New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Newapps comments policy and recent posts

Dear readers: there have been lots of questions raised about our comments policy regarding the recent accusations of sexual misconduct in the profession.  We think we have made some wrong calls along the way.  In this brief post we want to explain how our thinking evolved over the last hectic 36 hours, and more importantly to put in place a new policy.  

When we became aware of the accusations concerning Peter Ludlow, the bloggers at NewAPPS had a long internet conversation on whether to open comments or merely include a link to the news reports. In light of earlier discussions of similar topics, we suspected that an unmoderated blog debate on this case could become offensive and even cross the boundary of legality. So we did not open comments. This decision met with quite a bit of public criticism, some even hinting that we were protecting Prof. Ludlow. As a result, we decided to open comments, but to monitor them very closely. For nearly 24 hours, John Protevi - with some hours of others of us taking over - did this. Arguably some of the comments that stayed up should have been unpublished. But trust, us, the ones we did unpublish were worse. Comments were closed in light of a comment most of you haven't seen that we thought would push discussion in an unproductive direction.

Since this followed a comment that raised a different case - the claim that another department has had and hidden allegations - some have speculated that we don't want such allegations made public. This was, of course, not so. But a blog discussion like this was not the place to responsibly consider other allegations.  We are not here to encourage a free-flowing discussion that will inevitably include anonymous speculation.

In the future, our general policy on issues like this will be to close comments, merely posting links to information, until such time as there are professional or philosophical issues that we think it will be useful for the community to discuss.  We run this blog for a number of reasons. One of them, which we take very seriously, is to offer a discussion space for professional issues. However, our blog is not a soapbox, so although it is offered as a professional service, we can and will exercise our judgment as to what we want to appear here. 

I'm not opening comments on this post either. 

In philosophy, there should be no male and female (some hard data on the adverse effects of underrepresentation)

(Many thanks to Bryce Huebner for drawing my attention to this work) - There has been a lot of speculation about whether or not sexual harassment is worse in philosophy than in other disciplines. While there are few hard data on this issue, a new paper by Dana Kabat-Farr and Lilia Cortina throws new light on this problem, looking at the correlations between gender disparity and harassment in a large sample of employees in the military, academia and the court system. Across all these fields, the authors found that a low gender representation for women results in higher levels of gender harassment. Gender harassment is defined as "a broad range of verbal and nonverbal behaviors not aimed at sexual cooperation but that convey insulting, hostile, and degrading attitudes” about people of one’s gender". Concretely, "when comparing a woman who works in a gender-balanced work-group to a woman who works with almost all men, we find that the latter woman is 1.68 times as likely to encounter [gender harassment]." Remarkably, they found no correlation between sexual advance harassment (which we have been hearing a lot about recently) and underrepresentation.

I think these data are highly relevant for the recent news about harassment in our profession, and that there are things to learn from it for concrete policies.

Rawls on justification

I have a PhD student working on justification in epistemology. He just got started a few months ago, so for now we are sort of ‘sniffing around’ before we define a more precise focus. (He wrote his Master’s thesis on John Norton and the justification of induction.) Now, by a nice twist of fate, last week I received a Google Scholar citation alert which put us on a very promising track: Rawls’ notion of justification. (My book Formal Languages in Logic was cited in this Pitt dissertation, in the same section where there is a discussion of Rawls on justification. The dissertation, by Thomas V. Cunningham, looks very interesting by the way.)

Here is the crucial passage as quoted in the dissertation:

Justification is argument addressed to those who disagree with us, or to ourselves when we are of two minds. It presumes a clash of views between persons or within one person, and seeks to convince others, or ourselves, of the reasonableness of the principles upon which our claims and judgments are founded … justification proceeds from what all parties to the discussion hold in common … thus, mere proof is not justification … proofs become justification once the starting points are mutually recognized, or the conclusions so comprehensive and compelling as to persuade us of the soundness of the conception expressed by their premises…[C]onsensus…is the nature of justification. (Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1999 ed.), 508-509).

