New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Supreme Court of India Recriminalizes Gay Sex

In a disturbing ruling, the usually progressive and interventionist Supreme Court of India has recriminalized gay sex, on non-interventionist grounds. 

Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code holds that whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal commits an unnatural offence. There are two issues here: first, the law itself, and second, the interpretation of the law to include gay sex as being "against the order of nature."

In 2009, the Delhi High Court struck down Section 377, stating:

We declare that Section 377 of the IPC, insofar as it criminalises consensual sexual acts of adults in private, is violative of Articles 21 [Right to Protection of Life and Personal Liberty], 14 [Right to Equality before Law] and 15 [Prohibition of Discrimination on Grounds of Religion, Race, Caste, Sex or Place of Birth] of the Constitution.

We hold that sexual orientation is a ground analogous to sex, and that discrimination on sexual orientation is not permitted under Article 15.

Academic journals as ‘brands’

Yet another interesting piece in the Guardian on academia: Nobel-prize winner (in medicine) Randy Schekman declares he will no longer submit papers to ‘luxury’ journals such as Nature, Science and Cell. His main argument: 

These journals aggressively curate their brands, in ways more conducive to selling subscriptions than to stimulating the most important research. Like fashion designers who create limited-edition handbags or suits, they know scarcity stokes demand, so they artificially restrict the number of papers they accept. The exclusive brands are then marketed with a gimmick called "impact factor" – a score for each journal, measuring the number of times its papers are cited by subsequent research. Better papers, the theory goes, are cited more often, so better journals boast higher scores. Yet it is a deeply flawed measure, pursuing which has become an end in itself – and is as damaging to science as the bonus culture is to banking. 

More Good News on the Whole Robot Overlord Front

Nice article in today's NY Times here about MOOCs not doing all that Thomas Friedman (cf. his entirely predictably earlier puff piece) had quite hoped.

If the links don't work, just reset your browser history and they will open up. Here's a nice bit:

But the pilot classes, of about 100 people each, failed. Despite access to the Udacity mentors, the online students last spring — including many from a charter high school in Oakland — did worse than those who took the classes on campus. In the algebra class, fewer than a quarter of the students — and only 12 percent of the high school students — earned a passing grade.

The program was suspended in July, and it is unclear when, if or how the program will resume. Neither the provost nor the president of San Jose State returned calls, and spokesmen said the university had no comment.

But like "conservatism" for the Republican party, for academic administrators MOOCs apparently aren't something that can ever fail us, but rather only something we can fail.

Mr. Siemens said what was happening was part of a natural process. “We’re moving from the hype to the implementation,” he said. “It’s exciting to see universities saying, ‘Fine, you woke us up,’ and beginning to grapple with how the Internet can change the university, how it doesn’t have to be all about teaching 25 people in a room.

“Now that we have the technology to teach 100,000 students online,” he said, “the next challenge will be scaling creativity, and finding a way that even in a class of 100,000, adaptive learning can give each student a personal experience.”

Why do we (academics) blog?

Last week the Guardian had an interesting piece on academic blogging. The authors, academic bloggers themselves, conducted a small-scale study with 100 academic blogs as their sample set, in order to identify the main trends in what academic bloggers really write about. It is often said that blogging is an outreach/impact tool for academics, to reach out for the educated public at large, but this is not what came out of this study. The results were interesting: 41% of the posts were on what the authors call ‘academic cultural critique’, i.e. “comments and reflections on funding, higher education policy, office politics and academic life.” A similar number (40%) were dedicated to communication and commentary about research. The remainder 20% focused on other aspects of academic practice, such as teaching and career advice.

Now, clearly the wide majority of these posts were not written for ‘the public at large’ as their target audience. While some of the research communication (40%) could well be geared towards non-specialists, the authors of the piece seem to suggest that most of them were of a ‘researcher-to-researcher’ kind of communication. Is this worrisome? Does this mean that academic blogging is failing to deliver?

