New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Working for The Man: Reflections on the Hobby Lobby Opinion

Suspecting that a disappointing Court decision is coming doesn’t make it any better when it arrives, as did the Hobby Lobby opinion this morning, in which a 5-4 majority (led by Justice Alito) said that it violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1992 to require a “closely held corporation” (“family-owned,” but expect lots of litigation; apparently some 90% of American corporations may qualify!) to purchase a health insurance policy that provided free contraception to which the owners of that corporation object on religious grounds (nice summary here).  There is a substantial silver lining, which is that the Court seems to endorse an opt-out like the one provided for non-profits: certify that you object to providing contraception coverage, and you don’t pay for that part of the plan.  Either the insurer or the government does.  Accordingly, today’s ruling would also appear to  pre-emptively resolve (see also here) the next round of religious objections to the ACA, where some of those non-profits contend that even signing the paperwork saying they object to providing contraception somehow violates their religious beliefs, because signing the paperwork means they start a process the end of which is contraception (so would employing women at all, but never mind that, apparently).

The Future of the European Polity III: Policies (part 1)

Discussing the ideal policies of the European Union raises a kind of controversy not so apparent when discussing the idea of Europe and political structures, since people who agree on these may have very divergent views on the relative merits of capitalist and socialist economics, social liberalism and conservatism, and so on. In any case, policies are going to the product of the middle ground in European Union nations at that time. We are certainly very far from a model of European government in which there are sharp shifts according to temporary electoral majorities, and as I've explained in previous posts, I believe a more consensual model is appropriate at the European level, compared with the national level. 

Philosophers who work outside of academia – Part 3: Transferrable skills and concrete advice

This is part 3 of a 3-part series of interviews with philosophers who left academia right after grad school or in some cases later. See part 1 to see what jobs they held, and part 2 on how they evaluate their jobs. This part will focus on the transferrable skills of academics. 

The burning question of academics who want to leave academia is: What transferrable skills can they bring to the private sector? The responses of the seven people I interviewed clearly indicate that the skills that are transferrable are broad and fairly high-level.

Searle on formal methods in philosophy of language

Most readers will have had at least some exposure to John Searle’s interview by Tim Crane, which was published earlier this week. It was then hotly debated in the philosophical blogosphere at large (in particular at the Leiter Reports). Together with Peter Unger’s interview published roughly around the same time, it seems that the ‘old guard’ is on a Quixotesque crusade to chastise the younger crowd for the allegedly misguided, sorrow state of current philosophy. Now, I do think there is some truth to be found in what Searle says about the role of formal modeling in the philosophy of language, but his objections do not seem to apply at least to a growing body of research in formal semantics/philosophy of language. Moreover, it is not clear whether his own preferred methodology (judging from his seminal work on speech acts etc.) in fact does justice to what he himself views as the primary goal of philosophical analyses of language.

Here are the crucial passages from the interview (all excerpts from the passage posted by Leiter), the main bits in bold:

Well, what has happened in the subject I started out with, the philosophy of language, is that, roughly speaking, formal modeling has replaced insight. My own conception is that the formal modeling by itself does not give us any insight into the function of language.

Any account of the philosophy of language ought to stick as closely as possible to the psychology of actual human speakers and hearers. And that doesn’t happen now. What happens now is that many philosophers aim to build a formal model where they can map a puzzling element of language onto the formal model, and people think that gives you an insight. …

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Cinema big butts'

Last week I had a post up celebrating Chico Buarque’s birthday, and among other things I mentioned his relationship with young singer Thaís Gulin (I’m not sure if they are still together or not, but that’s not the point obviously). But it would be utterly unfair to portray her only as ‘Chico Buarque’s girlfriend’, and so to dispel this image of Gulin, here is one of her own songs, ‘Cinema big butts’. It is the strange mix of her own ‘Cinema americano’ interjected with her cover of the 1990s ‘trash-classic’ ‘Baby got back’. The result is at the very least  surprising and refreshing. It is the kind of song that provokes reactions of either love or hate, but in any case no indifference; to me, it is strange and compelling at the same time. So, ‘shake that healthy butt!’

Analytic philosophy and rules bloat

If I could go back in time and change the Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy anthology in one way, I would make sure that it included an essay on rules bloat.