Axiomatizations of arithmetic and the first-order/second-order divide

I'm currently running a series of posts at M-Phi with sections of a paper I'm working on, 'Axiomatizations of arithmetic and the first-order/second-order divide', which may be of interest to at least some of the NewAPPS readership. It focuses on the idea that, when it comes to axiomatizing arithmetic, descriptive power and deductive power cannot be combined: axiomatizations that are categorical (using a highly expressive logical language, typically second-order logic) will typically be intractable, whereas axiomatizations with deductively better-behaved underlying logics (typically, first-order logic) will not be categorical -- i.e. will be true of models other than the intended model of the series of the natural numbers. Based on a distinction proposed by Hintikka between the descriptive use and the deductive use of logic in the foundations of mathematics, I discuss what the impossibility of having our arithmetical cake and eating it (i.e. of combining deductive power with expressive power to characterize arithmetic with logical tools) means for the first-order logic vs. second-order logic debate.

Part I is here, Part II here, and Part III here. I still hope to post Part IV tomorrow, and then the final Part V will have to wait for a while.

Student sues Northwestern for alleged failure to act on sexual misconduct finding against a philosophy professor

[Changed headline and URL from this morning.] See here, here and here for news articles. 3:20 pm, CST, 11 Feb. We are opening comments. We will moderate closely. See our comments policy. From the news stories, we know the following facts:

1. The student is suing Northwestern, not suing Ludlow.

2. The lawsuit alleges that the original complaint was upheld by the NU Office of Sexual Harassment Prevention. Their wording is alleged to have been that Ludlow “engaged in unwelcome and inappropriate sexual advances.” [Per the news articles, it is a fact that the lawsuit contains this allegation. It is not a publicly available fact that this was the wording of the OSHP.]

3. The lawsuit alleges that a disciplinary committee recommended firing Ludlow. [Similarly, it is a fact, per the news articles, that the lawsuit makes this allegation. It is not a public fact that the disciplinary committee made this recommendation.]

4. The university did not fire Ludlow. [Update, 3:50 pm: it's better to say that Ludlow is teaching courses this term at Northwestern.] [Update, 9 am, 12 Feb: see here for more information on Ludlow's teaching schedule.]

5. Through his lawyer, Ludlow denies the allegations in the original complaint. 

6. The university changed its policies in January, claiming that these changes would put it in a position to be in better compliance with Title IX. 

[Update 9am, 12 Feb: 7. The Chicago Tribue reports: "This was not brought to our attention by either the candidate or his employer," said Rutgers spokesman Greg Trevor. "We are looking into this matter thoroughly, including requesting all relevant information to fully evaluate his candidacy."]

Another Gendered Speaker Series

The Gendered Conference Campaign "aims to raise awareness of the prevalence of all-male conferences (and volumes, and summer schools), of the harm that they do." In keeping with that aim, I call your attention to a (so-far) gendered speaker series that raises awareness for this issue in a different way. The University of California at Merced (disclaimer: my place of work) started a Philosophy Speaker Series this year that has so far organized talks for three speakers, all of whom are women (see the calendar and archive here). This was not intentional, but the fact that it is striking to have this sort of line-up reveals that we have some way to go to reach gender parity. Has anyone else come across conferences, speaker series, or summer schools with all-woman line-ups?

Philosophical Climate Survey

Two of my students just put together a philosophical climate survey. It can be found here. It's primarily intended for philosophy graduate students in PhD programs.

If you are a PhD student in philosophy, it would be great if you could complete it.

Hopefully this, together with The Philosophical Gourmet Report and other resources, will help students make informed decisions about which PhD programs to apply to.

Can someone please explain the publisher's blurbs for Heidegger's Black Notebooks

Google translate gives me gibberish, but with the possible exception (I can't tell) of comments at the end of both blurbs the gibberish seemed to be downplaying the elephant in the dining room. My German is inexcusably (for someone who lived there for two years as a child) awful, so I'd be really interested to see how the blurb accords with the Derbyshire piece.

In particular a couple of things seem clear to me:

1. Contra Faye et. al.'s repeated claims, the substance of Heidegger's pre and early 30's philosophy has absolutely nothing to do with anti-semitism or Nazism,
2. The fact that Heidegger was not a "crude biological racist" is a dangerous non-sequitur (neither were most Nazi's, who had a metaphysical conception of race rooted in German Romanticism),
3. Heidegger's middle and late work is tainted by the Nazism just to the extent that the history of being (especially the way it is tied to views of the German language and people and their relation to the Greeks) recapitulates central German Romantic themes that actually were central to blood-and-soil Nazism, and
4. It's possible that the most interesting thing about the black notebooks is that they make this connection much clearer. 