How well-meant efforts can fuel skepticism about climate change, evolution and vaccines

In a series of experiments, the developmental psychologists Paul Harris, Kathleen Corriveau and Melissa Koenig have shown that young children are more confident about the existence of unobservable scientific entities than they are about the existence of unobservable (semi-)religious entities. 5-year-olds in the Boston area, for example, were more sure about the existence of germs and oxygen than they were about the existence of God and Santa Claus. The experimenters were surprised by this finding, and replicated in several settings, including children from religious households in Spain who were sent to religious (Catholic) schools, and children from a Mayan community in Mexico (Santa was replaced by local spirits that people widely express belief in). As I will show below the fold, a plausible explanation for why children are less confident about religious entities is that the testimony to religious entities differs from that of most scientific entities. It that’s true, we need to rethink how to spread and promote the acceptance of “controversial” scientific ideas like climate change, the safety of vaccines, and evolutionary theory. For, as I will argue, some well-meant efforts to promote such ideas may actually backfire and fuel skepticism. 

Hyperemployment and gender (guest post)

Gordon Hull sends us this guest post:

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Writing at the Atlantic, Ian Bogost develops the concept of “hyperwork” to describe the constantly-on conditions of work in contemporary society.  The gist of the argument is that we (technology users, anyway) are overworked because we are doing a lot of jobs.  As he puts it, “No matter what job you have, you probably have countless other jobs as well. Marketing and public communications were once centralized, now every division needs a social media presence, and maybe even a website to develop and manage. Thanks to Oracle and SAP, everyone is a part-time accountant and procurement specialist. Thanks to Oracle and Google Analytics, everyone is a part-time analyst.”  And that’s before we get to try to manage email.  Most of these extra jobs aren’t paid, but the loss of money is not nearly alarming as the loss of time.

At Cyborgology, my colleague Robin James takes up one point that Bogost does not make: that the new jobs we are all working are, by and large, traditionally jobs held by women or other minorities, for which traditionally “feminine” attributes of caring and nurturing are useful.  She wonders aloud whether the phenomena of hyperwork will thus alter our notions of femininity.

Another point to which Bogost gestures but that needs more emphasis relates to what Tiziana Terranova, Paolo Virno, Franco Berardi, Antonio Negri and others of the Italian “autonomist” school of thought call “cognitive capitalism,” which is basically a Marxist interpretation and critique of the “net economy.” 

Revolutionary democracy and statist "democracy" (reflections on Mandela pt 2)

There is a theme I'm seeing over and over in the coverage of Mandela's funeral - in everything from mainstream press, to "expert" commentators both inside and outside the press, and essays on the left. People note how brilliant, effective, humane, democratic, strategic, etc. Mandela was when leading the resistance movement. Then they note that he was less effective, less strategic, less brilliant, less democratic as president. (Those on the left add that he began collaborating with international corporations, imperialist or otherwise disreputable states, etc.) And then they move onto how much this negative  trend has continued and in some cases wonder whether there is a leader who can bring South Africa back to the excitement and progress of the revolution. 

What is striking is that everyone takes this history to reflect on Mandela, on Mandela's legacy as a person. It is if the main observation is that this guy was great for a time and only good later, to be followed by people who were massively worse. And so we are led to take from this the lesson that we need to find someone who is as he was earlier but able to maintain this disciplined humanity as president.

No one that I have seen has so much as entertained the possibility that this difference might imply not changes in Mandela, but the difference between democratic voluntary movement coalitions and institutionalized states, even ones with marvelous constitutions like that of South Africa. If we did consider seriously this other possibility - that it is the structures that were the independent variable in this experiment - might we possibly be led to the thought that the way such revolutions are organized is a better model for society than the way states are?

