New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Pernicious Truth and Power

A few days ago, I used the lack of historical figures in its top-20-pernicious list to propose that Leiter’s poll about pernicious philosophers said a lot about the politics of academic philosophy, and not so much about anything else.  “Pernicious,” in other words, is a political designation.  In the comments, Jon Cogburn wonders:

“You had me up until the historical construct bit. Aren't we in danger of presupposing that something can't both be a political act of boundary policing *and* a statement with a truth value?  I mean I think that it's objectively false that Heidegger is a pernicious philosopher. I also think that calling one's colleagues charlatans in public forums is objectively pernicious. Maybe I [am] trying to police a boundary here, but aren't some boundaries objectively worth policing?”

This is a fair question; let me try to pursue and answer in three slightly different ways.

Adam Silver banning Donald Sterling (hat-tips Graham Harman and Rod Dreher)

Sometimes it really is great to see the hammer of justice descend. Can you imagine what could have happened if Mark Emmert had helped himself to whatever this guy's been eating?

This being said, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar  here makes a pretty good argument that nobody involved should be doing a victory dance.

Why should we grade final exams?

Are students aware that most of their professors can accurately predict their final grades prior to the final exam or paper? Is this just hubris on my part, or do people in the biz long enough get very good at this?

If it's not hubris, then it raises a genuine practical ethics problem. If I already know what the student is going to make, why do I feel morally obligated to grade the paper? I can't figure this out.

I'm clearly obligated by prudence to grade the papers as the LSU hair and teeth men* would be very unhappy with me for not doing so. But would they be right to be unhappy?

Maybe the problem is that if the students knew I wasn't grading their final papers, then they wouldn't do the work. So perhaps not doing the grading would involve deception? This seems pretty weak to me though. I could just not say anything one way or the other, or honestly say that I might** grade the person's exam or paper. Knowing their exams might be graded would motivate them enough.

A few students want comments on their work and we owe them that, but the overwhelming majority of them don't. So why not just hold onto the papers and grade them later if a student wants comments?

Is the Barwise/Etchemendy system unsound?

I might be being an idiot here, but I can't for the life of me figure out how the following inference is disallowed in the Barker-Plummer/Barwise/Etchemendy textbook:

1. Ex(Rax)

2. ExEx (Rxx)   1, E introduction

This is clearly invalid, because there are anti-symmetric relations (note that if it were valid one can prove ExEx (Rxx) from ExEy (Rxy), and that ExEx(Rxx) has the same truth conditions as Ex(Rxx)).

Intuitively, Existential Introduction should be restricted so that one cannot replace a name or eigenvariable with a variable that is already bound in the sentence. But I can't find this restriction in Barker-Plummer/Barwise/Etchemendy. My friend couldn't find it in the old red Mates book either, so we think it's not unlikely that we're both missing something obvious.

I turned to the soundness proof in Barker-Plummer/Barwise/Etchemendy and they leave the case of Existential Introduction as an excercise to the reader. It has a little star next to it showing that it is a difficult problem. I'm wondering if it's impossible. But, again, it's more likely that I'm missing something, so if anyone who teaches from the book could take a look my introductory logic students would appreciate it.

If fighting climate change denial is like fighting creationism, how do we do it?

Helen De Cruz has some excellent suggestions for how to talk to creationists given that neither debate nor denouncement are likely to be productive.  She describes the way in which a religious person who is not a creationist can speak to another religious person who is a creationist, e.g., by pointing out that Biblical literalism is a recently emerged approach, one that may be impossible to apply consistently, and for that reason among others it may not be thoroughly used by anyone.

This article by Dan Kahan suggests that disbelief in human-caused climate change is like belief in creationism in this respect: What people "believe" about each doesn't reflect what they know, but rather expresses who they are.  This supports the thesis that providing evidence for creationism isn't likely to change minds and that providing evidence for climate change isn't likely to change minds, either.

But what is the climate change equivalent, where we speak to people from their own perspective as Helen proposes that we do for religious people who are creationists?

On Pernicious Philosophers

There’s a discussion going on over at Leiter about the results of his latest poll: which modern philosopher had the “most pernicious influence” on philosophy?  Heidegger was the strong #1, both in terms of the number of people who hated him, and the intensity of their hatred.  This doesn’t seem that surprising, given that Leiter’s readers, um, lean analytic and since Leiter took their Derrida option off the table.