Now, 3 and 4 may be completely wrong, or may be the kind of things that informed people of good will can disagree about*. But if the blurbs are written in a way that forecloses 3 and 4, this seems a little bit problematic to me.

Philosopher Jaakko Hintikka reveals love affair between his wife and JFK

Here.

Really just a wonderful performance, and a bit about teaching

Georgetown, like many Jesuit schools, requires philosophy of all undergrads - two courses.  Since most of these students are not going to go on in philosophy, some of us spend a fair bit of time reflecting on what best to aim for in such a class. I don't really think the first steps of professional training are the goal - and so try more to instill habits of philosophical reflection - the examined life - that might be useful to them in the future. As part of this, a few of us have tried to tailor courses to particular groups of students. For myself, this has meant a philosophy of music course - now in its second iteration. I'm not any kind of expert in the area, but I know a bit of philosophy, have a history in music -I was an orchestral trumpet player, was one course short of a music performance major, and have performed with everything from brass quintets to rock bands to professional orchestras - and I'm a thoughtful guy, so I figured I could fake it. 

For the first assignment in this course, I ask them to select a performance of a piece of music to analyze in Aristotelian terms - a piece that generates an understanding conducive collective emotional reaction in the audience by way of the integration of all the elements, in such a way that nothing is superfluous.  

Well, really I have nothing to say in this post.  I just wanted to offer you this performance, by one GU student, that was selected by another as the topic of his analysis for the assignment.  

But What about the Children?

It is not very difficult to give undergraduates advice about where they might pursue graduate study without egregiously insulting large numbers of your professional colleagues. 

But then how to explain the ubiquity things like this not unrepresentative post by Spiros?*

In the context of a very nice post about an exceptional department, Professor Leiter claims: "The term 'pluralism'** has, alas, been debased to the point that everyone now knows it is usually a code word for 'crappy philosophy is welcome here'."

That's accurate, but a little too generous! For one thing, it understates the self-congratulation with which the term is deployed, and well as the ways in which it is wielded in order to deceive those most vulnerable in our profession.

I realize that many of our judgments of concerning philosophical work are somewhere between full-bore cognitive judgments and Kantian judgments of taste rather than judgments of things you happen to find agreeable. I mean, my distaste for a philosophical view or text is not the same as my distaste for bitter vegetables. And that's fine!

Guardian guidelines on how to talk about transgender people

We've recently had a NewAPPS post where it became clear in comments that many (presumably well-meaning) people are at loss when it comes to the appropriate terminology to use when talking about transgender people. (Interestingly, there is a recent post over at Feminist Philosophers on this very topic.) Conveniently, the Guardian just published an informative piece with very sensible guidelines on how to go about it (at least, they seem sensible to me, but I'd like to hear more from people more knowledgeable than me on this matter). For example, I often asked myself which pronoun to use when talking about a transperson's past, prior to her/his transition, and here is the answer:

Whether discussing a person's past, present or future, only use the correct pronouns for their gender. A person's gender generally does not change. Public presentation may change in transition and secondary sex characteristics may change with the aid of hormones and/or surgery, but one's sense of being either male or female is, in most cases, constant throughout life.

There is much more sensible advice in the article, so go check it out!

showing versus telling in language

There have been a number of discussions here at Newapps on various things that philosophical writing can legitimately aim for other than simply tell some truth or other. Here, I want to reflect on a distinction between telling and showing. In the simplest case, this distinction arises when we contrast being told some fact and seeing something for ourselves. So I can tell you about an apple, or show you one. I can tell you how to properly pull a sweep oar or show you.  And there are clearly important differences here.  For one, showing is "higher bandwidth".  That is, the amount of information transfered in a typical observation or physical engagement with an object is orders of magnitude more than the information stated in a claim - even a very complex, say book-length one.  And there may well be other important differences. One can talk about those in different ways - concrete embodiment in environmental-social context, phenomenal access, etc. I'm making no claims about what the difference is, merely pointing to the - I hope - uncontroversial claim that there is an important difference.  And I claim that this is a difference that makes an epistemological difference.  We can know more, know different things, have a different sort of understanding when something is shown to us than when we merely learn various facts about it.