Personal vignettes from the anti-apartheid struggle - (1st of 2 reflections on the passing of Mandela)

My own involvement in the anti-apartheid struggle began in the mid 1980s when I was a graduate student at Pitt. It was a formative period for me, a time when I was learning to be an activist and organizer, and taking that on as part of my life and identity. throughout that time, Mandela was a symbol more than a real live figure.  We read his speeches and analysis, studied his life. But locked up in prison, he was not someone we interacted with, even from a distance.  Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, Joe Slovo, Ruth First, and many others were the ongoing partners in our thinking.  Numerous less well known representatives came to our campuses and engaged with us directly.  Mandela was this figure on "free Nelson Mandela" posters, but nonetheless important for all that.  Of course this change with his release from prison and the transformation of roles that he took on as a result. In this first post, I want to reflect on the importance that this time had for me, by passing on a few little vignettes.  I invite others to do the same in comments. this might seem odd, talking about my own life on the occasion of the passing of one of the world-historical greats. But as I see it, a good measure of the importance of Mandela lies in the changes he brought about in so many thousands of less significant people like me. 

Wittgenstein and Enactivism

Let me begin with two of what I think of as an extremely simple, indeed grossly over-simplified, truism. Wittgenstein told us that meaning is use. He also told us that meaning should not be understood as primarily consisting in the relationship that holds between a name and its bearer. My truism is this: Wittgenstein’s two dicta are logically independent. It might be that meaning is use: that is, it might be that ultimately anything I mean has to be explicated in terms of something I use it for.  For instance, it might be that every time I utter ‘cat’, I am doing something cat-related. It may nonetheless be true that the best way to understand the word ‘cat’ is as naming the concept CAT. Conversely, it may be that my utterances of ‘cat’ have to be understood in complex, situationally variable ways, so that the word cannot be explicated as naming anything. Nonetheless, it may be true that meaning is independent of use. In short, one of these dicta is about the communicative and pragmatic aspects of language, and the other about semantics, and though closely related in Wittgenstein’s thought, they are logically independent and they have to be argued for separately.

In a similar vein, the meaning-is-use claim is logically independent of Wittgenstein’s no-inner-mentality ideology, unless you follow a stolidly behaviourist line of thought. You might think that understanding the meaning of ‘cat’ is a matter of behaving in a certain way with regard to cats. But this has little to do with whether or not you change your inner state when you come to understand ‘cat’.

GMO paper retraction produces yet another Elsevier boycott

In an earlier post, I suggested that the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) should not have retracted a paper that purported to show toxic effects in rats fed GM corn.  Now just over 100 scientists have signed a petition protesting the retraction, stating that the retraction violated the norms of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), of which FCT is a member.  The scientists note concerns about the impartiality of the process (e.g., the the appointment of ex-Monsanto employee Richard Goodman to the newly created post of associate editor for biotechnology at FCT) and assert, "The retraction is erasing from the public record results that are potentially of very great importance for public health. It is censorship of scientific research, knowledge, and understanding, an abuse of science striking at the very heart of science and democracy, and science for the public good."

The scientists are boycotting the journal's publisher, Elsevier; they will "decline to purchase Elsevier products, to publish, review, or do editorial work for Elsevier."

This is one more black eye for Elsevier that we can add to the removal of papers from Academia.edu, which Catarina recently blogged about, and the pre-existing boycott of Elsevier, discussed on this blog many times (see, e.g., here,  here, here, and here).

Simon Baron-Cohen's Autism-Spectrum Quotient test

Simon is comedian Sacha-Baron Cohen's (AKA Ali G., Borat, Bruno) brother, and also does philosophically interesting work on psychopathy.

Wired has the test HERE.

What's interesting about the test is that 80% of the people who scored 32 or above then went on to pass other diagnostic tests for what's now called Autism Spectrum Disorder. Pretty impressive for a test consisting of 50 questions involving this kind of self-reporting.

In any case, this is a good excuse to revel in Simon's brother flummoxing (recently incarcerated) evolution denier Kent Hovind at right. One can score pretty high on Simon's test and still find this kind of thing hilarious.