Much more interesting, it seems to me, is the historical skew of the results.  Most of the figures in the top 20 are 20^th century philosophers, and all but three (Descartes, Berkeley, and Kant) are 19^th or 20^th century (and it wouldn’t be conceptually wrong to put Kant in with the 19c).  Does this reflect poor historical training?  Do influential but controversial positions get absorbed into the ‘mainstream?’

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Palco'

This week I am posting ‘Palco’, a 1981 song by Gilberto Gil. The other day I was reminded of this song and then showed it to my daughters; they now love it, especially the part at the beginning that goes ‘my soul smells like talcum power, like a baby’s buttocks’ (‘minha alma cheira a talco, como bumbum de bebê'). It’s a great song, even if betrays its 1980s-ness in the instrumental overproduction. But it’s upbeat and lively, so perfect to put ya’ll in the mood for the weekend.

(BMoF will be on recess next week.)

Commenting on the Blog

Should be working again!  Thanks for everyone's patience while we've been having problems with Typepad.

More on the Fermi paradox (from David Wallace).

In a comment to the previous post on the Fermi Paradox, David Wallace wrote this terrific exposition of it.  I agree with almost everything he says, so I will save my own quibbles for a comment.  David writes:

Just to clarify the force of the Fermi paradox (which is intended to rest on quantitative factors, not just a general "where are they?"), here are the main basically-uncontroversial premises that get it going:

1. The Galaxy contains an awful lot of stars, and plenty of them have planets. There are 100+ billion stars in the Galaxy, and in our neighbourhood, around 5% of them are G-type stars like the Sun in non-binary systems. Our best theories of planet formation make planets look generic, and the current era of exoplanetology backs that up. I think it would be very hard now to argue for fewer than several hundred million Earth-type planets, and that's almost certainly a significant underestimate.
2. The Galaxy is much older than it is large. The Galaxy is something like 100,000 light years across. But it's nearly ten billion years old, which is to say that light could have travelled across the Galactic disk and back some 50,000 times.
3. Slow interstellar travel (c.0-1%-1% of light speed) is technologically possible. Pioneer 10 is already a starship, travelling at (1/30,000) of the speed of light, and that was by accident. There are a quite large number of designs and plans for spacecraft capable of reaching between 0.1% and 10% of light speed. That we are unlikely to build any of them any time soon - the mission time is too long and the cost is currently rather painful - isn't my point; the point is that this kind of speed is borderline possible with *current technology*, let alone the extrapolated capabilities of much-more-advanced civilisations. (Contrast relativistic starflight, which doesn't violate any known physical principle but isn't remotely possible with any feasible technology we can think of now; contrast faster-than-light starflight, which actually looks *physically* impossible.)
4.  Self-replicating intelligent machinery is technologically possible. We have an existence proof for this: humans. (I guess I can't absolutely rule out some strange principle of emergent engineering which makes it physically impossible to make a slow-moving space probe capable of carrying machines (humans or not) that can reproduce the probe even though self-replicating intelligence and probes are separately possible, but it seems ad hoc.) Given 2-4, it is technologically possible for a civilisation to send physical vehicles to every solar system in the Galaxy in a timescale *much* less than the age of the Galaxy. (Err on the pessimistic side: assume 0.1% light-speed propulsion and a 1000-year turnaround time; you still get an expansion wave moving at 0.05% of lightspeed, enough to span the galaxy in 200 million years, or 2% of its current age. Why might a civilisation do so? Several plausible reasons: (i) colonisation. As Allen Olley points out, this isn't a plausible way to move your existing population (I don't really agree with Eric's resource-based argument for colonisation) but it is a plausible way to spread your civilisation, or your species, across the Galaxy. (ii) exploration. Robot probes is a really great way to explore space, as we've found ourselves. (See the Wiley paper cited above.) (iii) malevolence or prudence. People very often react by noting that each of (i)-(iii) is speculative, and maybe intelligent civilisations don't tend to do that kind of thing. Fair enough. But the crucial issue in the Fermi paradox is that *it only has to happen once*. And unless life *basically never* evolves, or intelligence *basically never* evolves, or civilisations *basically always* die off before they get to the stage of exploring the galaxy, there ought to have been so many civilisations that it seems implausible that not even one would do this. (Note that I'm pretty sure *we* would do it, if we got to the point at which it was reasonably inexpensive.) An illustration: suppose life only turns up on 1% of earth-type planets, and that intelligence only evolves in 1% of biospheres, and that 99% of civilisations wipe themselves out through war or resource exhaustion before reaching the stage when it's feasible (indeed relatively cheap) to spread across the Galaxy. Then, on a pretty conservative estimate of 1 billion habitable planets, there should have been 1000 suitable civilisations so far in Galactic history. Yet *not even one* decided to try the explore-the-galaxy strategy? Things get several orders of magnitude worse when you consider that the strategy works perfectly well over intergalactic distances too, and that there are hundreds or thousands of galaxies in realistic exploration range. Could they be here but not be noticed? Well, it's quite hard to hide a decelerating starship, but maybe none happen to have turned up recently. There could be all manner of things hiding in the Solar System. But again: does *every single* civilisation behave that way? It seems unmotivated to suppose so. (Unless there is a single hegemonic species or coalition that requires it coercively.) I think the force of the Paradox is this: yes, for any given civilisation we can imagine reasons why we could be completely oblivious of it despite it being millions of years older than us and quite capable of having spread across the Galaxy. But unless technological civilisations are fantastically unlikely to arise on a per-planet basis, there should have been such an enormous number of them by now that it becomes really implausible that *none of them* have done so.