My thought that something very like the showing/telling distinction can arise in language; that is, we can make use of language to show things to one another in ways that carry with them the positive features of material showing.  That's to say that there are non-fact-stating features of speech acts that have the upshot of something very like showing.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Gilberto Gil sings Bob Marley

Yesterday (February 6^th) would have been Bob Marley’s 69^th birthday. As it so happens, I spent a huge portion of my adolescence and early adulthood listening to Bob Marley. In fact, it is difficult to express how much his music has always been and still is an integral part of my life. Reggae in general, and Bob Marley in particular, is extremely popular in Brazil, and I’ve posted before some samples of Brazilian reggae (here, here, and here). But today, to celebrate Bob’s birthday, it is time to post a few songs from the 2002 tribute album to him by Gilberto Gil, Kaya N’Gan Daya (which phonetically reads as ‘Caia na gandaia’, something like ‘Go party’, and is of course a reference to Bob Marley's song 'Kaya'). Gil is a long-time Marley fan; his version of ‘No woman no cry’, ‘Não chore mais’ is a classic from his Realce album (1979), and received a new version in the 2002 album (I like the older version better).

It is hard for me to choose which songs from Kaya N’Gan Daya to post, simply because I’m such a huge fan of pretty much every existing Bob Marley song (and possibly the non-existing ones as well), but I’ll go with ‘Waiting in vain’ and ‘Positive vibrations’. Fellow Bob Marley fans, feel free to post your favorites in comments below!

Existentialist Star Wars (hat tip Andrew Sullivan)

Critical Reasoning Materials with a Dialectical Focus

Over on Facebook, Bijan Parsia asked a really great question.  

[... are there] any critical reasoning courses/textbooks out there that focus at the dialectical (or beyond) level rather than at the argument level. My recollection is that they are very focused at the individual argument level with an unhealthy focus on fallacies rather than thinking very much about overall cognitive strategies (esp. in group settings) or other goals than the cognitive. I recall getting a lot of that from phil of science classes and pedagogy and (interestingly) online dissuasion analysis (see the "poisonous people" video floating about, or even troll bestiaries), but not so much from critical reasoning (which often was shoehorned into a symbolic logic class).

While I haven't taught critical reasoning in a few years, I also can't recall having run across anything like what Bijan is looking for here. But I don't think it's difficult to see why materials of the sort would be of great value. In fact, I can see how they would be very helpful not just in the 'critical reasoning' context, but more broadly as part of the kind of instruction might give in philosophical process in a lot of our classes. 

And with that, I throw the question out to the rest of you. Do you know of materials of this sort? Have you developed something of your own that you'd like to share?

The politics always look clearer on the other side of the fence.

This is just a short note to express my hope that all the celebrities and ordinary folks celebrating the two former members of pussy riot will recall that there are political prisoners rotting in US prisons as well.  This is not to criticize TFMPR - I don't really understand the issues behind the split, but that aside, I take it that their primary moral responsibility is to stand up to abuses in Russia. On the other hand, while there is nothing at all wrong with cheering on these efforts from the safe Brooklyn sidelines, this is not the primary moral responsibility of someone in the US.  For those who would like to learn more about US political prisoners, there are quite a few excellent resources Here

Reimbursement Issues for Junior People

I would like to call attention to a problem that may not be salient to university administrators or senior philosophers: Junior philosophers tend to be rather poor and in debt. They may have been paying for tuition and living expenses for five years or more (sometimes they have also been paying for kids in addition to that). Why should that concern you? Because (to mention just one issue) every so often you invite a junior philosopher to give a talk at a department colloquium or a conference. That's really great. Keep doing that. However, you may want to reconsider the whole reimbursement business. When I am asked to give an invited talk, and you promise to reimburse me, that's super-nice of you. If the reimbursement doesn't arrive right away (or occasionally never arrives), my kid won't starve. But I am not a junior person.