Nearly every role playing game suffers from this. At the outset the impetus is to present something that is easy for new players and game masters to figure out and play. After the game hits a kind of popularity threshold the only way to make new money on it is to produce expansions with new character classes and rule-based mechanics. To get people to pay the money, there has to be some sort of ludological advantage to using the new characters and mechanics. So if you just stay with the old set, at a minimum your characters will be underpowered.

But each expansion makes the game more complicated, until it finally reaches a point where it becomes borderline unplayable for everyone (except for the Simpsons Comic Book Guy who loves this kind of thing). And it gets so slow. Where you could have had twenty combats a night in the unexpanded version, now you can only complete two, and you spent long increments of time thumbing through various books figuring out the proper algorithm for how the dragon-spawn Barbarian's grappling ability works during attacks of opportunity when the opponent is half submerged in water.

Since the industry needs non-Simpsons Comic Book Guys to remain viable, a new edition* is then released, and the process starts all over again.

Top Ten Reasons to Visit the PhilSci-Archive

(This is a companion piece to Top Ten Reasons philosophers of science should post their papers to PhilSci Archive)

10.You can be the first to know what's new in philosophy of science.

9. It's a fast way to survey recent work on any topic in philosophy of science.

8. It's a fast way to find out who is working in any topic in philosophy of science.

7. You can search on any keywords or parameters you like.

6. It's a chance to help an author with a draft before it is too late.

5. You can download complete conference proceedings.

4. It offers one stop shopping for open access journals (more coming soon).

3. It's easy to get to from anywhere.

2. It's free.

1. Not sold in stores. Available only through this exciting, time unlimited web offer.

Bonus reason: find out whether rocks think.

(Thanks to John Norton for most of this and Ken Waters for inspiration).

Aereo, Cable TV, and the Privatization of the Public Sphere

In the most anticipated Copyright decision this term, the Supreme Court today ruled, 6-3 (opinion by Breyer, dissent Scalia) that Aereo’s service for watching broadcast TV online violates the Copyright Act.  Briefly:  Aero operates a large number of tiny antennas.  Subscribers pick a program they want to watch, and get exclusive access to an antenna.  That antenna then receives the broadcast in question, sets it up on a private folder for that user in the cloud, and then streams it to him/her over the Internet.  The broadcast networks sued, claiming that Aereo’s actions constituted an infringing public performance of their content.

There is and will be endless discussion about this case, because it may very well have enormous implications for cloud computing (the opinion tries very hard to limit itself: it includes an entire section about why it doesn’t apply to cloud computing, and the argument hinges on an analogy to cable TV and specific statutory language adopted in 1976 to deal with cable TV).  But there’s something else more interesting, I think, under the radar.  I sort of saw it in the opinion, but it came into sharp focus in Scalia’s dissent, so I’ll start there.

Job Placement 2011-2014: Departments with Relatively High Placement Rates (Updated 9/17/2014)

As discussed in the comments at a previous post, I have been looking at department-specific placement rates. "Placement rate" is the number of reported placements*** divided by the number of graduates. I looked at reported placements between 2011 and 2014 and graduates between 2009 and 2013. I do not have data on many departments that reported placements in this time frame**, but of those 94 departments for which I do have data, 32 appear to have placement rates higher than 50% for tenure-track jobs and 51 appear to have placement rates higher than 50% for a combination of tenure-track, postdoctoral, VAP, and instructor jobs (both sets are listed below).****

Update: I have removed the following departments from both lists because I do not have updated graduation data from them: University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University. These departments may well have placement rates as high as these others, but the graduation data I have from them comes from the 2012 APA Graduate Guide, since they did not complete the 2013 APA Graduate Guide. If the department chairs respond to my email of June 10th with updated information, I will update their status.

Philosophers who work outside of academia – Part 2: What's it like to have a nonacademic job?

This is part 2 of a 3-part series of interviews I conducted with seven philosophers who went on to a non-academic career after obtaining their PhDs. For more background on these philosophers, the work they currently do, and the reasons they left academia, see part 1: How and Why do they end up there?  This part will focus on the realities of having a non-academic job. 

One of the main attractions of an academic job, especially one of a tenured academic professor, is the autonomy (intellectual and in terms of time management) it provides. However, there are downsides as well: the increasing pressure to churn out publications (which some of the respondents already alluded to in part 1, lack of support, and isolation lead to mental health problems in some academics. So how do philosophers with experience in academia and outside evaluate the work atmosphere? 