Fighting creationism through debate is pointless; how then can we do it?

A friend of mine is doing her DPhil in Oxford. She's American, and out of term she goes back to her home in middle America. She recently went to see the newly refurbished museum in her home town. When she was looking at the displays on human evolution, a museum guard, who had been observing her, suddenly said "So, what side are you on: the Bible or evolution?" Whereupon my friend replied "What do you mean what side am I on? This is not a football game, you know".

I am deeply troubled by the incipient creationism, which treats biblical literalism as a serious intellectual contender to scientific inquiry. I want my children to grow up with normal biology textbooks, not with Of Pandas and People. If creationists win their lobbying efforts to make creationism mainstream in schools and the public sphere, that is a loss for everyone (including the creationists). Debates don't seem to do any instrumental good. If we are not going to fight creationism through debates, how can we - as public intellectuals - ensure that creationism doesn't encroach even further upon our schools and public life?

SB 1391 and the Criminalization of Pregnancy in Tennessee

A petition is circulating online asking Gov. Bill Haslam to veto SB 1391.  The bill would modify the Tennessee criminal code to allow for criminal assault charges to be brought against women who use illegal narcotics while pregnant, should their drug use lead to harm or death for the fetus or child.  These charges carry a penalty of up to 15 years in prison.  But the bill is so badly written, it could affect all pregnant women in Tennessee, whether or not they use drugs, should something go wrong during their pregnancy.  In effect, SB 1391 threatens to criminalize pregnancy in Tennessee. 

Policy analysts and political commentators across the world have voiced their concerns with SB 1391, arguing that it could have far-reaching consequences (Reality Check, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, and NPR).  Even some pro-life groups recognize that SB 1391 could incentivize abortions for women who use drugs, since women risk up to 15 years in prison by continuing their pregnancy, especially if they are unable to access drug treatment programs (All Our Lives).  

If we really want to support the flourishing of children in Tennessee, then we need to move beyond the pro-life/pro-choice framework to seek reproductive justice for everyone, based on “the right to have children, not have children, and to parent the children we have in safe and healthy environments” (SisterSong).  For example, rather than punishing women who use illegal drugs while pregnant, we should be extending the Safe Harbor Act to support women who use either prescription drugs or non-prescription drugs to get the treatment they need, and to stay clean for the sake of their families and themselves. 

Talk like Shakespeare day

Mark, 'tis 'Talk Liketh Shakespeare Day!' Then come, good fellows, and let us dream of dragons and finless fish, take but a moment and speak of clip-winged griffins and a ramping cat. The youth of England are on fire, and though men may sleep, some have knives with edges. Such words as his delight the eyes and fill the mind as the secret parts of fortune come to a handsome gentleman, as a stratagem to its quarter returns an ill-shaped fish with magnanimity! If you disagree, you are a stuffed cloak-bag of guts, a bolting-hutch of beastliness!  (h/t David Hoyt)

 

Things not to do at conferences

Have you done any of the following or had them done to you?

