (see here). Of course, McKenzie does no such thing. Rather, McKenzie claims that (a) McGinn does not engage with folk who anticipate versions of such views and (b) that he misrepresents the existing discussion; moreover, she reveals that (c) his sole citation to contemporary work in the area is mangled. 

Obviously, one can debate the merits of extremely polemic, uncivil reviews. But when in glass houses...

"God's Not Dead" Real Life Top Ten (apologies to Greil Marcus)

10. "God's Not Dead" was filmed at Louisiana State University; the location generally adds to a movie's unique feel (cf. the criminally underrated Johnny Knoxville/Willie Nelson version of "Dukes of Hazard"). But in spite of the setting, the overall filmic ambiance of the trailer of "God's Not Dead" is in its cheap bombast almost identical to the "Atlas Shrugged" and "Left Behind" movies. The weird conservative variety of emotional tone deafness works at all levels, visual, audio, and with respect to dialogue (e.g. minute 2:11- "Yeah but who are you looking to fail? Me? or God?") 

9. The taxpayers of the gret stet of Louisiana almost certainly funded "God's Not Dead" via one of the many boondoggles that account for 7 billion (a full third) of our tax receipts being given directly to private industries (long story about how this 7 billion funnels down to Republican politicians around the country who will deliver primary voters to Bobby Jindal's unsuccessful 2016 Presidential Bid; cf. the tee shirts "My philosophy professor lives in Louisiana and all I got was this stupid presidential run.").

8. Gratuitous appearance of "Duck Dynasty" stars and famed Louisiana theists at second 13 of the trailer!

7. Weird Duck Dynasty theology expressed around seconds 16-18 that if we disown Jesus, Jesus will disown us. If that were true, in what universe would Got still be love? What's going on here?  

6. Second 26! Kevin Sorbo! Kevin Sorbo! Kevin Sorbo! (That's Hercules to you and me). This. Changes. Everything.

Some boys should not try their hand at the metaphysics of physics

Kerry McKenzie explains.

What female orgasm and deductive reasoning have in common: they are not adaptations

Evolutionary accounts of deductive reasoning have been enjoying a fair amount of popularity in the last decades. Some of those who have defended views of this kind are Cooper, Maddy, and more recently Joshua Schechter. The basic idea is that an explanation for why we have developed the ability to reason deductively (if indeed we have developed this ability!) is that it conferred a survival advantage to those individuals who possessed it among our ancestors, who in turn were reproductively more successful than those individuals in the ancestral population who did not possess this ability. In other words, deductive reasoning would have arisen as an adaptation in humans (and possibly in non-human animals too, but I will leave this question aside). Attractive though it may seem at first sight (and I confess having had a fair amount of sympathy for it for a while), this approach faces a number of difficulties, and in my opinion is ultimately untenable. (Some readers will not be surprised to hear this, if they recall a previous post where I argue that deductive reasoning is best seen as a cultural product, not as a biological, genetically encoded endowment in humans.)

In this post, I will spell out what I take to be the main flaw of such accounts, namely the fact that they seem incompatible with the empirical evidence on deductive reasoning in human reasoners as produced by experimental psychology. In this sense, these accounts fall prey to the same mistake that plagues many evolutionary accounts of female orgasm, in particular those according to which female orgasm has arisen as an adaptation in the human species. To draw the parallel between the case for deductive reasoning and the case for the female orgasm, I will rely on Elisabeth Lloyd’s fantastic book The Case of the Female Orgasm (which, as it so happens, I had the pleasure of re-reading during my vacation last week).

On Fundamental Assumptions in economics and philosophy

Ingrid Robeyns has a very nice post at Crookedtimber with an excellent discussion on why "economics should become much more aware of the values it (implicitly or explicitly) endorses. Those values are embedded in some of the basis concepts used but also in some of the assumptions in the theory-building." Her post includes a lovely, brief and clear treatment of the abuse of the Pareto-improvement criterion; it's worth your time to check it out.

However, I worry a bit about the meme that focuses on the lack of clarity about values by economists. For, it reinforces the convenient economist's (and philosopher's) distinction between positive and normative questions, embraced since Sidgwick encouraged the split between the two fields (recall and here). To put the worry more constructively and subtly reinterpret my two earlier posts (here and here) on Raj Chetty's widely discussed NYT op-ed piece: economists are not transparent about their status-quo bias that is embedded in their empirical methodology, which (recall (and here and here), takes important institutions and norms as given).[+] From the point of view of the political economy of economics this (relative) status-quo bias of policy oriented economics is to be expected because the demand for economists is fuelled by existing institutions. 

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Ive Brussel'

I haven't posted anything by Jorge Ben(jor) for a while, so here is the easy-going, mellow samba 'Ive Brussel', from his 1979 album Salve Simpatia. It is a duo with Caetano Veloso, which makes it even more enjoyable. So let the weekend come!