Sean Carroll on the Tyson/Kraus/Hawking Phenomenon

here.

and more from Sean in response to a query from Wayne Myrvold here.  Wayne is hosting a series of posts from Physicists on "Why they talk to philosophers" that was inspired by his guest post here at NewAPPS.

Philosophers who work outside of academia – Part 1: How and why do they end up there?

This is the first of a three-part series featuring in-depth interviews with philosophers who have left academia. This part (part 1) focuses on their philosophical background, the jobs they have now, and why they left academia. Part 2 examines the realities of having a non-academic job and how it compares to a life in academia. In part 3, finally, the interviewees reflect on the transferable skills of a PhD in philosophy, and offer concrete advice on those who want to consider a job outside of academia. 

Does having a PhD in philosophy mean your work opportunities have narrowed down to the academic job market? This assumption seems widespread, for example, a recent Guardian article declares that programs should accept fewer graduate students as there aren’t enough academic jobs for all those PhDs. Yet academic skills are transferrable: philosophy PhDs are independent thinkers who can synthesize and handle large bodies of complex information, write persuasively as they apply for grants, and they can speak for diverse kinds of audiences. 

How do those skills translate concretely into the non-academic job market? To get a clearer picture of this, I conducted interviews with 7 philosophers who work outside of academia. They are working as consultant, software engineers, ontologist (not the philosophical sense of ontology), television writer, self-employed counselor, and government statistician. Some were already actively considering non-academic employment as graduate students, for others the decision came later—for one informant, after he received tenure. 

These are all success stories. They are not intended to be a balanced representation of the jobs former academics hold. Success stories can provide a counterweight to the steady drizzle of testimonies of academic disappointment, where the inability to land a tenure track position is invariably couched in terms of personal failure, uncertainty, unhappiness and financial precarity. In this first part, I focus on what kinds of jobs the respondents hold, and how they ended up in non-academic jobs in the public and private sector. Why did they leave academia? What steps did they concretely take to get their current position? 

I hope this series of posts will empower philosophy PhDs who find their current situation less than ideal, especially—but no only—those in non-tenure track position, to help them take steps to find a nonacademic career that suits them. And even if one’s academic job is as close to a dreamjob as one can conceivable get, it’s still fascinating to see what a PhD in philosophy can do in the wider world.

Practical deference: Does it matter?

There are several variants of a list in circulation with skills our grandparents could do but the majority of us can't, for instance, 7 skills your grandparents had and you don't. Examples include ironing really well, sewing, knitting, crocheting, canning, cooking a meal from scratch, writing in beautiful longhand, basic DIY skills... What have the majority of us lost by not having these skills, which I'll call granparent skills for short, anymore?

As Lizzie Fricker argued today in a workshop held in honor of Charlotte Coursier, trust in other people is common and is a pervasive element of human life. We defer to the knowledge of others (testimonial dependence) and to their expertise (practical dependence): we rely on experts to tell us what the weather will be like, to fix our car, to give us a new haircut. Often, this deference is shallow and dispensable (we could in principle do it ourselves), but it can also be deep and ineluctable, as when we rely on electricians and other specialists. 

This division of cognitive labor provides us with enormous gains, but does an increased reliance on testimony and expertise of others also come with costs? Fricker feels we do not reflect enough on this question, especially as the extent of both testimonial and practical dependence seems have increased dramatically in recent years. People increasingly rely on Google rather than internally stored semantic knowledge, and they increasingly outsource practical skills – navigation with maps, dead reckoning, and compasses is replaced by user-friendly  technologies like GPS devices. 

The Future of the European Polity II: Institutions (part two)

 Continuing from a post of a week ago where I set up the discussion of renewed European Union institiutions, including a limited from of EU government replacing the Commissioners and the Council of Ministers, composed of a Council of Europe appointed by the European Parliament according to the strength of political groups, and a Council of Nations composed of the government leaders of member nations of the European Union.

First successful British punk single

The drum sound on this is a thing of wonder.

I wish George Martin had achieved something like it for Ringo's toms during the White Album sessions. Or maybe Ringo just needed to pound them harder. I don't know. The snare and symbols are wonderful, but the wimpy toms make songs like Helter Skelter fall well short of what Paul intended (in that case, to rock heaver than the Who).