1. Changing your paper after receiving written versions of the comments, so that the comments no longer make sense (Eric Schliesser on this HERE).
2. If you are a senior European philosopher, instead of asking a question during the Q&A, just telling the junior speaker that only a fool would believe their premises.*
3. Not turning your comments in ahead of time, so the speaker cannot prepare a response, and then in your comments trying to eviscerate the speaker's paper (hypothetical imperative- if you are not going to turn your comments in on time, then either show interesting things that follow from the speaker's claims, or show that something interesting is left of the speaker's claims after your criticism, or opt out and don't deliver them).
4. Only attend your talk (this one and the next three are courtesy of Melissa Ridley Elmes, hat-tip Daily Nous).
5. Attend other talks but grandstand during the Q&As in a way that is not as bad as the senior-European-philosopher malfeseance, but still manifestly unhelpful to the presenter (see PrawfBlawg for good Q&A guidelines).
6. Go overtime on your paper so that other speakers are shorted.
7. Act radically different towards other scholars, depending upon where they currently are in the academic hierarchy.

Radical Philosophy and the Free Alabama Movement

Last summer, thousands of prisoners in California launched a 60-day hunger strike to protest and transform oppressive policies in the California Department of Corrections.  One member of the organizing team called their strike action a “multi-racial, multi–regional Human Rights Movement to challenge torture.”

This weekend, another prisoner-led human rights movement is gaining momentum in Alabama.  The Free Alabama Movement (FAM) seeks to analyze, resist, and transform prison slavery from within the Prison Industrial Complex. 

Both of these movements challenge us, as philosophers and as people, to interrogate the meaning of slavery, torture, human rights, and political action.  What does it mean to struggle for one’s human rights as an “offender” in the world’s first prison society?  What can philosophers and political theorists learn from the example of incarcerated intellectuals and political actors whose everyday lives are situated at the dangerous intersection of racism, economic exploitation, sexual violence, and civil death?  What would it mean to respect the specificity of the Free Alabama Movement, and at the same time to recognize that even the freedom of non-incarcerated philosophers may be bound up with the freedom of Alabama?  What is freedom, after all?  What – and where – and who – is Alabama?

First earth-sized exoplanet found in habitable zone.

Astronomers have found the first  Earth-sized planet located in the habitable zone of a star — the right distance away to host liquid water and possibly life.  Story here.  The system is only about 500 light years away.

 

This of course raises the issue of the Fermi paradox:  if there is even a tiny chance of intelligent life arising on such a planet, and many of the stars around which we would expect to find such planets are billions of years older than the sun, then why hasn't some intelligent species already colonized our galaxy in such a way that we would have observed it?

To my mind, there are only a few premises one can plausibly deny that give rise to the paradox.    

One is that there is any substantial chance  at all of life arising at all on a planet with conditions more or less like ours.   I admit that it is possible for this premise to be false, but I don't begin to see how that could be.  Given the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone, let alone our local cluster, the needed probability here would be so tiny.

Deleuze on Learning and Skill

When it comes to learning, Deleuze argues that “it is so difficult to say how someone learns.” (DR 23). More dramatically, Deleuze adds, there “is something amorous – but also something fatal – about all education.” (DR 23). In learning to drive a stick shift car, for example, it is not sufficient simply to be told by the instructor to “do as I do,” or to follow the rule as they have stated and/or exemplified it in their actions. Learning is not a matter of following a rule or of doing what someone else does; to the contrary, what one encounters in learning to drive a stick shift car is the task of connecting various elements – namely, the hand, foot, clutch, accelerator, slope of the road, etc.—and of connecting them systematically so that the foot releases from the clutch right when the accelerator is being pressed, etc. Similarly in learning to swim it is a matter of establishing connections between the various parts and motions of one’s body with the resistance, currents, and buoyancy of the water. As Deleuze puts it, “To learn to swim is to conjugate the distinctive points of our bodies with the singular points of the Objective Idea in order to form a problematic field.” (DR 165)

In clarifying what Deleuze means by conjugating the distinctive points “in order to form a problematic field” will offer, I argue, what I take to be a helpful perspective from which to understand Merleau-Ponty’s example of the expert organist as well as Jason Stanley’s recent work on skill.