Gender and philosophy in the Netherlands (Guest Post)

This is a guest post by Anthonie Meijers. He is professor of philosophy at Eindhoven University of Technology, and chair of the board of the Dutch Research School of Philosophy.

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There is a serious gender problem in philosophy in the Netherlands. In the 11 departments of philosophy the numbers of permanent staff members are roughly the following:  assistant professors: 110, of which 25 are women; associate professors: 45, of which 5 are women; full professors:  65, of which 7 are women (I have not included part-time professors; this data is based on the websites of the departments).  You may think that this just indicates that women have to work harder to get advanced positions at Dutch universities (i.e. that the problem is only theirs). But there is sufficient evidence now that a gender bias is built into the system. This implies that men are part of the problem and that they will have to take their responsibility. The solution is not easy though. It requires a package of measures. What can we do?

It is always good to raise awareness, but what really helps is to move beyond awareness-raising with a few very simple institutional measures that can be implemented right away. Why not make it a rule that 30% of all invited speakers at conferences are women, or that 30% of the papers in special issues are by female philosophers? The Board of the Dutch Research School of Philosophy (OZSW) will discuss such measures for activities organized by the OZSW later this year. There may of course be exceptions to this rule, but these exceptions need to be justified. Similarly, we should stick to the rule, formally adopted by many universities, that selection committees should include at least two women.

The Dogs of Istanbul

Spending a short holiday, and of course, seeing all the fabled sights of this fabulous city. 

Back one day from several hours on a cruise up the Bosphorus, Lynne and I settled in to some comfortable sofas in a restaurant called Pallatium (or something like that) with a glass floor that looks down on to an excavated palace and a view of the street. It was the latter that fascinated us an in particular, a bright, intelligent, dog who looks very much like this one:

(Note the tagged ear. See below for explanation.)

Elsevier is taking down papers from Academia.edu

It's very ugly (via many of my Twitter contacts). Go check the whole story, but here's the beginning:

Lots of researchers post PDFs of their own papers on their own web-sites. It’s always been so, because even though technically it’s in breach of the copyright transfer agreements that we blithely sign, everyone knows it’s right and proper. Preventing people from making their own work available would be insane, and the publisher that did it would be committing a PR gaffe of huge proportions.

Enter Elsevier, stage left. Bioinformatician Guy Leonard is just one of several people to have mentioned on Twitter this morning that Academia.edu took down their papers in response to a notice from Elsevier.

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Free Nelson Mandela'

BMoF today could not but honor Nelson Mandela, without a doubt one of the greatest humans in the 20^th century and possibly of all times. There is probably no better way to honor him than with music – a man who once said “it is music and dancing that makes me at peace with the world and at peace with myself”. There is much in common between the place that music occupies in people’s lives in South Africa and in Brazil, and this statement by Mandela encapsulates how many Brazilians feel about life, music and dancing (that's certainly the case for this particular Brazilian…).

I found this 1990 video of the pop band Paralamas do Sucesso performing ‘Free Nelson Mandela’, where they reveal their roots as a ska/reggae band. They appeared in the 1980s, and provided much of the soundtrack for my childhood and early teens. They continue to play and record to this day, despite some set-backs (in particular the ultra-light accident of the band leader Herbert Vianna in the early 2000s, which killed his wife and left him paraplegic).

So let’s all get up and sing for (and with) Mandela, and thank him for all he’s done to make this world a better place. (The music itself starts at 1.10.)

some recent Clancy Martin essays

Here's Clancy Martin's recent Chronicle of Higher Education review of Michael Clune's White Out.  

When googling that for the link I found an earlier London Review of Book essay by Martin that's about as raw as the Neal Young song that he quotes in the Clune review.

For some of the reasons Martin suggests, I find much of the philosophical debates surrounding action theory, autonomy, and akrasia to be nearly inscrutable. I just don't end up having enough of the intuitions that participants in the debates seem to take as shared. . .* but mostly (beyond what can be gleaned from the Neal Young lyrics and melody)** I just find people basically incomprehensible.