Annals of obfuscation, volume 4501

This is how you obfuscate, ladies and gentlemen: "There's a good reason for that, says Rex Ramsier, vice provost at the University of Akron, where Gallagher is teaching one class. "Institutions have to be very mindful that if we simply tried to staff every course with full-time faculty that have full benefits, the cost of higher education at any institution would go up 30 to 40 percent potentially," he says. "The public's not going to accept that."

Notice the conflation of instructional labor costs and total costs (including admin salaries, fixed costs (building construction and upkeep, etc), which go to the bottom line of the school, and "cost" to "the public."

There's another equivocation there, between the public qua set of individual consumers (in which case we're talking about "price" to them -- tuition and fees) and public qua set of individual taxpayers. 

Why is this important? A public uni could recoup its increased labor costs by two means. 

What Eric said, plus this song

Eric Schliesser's post HERE. In praise of the efforts of Profs. Hardcastle, DesAutels, and Fehr (as well as the good people at Boulder's philosophy department who are working to improve their climate) the following:*

*(1) Apologies for whatever commercial shows up at the twelve second mark yellow bar; the only add-free version was a pretty bad cover. And who can begrudge Daniel Johnston a little bit of money at this point? You can hit the x and remove the add. (2) This is always a good song to listen to in honor of the monster slayers on the rare occasions when human depravity** takes a solid blow. One might end up being a bit like this, but that's O.K.

A statement from the CU Boulder philosophy department "climate committee"

Here at Feminist Philosophers.

The Funny Thing About Colorado

One thing that attracted my attention in the Colorado situation was the university’s use of the APA’s Committee on the Status of Women Campus Site Visit program. Judging from the description of the program on the Committee’s website, campus visits are normally advisory. Departments request site visits in which a team investigates climate issues, with the purpose of “offering practical suggestions on how to improve the climate for women.” (The Committee also says: “The team will be attentive to issues beyond gender, e.g., race, sexuality, disability, and will make an effort to collect quantitative data on these groups.” Apparently, no practical suggestions, though, about these matters.)

In this particular case, the context was rather different. It is clear that the Department, Dean, and Provost must have decided that they needed to know and do something about the spate of complaints from Department members (including students) to Colorado’s Office of Discrimination and Harassment. So the advice being sought was not general, but highly specific. In other words, the investigation of climate was not motivated by general concern but by a specific bad situation.

Is jury duty a trolley type problem? What should one do?

Once again I've been called in for Jury Duty.

It's nearly a priori that they won't impanel me for death penalty or war-on-drugs type cases, since I'm up front about exercising my right to jury nullify in the case of unjust laws or state sanctioned murder.*

But I have no idea what to do with respect to someone who has both broken a just law and who should not be on the streets.

How can anyone in good conscience send another human being to an American prison?

But as a juror the only choice they give you is sending the person to prison or releasing them. And many people are too predatory to be allowed to operate in normal society. 

I've got two weeks until I have to go in. Any advice about from people agree with me that this is a genuine dilemma** and/or have some experience negotiating the system would be greatly appreciated.

How to deal with a journal rejection?

Recently, I received two journal rejections within 4 days; it must be some kind of record. I could of course despair and take it personally, which is what I used to do at early stages of my career. But now, with sufficient publication success in the past to assure me that I am not a hopeless case when it comes to publications (or so I hope!), I try to look at rejections from a more positive, constructive angle. Readers who were interested in this post of mine of a few weeks ago, on how to go about selecting journals to submit your papers to, may find my current thoughts on how to deal with these two rejections useful.

The first of the two rejections was somewhat frustrating. It came from a very fine, highly selective journal, but it was based on only one referee report, and a referee who seemed to misunderstand the main claim of the paper quite severely. (S/he identified an equivocation that I’m pretty sure is simply not there.) But at the very least, the report suggested that I hadn’t been clear enough concerning the main claims of the paper. The truth is that this paper defends a somewhat controversial thesis; the referee commended the paper as well written and well structured, but seemed simply not to find the main thesis particularly appealing.

Important Feminist Philosophers post on Colorado

Many of the issues discussed on our thread are carefully addressed there. Link.