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Wave'

I’m in San Diego at the moment for the Pacific APA. Naturally, California rhymes with sea and sun, and in the absence of a California-themed Brazilian song worth posting (of course, there’s this silly one by Lulu Santos), I had to think of the classic ‘Wave’, composed by Tom Jobim and perhaps best known in the João Gilberto version. But I’m also posting it in the original instrumental version, by Jobim himself, and a live version with Jobim and Herbie Hancock. In other words, plenty of choice for picky ears...

The Gourmet Ranking and Gender: How Can It Improve?

I noted in another post the apparent difference in impact of the Philosophical Gourmet ranking of one's PhD granting institution on tenure-track placement according to gender, following up on posts elsewhere (here, here, and here). In this post I want to follow up on a speculation that I made in comments that the apparent difference in impact is due not to a difference in the way prestige impacts women and men on the job market, but due to a difference in the way that the Philosophical Gourmet tracks prestige for areas that have a higher proportion of men versus areas that have a higher proportion of women. 

You may already be familiar with work by Kieren Healy that shows that the Philosophical Gourmet ranking especially favors particular specialties: "It's clear that not all specialty areas count equally for overall reputation... Amongst the top twenty departments in 2006, MIT and the ANU had the narrowest range, relatively speaking, but their strength was concentrated in areas that are very strongly associated with overall reputation---in particular, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Language, and Philosophy of Mind."

On evolutionary biology and giving religion a "pass"

Last week, Jerry Coyne gave a talk at my university, UC Davis.  Coyne is one of the "new atheists," people who believe that "religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises" (Simon Hooper).  In his talk, he argued that science and religion were incompatible, focusing on evolution and religion in particular.  When pressed afterward, however, he seemed to grant that not all forms of supernatural-believing religions are incompatible with science; deism, for example, is not incompatible with science.  However, he then wanted to know why those of us who were pressing him – people who think that the theory of evolution is well-supported and are not ourselves religious – were giving religion a "pass."  We would not, he suggested, give a similar pass to beliefs in UFOs or fairies or tarot cards.  And that is probably true.  So is there a difference?

Now, admittedly, part of my reasons are pragmatic.  I happen to think that religious believers who accept the theory of evolution are our best allies in the fight to keep good science education in public schools.  That's because they show people that they don't have to give up their deeply held beliefs in order to accept views about common descent and evolutionary processes like natural selection and random drift.  They don't force a choice, a choice that religion would most likely win most of the time.

News about PhilPapers

PhilPapers will be moving to a partial subscription model.   Access to their resources from computers on campuses of institutions will be limited unless the institution pays for a subscription.   The features that go behind the paywall will be phased in over time.     Access to individuals from home will remain free.

Details can be found here

Ancient Rome Open City to Refugees: Antique Republics and Inclusive Citizenship

A story in the Britsh press about archaeological investigations in Rome that suggest the city is about 150 years oldler than its legendary foundation in 753 BCE reminds me of the apparent characteristic quality of early Rome, its openness to refugees, vagrants, and everyone in search of a new home.  At least this is the impression we get from Livy's History of Rome, and it makes sense given that Rome did keep getting bigger as as a city and greater in the reach of its power through alliances ansd aborption. We can also think of how the foundational mythology, we see in Virgil's Aeneid, represents Rome as the product of refugees from Troy.

The *Apparent* Impact of Gourmet Rank on Women and Men Seeking Tenure-Track Jobs

Marcus Arvan at the Philosophers' Cocoon posted sample data from the new appointments site at PhilJobs, which is discussed in a great post by Helen de Cruz here at New APPS. In comments at de Cruz's post and in a new post Arvan discusses the impact of Gourmet ranking on women and men seeking tenure-track jobs. I wanted to follow up on Arvan's post by looking at the full set of data currently available at PhilJobs. I did this in part because I knew that the sample Arvan collected was skewed on gender, due to an earlier analysis on gender I performed for a comment on a post at the Philosophy Smoker. With that convoluted introduction aside, here is a summary of the findings, in keeping with the findings by Arvan: the gourmet rank of one's PhD granting institution appears to have a greater impact on men seeking tenure-track jobs than on women seeking tenure-track jobs. Although I cannot yet speak to the source of this discrepancy, I (like Arvan) find the difference troubling. I welcome comments on the source of the difference below, although any comments will be subject to moderation. Let's look more closely at the data (Note: the linked spreadsheet was updated on May 14th):

What Kelp Remembers

Weird Tales, one of the best and oldest horror and dark fantasy magazines, has just launched a new series of ultra-short flash fiction (under 500 words), Flashes of Weirdness. To inaugurate the series, they've chosen a piece of mine -- which is now my second publication in speculative fiction.