As Martin does in his essay and Steve O does in the documentary to right, every person I've known who has  navigated addiction/recovery successfully(i.e. (1) without dying, while (2) managing to recover/sustain a state of basic decency to others) has ended up embracing pretty paradoxical views about volition. At one point in the documentary someone congratulates Steve O for staying clean for over a year, and he just good naturedly deflects the compliment by saying that for all he knows he might get high tomorrow. 

I don't get this at all, because accepting that one has so little control over one's own actions strikes me as absolutely terrifying, but it does seem to be part of the healing process for so many people. I realize that this is all pretty standard AA boilerplate, and that AA should be thought about critically (as Martin begins to explore in the essay). Still, I think there's something true and paradoxical that the AA boilerplate is attempting to give voice to.  

I do know that Martin's own experiences in the international jewelry business profoundly informs his fiction and his philosophical work on deception. Maybe there are some new (over and above the standard higher order belief/desire stuff) philosophical theses to be discovered about autonomy, etc. from the experience of addiction and recovery. 

Tennessee Prepares to Commit Mass Murder

Today, The Tennessean newspaper reported that the state plans to execute 10 people beginning in the new year ("TN makes unprecedented push to execute 10 killers"). This is almost double the number of people executed in Tennessee over the past 40 years. 

While it may seem hyperbolic to describe these planned executions as a form of "mass murder," I believe that the hyperbolic nature of capital punishment warrants such a description.  And the state of Tennessee seems to agree, at least on some level.  The standard way of recording the "manner of death" on an executed prisoner's death certificate in Tennessee is as "homicide."  A homicide committed by the state, and by proxy by the people of Tennessee. 

Over the next few months, I will explore some of the issues raised by state homicide in a series of blog posts on New APPS.  I welcome your constructive and critical feedback.

New Blog: "Philosophical Spaces: Answering questions about how to improve the professional environment of philosophy"

Here's the URL: http://philosophicalspaces.wordpress.com/ The self-description: 

This is a blog that discusses and advises people about how to make the climate in their philosophy department and other professional spaces more hospitable.  Some have argued that the norms of behavior in philosophy departments are part of what explains why Anglophone philosophy is not as diverse as other disciplines in the academy.  We are sympathetic to this hypothesis, but also believe that an inhospitable environment is bad for everyone and does not produce the best philosophy.

Summer School: Mathematical Philosophy for Female Students (MCMP Munich)

The Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy is hosting a pioneer event: a summer school exclusively for female students. Summer schools for female students are now well established in mathematics, but to my knowledge this is the first summer school in philosophy geared explicitly towards female students. (In a similar vein, Rutgers hosts the wonderful Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy.) I am posting below the official announcement that has been circulated today. Please pass on the information to anyone you think may be interested, and do encourage your motivated female students to apply!

Consumer Risk, Producer Risk, and the politics of commercialized science

I thought I would make my inaugural post on NewAPPS a follow-up to Roberta's post about the retraction of the article in Food and Chemical Toxicology.  I don't want to continue the debate about whether the retraction was justified; that debate can continue in the original thread.   Here, I want to discuss one of the reasons why we should be paying vigilant attention to events such as these, and why their importance transcends the narrow confines of the particular scientific hypotheses being considered in the articles in question.  What I worry most about is the extent to which pressures can be applied by commercial interests such as to shift the balance of “inductive risks” from producers to consumers by establishing conventional methodological standards in commercialized scientific research. 

Inductive risk occurs whenever we have to accept or reject a hypothesis in the absence of certainty-conferring evidence.  Suppose, for example, we have some inconclusive evidence for a hypothesis, H.  Should we accept or reject H?   Whether or not we should depends on our balance of inductive risks—on the importance we attach, in the ethical sense, of being right or wrong about H.   In simple terms, if the risk of accepting H and being wrong outweighs the risk of rejecting H and being wrong, then we should reject H.  But these risk are a function not only of the degree of belief we have in H, but also of negative utility we attach to each of those possibilities.   In the appraisal of hypotheses about the safety of drugs, foods, and other consumables, these are sometimes called “consumer risk” (the risk of saying the item is safe and being wrong) and “producer risk” (the risk of saying the item is not safe and being wrong.)