My philosophical aim in the story -- What Kelp Remembers -- is to suggest that on a creationist or simulationist cosmology, the world might serve a very different purpose than we're normally inclined to think.

At some point, I want to think more about the merit of science fiction as a means of exploring metaphysical and cosmological issues of this sort. I suspect that fiction has some advantages over standard expository prose as a philosophical tool in this area, but I'm not satisfied that I really understand why.

[Cross-posted at The Splintered Mind.]

A good year for the Hobbesians among us

Two new books argue that pre-agricultural societies were far more Hobbesian than Rousseauean.

Read the Spectator review of Ian Morris’ War: What is it Good For? The Role of Conflict in Civilisation, from Primates to Robots here, which includes this:

If sometime around 7a.m. on 1 July 1916, as you waited to go over the top somewhere along the Somme, you had been tapped on the shoulder and told that you’d never had it so good, you might well have been mildly surprised at the news, but you would have been wrong to be. It would seem from the growing evidence of graves that Stone Age man had something like a 10–20 per cent chance of meeting a violent death, and if you factor in the anthropological evidence of surviving 20th-century Stone Age societies, then, as Morris puts it, Stone Age life was ‘10–20 times as violent as the tumultuous world of medieval  Europe and 300–600 times as bad as mid-20th-century Europe.’

If I understand right, Morris is building off of Stephen Pinker's earlier research. Napolean Chagnon has just released his book about the Yanomamo that provides some more contemporary evidence.

Hiring, academic pedigree, and exclusion: Is going for pedigree racist and classist?

On the basis of this year’s partial hiring data, Marcus Arvan notes that the majority of tenure track hires (a whopping 88%) are from people of Leiter-ranked programs. Only 12% of hires are from people of unranked programs. Also, 37% of all tenure track hires come from just 5 schools, the Leiter top 5 list - this is amazing if one ponders it, and one may wonder at the direction philosophy is going to, if most of its future tenured workforce comes from just a few select programs.

This has caused a lot of debate: why would people go to grad school in unranked programs at all? Why attend an unranked program if you can’t get into a highly ranked one? But what is often overlooked are the many factors, such as class and ethnic background, may contribute to someone not getting (or, as I will examine in more detail below), even applying to get into top programs. In fact, going for pedigree may be a particularly effective way to screen out people who come from poorer backgrounds and of different ethnicities.

Philosophers Carnival #162 is. . .

HERE.

Lot's of great stuff. Epistemology and ethics form a strong plurality this month. There are two by newappsers and one by friend of the blog Joshua Knobe and one cool interview with friend of the blog Roy Cook.

Very happy to see Aesthetics for Birds' Christy Mag Uidhir interviewing Cook about his Lego work. My second punkrockmonday three years ago post was dedicated to his jawdroppingly awesome Lego building skills. Uidhir's interview is pretty awesome and has some more recent of Cook's work.

[punkrockmonday #29] Kommunizm (Egor Litov) - Stop the Rolling Stones; Yanka Dyagileva - On a Rainy Day; Dean Reed - Elizabeth; Alina Simone - My Love is a Mountain

While lecturing on Tristan Garcia's chapter on history today I couldn't help but remember  this essay by Adam Curtis on music and youth rejection in the Soviet Union.

Curtis explores the psychic fallout of the widespread failure of communism to deliver on the very promises that legitimated it (e.g. we keep breaking all these eggs and nobody I know is ever going to get that omelet).  He explores how the widespread recognition of civilizational hypocrisy lead to despair and a general collapse of belief in anything. His main thesis is that the same thing is happening in neo-liberal regimes now.

This seems plausible to me, both in the European Union and the United States. Consider the latter. With their constitutionally affirmed right to buy and sell politicians, Shelden Adelson and the brothers Koch are very close to becoming nothing less than our version of late Soviet era gerontocracy (Brezhnev/Andropov/Chernenko, etc.). To see what happens when American politicians are commodities, look at West Virginia. This kind of thing is going to get much worse.