Gender differences in brain connectivity (if any) aren't hard-wired

A headline story this morning, featured in several news outlets, reported on a new study published online in PNAS yesterday that allegedly confirms that there are major brain differences between men and women. In the study Ragini Verma, an associate professor in the Department of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues examined the neural connectivity across the whole brain in 949 individuals (521 females and 428 males) aged 8 to 22 years using diffuse tensor imaging (DTI).

The researchers found that in certain age groups, females had greater inter-hemispheric connectivity in the supratentorial region (the part of the brain above the cerebellum), whereas males exhibited greater intra-hemispheric connectivity as well as greater interhemispheric connectivity in the cerebellum. The cerebellum has been implicated in certain forms of knowledge of action and knowledge-how, interhemispheric connectivity seems crucial for many social skills, and intrahemispheric connectivity in local sensory regions may lead to richer perceptual experiences. So, on the basis of these findings, many news reports concluded that men have a greater perception to action potential, whereas women have a greater potential for communicating and connecting “the analytical and intuition.” Some concluded that gender differences in brain connectivity are hard-wired.

In memoriam: Francesco del Punta

Francesco del Punta, a well-known and much admired scholar of medieval philosophy, sadly passed away yesterday. Upon hearing the news from his former student Luca Gili, I asked Luca to write an obituary for NewAPPS, and here it is.

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After a long and dreadful illness, Francesco Del Punta (1941-2013) passed away yesterday evening. He was a great scholar and a great man, and he will be much missed. Del Punta is well known especially for his edition of Ockham’s commentary on Aristotle’s Sophistici Elenchi (St. Bonaventure, New York, 1978), and for his edition of Paul of Venice’s treatises De veritate et falsitate propositionis  and De significato propositionis (Oxford, 1978).

Tolerance is not a virtue

This is my first foray into newAPPS waters-- and I thank the newAPPS coterie for the invitation!-- so I thought I’d start by tossing out a fairly straightforward philosophical claim:  Tolerance is not a virtue.

When I say that tolerance is not a virtue, to be clear, I don’t mean to imply that tolerance is a vice. No reasonable moral agent, certainly no moral philosopher worth his or her salt, would concede that.  Rather, I only want to point out that “being tolerant” requires at most little if not nothing more than refraining from being vicious.  Not only is it the case that we don’t define any other virtue in this explicitly negative way, but we also don't generally ascribe any particular kind of moral credit to persons who are merely refraining from being vicious.

Discourse representation theory and x-phi

I have recently been working on a paper about some of the testable implications of DRT (discourse representation theory) and related dynamic semantic frameworks. One of the questions I am stuck on is that of how to put the semantics of proper names to the test. The general framework of DRT does not commit us to a special theory of proper names. However, Hans Kamp traditionally treated them as individual constants, which is consistent with the philosophical (and post-semantic) theory that non-empty names stand in causal-historical relations to their referents. In subsequent work Kamp has treated names as predicates but with an anchor to a particular individual satisfying the predicate. This, too, is consistent with a causal-historical constraint.

Survey: philosophy of religion – a qualitative study of motivations and attitudes

[This call has also been spread on Prosblogion, but by posting on NewApps I hope to reach a wider audience]

If you are a professional philosopher of religion (including graduate students), I would be very grateful if you could fill out the following survey: https://surveys.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_4UvmgvHInmoRgkR

Two modes of graduate school writing

Both of these writing modes are essential skills for graduate students to master, but it's hard to get them to even try the "teacher-development" mode, perhaps because it's more difficult. (It's especially important for continental philosophy students to master this, since they will very often be addressing non-CP experts when addressing professional colleagues.)