The real problem is that these people (successful Soviet apparatchiks and our 1%ers) are very good at gaming the system so that they land on top. But, for various reasons, the system is not very good at putting people on top who will be very good at running things. And at some point the population starts to see through the relentless propaganda about how great everything is becoming.* And then, according to Curtis, rock and roll ceases being rock and roll. It becomes phony.

cool search field on PhilJobs

In the discussion at the phil smoker on the philjobs appointments page a lot of interesting issues are raised, including:

• whether one should put one's adjuncting jobs on it,
• how post docs seemed to only be available to people from the most prestigious schools,
• the extent to which one can infer affirmative action from the page,
• the extent to which one can infer chances of a tenure track job right out of graduate school from the page,
• the extent to which deans are or are not driven by the desire to make hires from more prestigious schools,
• how many post docs might already have accepted job offers which are now deferred and not on the page,
• the ethical obligations of everybody involved in a department with persistantly low placement numbers.

One thing that didn't get any discussion is the fact that there's a search field on the appointments page. It's on the the right hand side with the word "Go" after it. You can search by area and tell how many people out of the (at present) 206 people who reported their hiring to the site got jobs with given AOSs or AOCs, e.g.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Luciana Souza

BMoF's guest of this week is Luciana Souza, a Brazilian singer who is surprisingly little known in Brazil, having been based in the US for many years now. (Indeed, I discovered her recently thanks to the recommendation of a BMoF reader.) And yet, she has been receiving wide recognition for her work, including a number of Grammy nominations. One of the remarkable features of her career is that she continues to record classics from Brazilian music, while also making quite a splash in the more ‘traditional’ jazz scene. I’m quite impressed with how versatile Luciana is proving to be, being such an accomplished interpreter both of American standards and Brazilian classics.

Indeed, last year she released TWO albums (check here for a promotional video of both): one is the third installment of her Duos series, all of which containing nothing but Brazilian songs; the other is called The Book of Chet, and includes classics of the ‘Chet Baker sings’ repertoire. (Having spent a considerable portion of my youth listening to these Chet Baker recordings, I was particularly pleased to discover the Chet album…) Both albums received Grammy nominations, in different categories (Latin jazz and jazz vocal, respectively). 

From Duos III, I’m posting ‘Doralice’, made famous through the João Gilberto classic version, and 'Lamento Sertanejo' (the very same song of last week's BMoF) in a medley with Djavan's beautiful 'Maçã do rosto'; from The Book of Chet I’m posting ‘The thrill is gone’ (my favorite from the album is ‘I get along without you very well’, but sadly I couldn’t find it on youtube). This should be more than enough to convince everyone of Luciana's exceptional talent.

Numerical cognition as a social phenomenon

A few weeks ago I had a post on different ways of counting infinities; the main point was that two of the basic principles that hold for counting finite collections cannot be both transferred over to the case of measuring infinite collections. Now, as a matter of fact I am equally (if not more) interested in the question of counting finite collections at the most basic level, both from the point of view of the foundations of mathematics (‘but what are numbers?’) and from the point of view of how numerical cognition emerges in humans. In fact, to me, these two questions are deeply related.

In a lecture I’ve given a couple of times to non-academic, non-philosophical audiences (so-called ‘outreach lectures’) called ‘What are numbers for people who do not count?’, my starting point is the classic Dedekindian question, ‘What are numbers?’ But instead of going metaphysical, I examine people’s actual counting habits (including among cultures that have very few number words). The idea is that Benacerraf’s (1973) challenge of how we can have epistemic access to these elusive entities, numbers, should be addressed in an empirically informed way, including data from developmental psychology and from anthropological studies (among others). There is a sense in which all there is to explain is the socially enforced practice of counting, which then gives rise to basic arithmetic (from there on, to the rest of mathematics). And here again, Wittgenstein was on the right track with the following observation in the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics:

This is how our children learn sums; for one makes them put down three beans and then another three beans and then count what is there. If the result at one time were 5, at another 7 (say because, as we should now say, one sometimes got added, and one sometimes vanished of itself), then the first thing we said would be that beans were no good for teaching sums. But if the same thing happened with sticks, fingers, lines and most other things, that would be the end of all sums.

“But shouldn’t we then still have 2 + 2 = 4?” – This sentence would have become unusable. (RFM, § 37)