Job Placement 2011-2014: Overall Placement Rate

In two previous posts I have provided data on gender and AOS for placements reported at ProPhilosophy  (2011-2012 and 2012-2013) and PhilAppointments (2013-2014). As of today, I have data on 729 placed candidates. In this post I aim to use this and other data to estimate the total number of candidates seeking employment and to calculate an approximate overall placement rate. 

Badiou against the Angles, the Saxons, and the Vikings too

Wow Badiou says some weird things about analytic philosophy in the Introduction to Being and Event.

The 'analytic' current of English-language philosophy discounts most of classical philosophy's propositions as senseless, or as limited to the exercise of a language game (1).

. . .for Kant, the transcendental subject, after which the question [of the utility of mathematics] was no longer seriously practised, save by Bachelard in a vision which remained constitutive, and by the American partisans of the stratification of languages) (7). . .

From that point onwards, with the exception of Husserl-who is a great classic, if a little late-modern (let's say post-Kantian) philosophy was no longer haunted by a paradigm, except that of history, and, apart form some heralded but repressed exceptions, Cavailles and Lautman, it abandoned mathematics to Anglo-Saxon linguistic sophistry (7).

Poor Saxons! As if it isn't bad enough that they got destroyed by the Normans mere days after finally winning a hundreds years struggle against the Vikings. As if it isn't bad enough that the 80s metal band of the same name was so indifferently talented. No. Badiou must compound the injuries with insult. In addition to military annihilation and no copy-write recourse with respect to crap bands, all Saxon philosophers are sophists, just sitting around stratifying languages, declaring all philosophy senseless and language games and whatnot.

Preferential logics, supraclassicality, and human reasoning

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

 

Some time ago, I wrote a blog post defending the idea that a particular family of non-monotonic logics, called preferential logics, offered the resources to explain a number of empirical findings about human reasoning, as experimentally established. (To be clear: I am here adopting a purely descriptive perspective and leaving thorny normative questions aside. Naturally, formal models of rationality also typically include normative claims about human cognition.)  

 

In particular, I claimed that preferential logics could explain what is known as the modus ponens-modus tollens asymmetry, i.e. the fact that in experiments, participants will readily reason following the modus ponens principle, but tend to ‘fail’ quite miserably with modus tollens reasoning – even though these are equivalent according to classical as well as many non-classical logics. I also defended (e.g. at a number of talks, including one at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy which is immortalized in video here and here) that preferential logics could be applied to another well-known, robust psychological phenomenon, namely what is known as belief bias. Belief bias is the tendency that human reasoners seem to have to let the believability of a conclusion guide both their evaluation and production of arguments, rather than the validity of the argument as such.

 

Well, I am now officially taking most of it back (and mostly thanks to working on these issues with my student Herman Veluwenkamp).

Brazilian music on Fridays: happy birthday, Chico Buarque!

The great Chico Buarque joined the club of the ‘over-70’ yesterday (recall Caetano Veloso joining the club last year). Now, while one may speak of a constant stream of talented musicians in Brazilian music, we still haven’t come across anything like the brilliant generation of singers/composers emerging in the later 1960s, including Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Milton Nascimento and of course, Chico Buarque. They are now all in their early 70s, and alive and kicking. Chico Buarque in particular released an acclaimed new album in 2011 (Chico), and a DVD surveying his whole musical career in 2012. He also continues to pursue a celebrated literary career; in particular, his 2009 novel Spilt Milk has been translated into a number of languages (I very much enjoyed the novel myself). 

To celebrate Chico’s birthday, here is ‘Essa pequena’ from his 2011 album (about his relationship with singer Thais Gulin – here is the two of them in the duo ‘Se eu soubesse’), and a classic, ‘O que será’ (1976), a duo with Milton Nascimento. So here’s to many more productive years for him, from which we all benefit…

Washington Redskins Lose off the Field

In case you hadn’t heard, it’s been a big week in intellectual property.  The biggest news item in the non-legal press was the Patent and Trademark Office’s decision to cancel several of the NFL’s Washington Redskins trademarks because they were “disparaging.”  This review and cancellation is required by statute, and the decision is generating a fair amount of First Amendment discussion, much of it incautious.  On the Diane Rehm show today, for example, Bruce Fein went completely off the rails:

Presbyterian General Assembly votes for gay marriage and divestment

Good news from San Fransisco Theological Seminary chaplain Scott Clark about the 2014 Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly here.

The bill sent out from committee a couple of days ago would take the "one man, one woman" talk out of the Book of Order and add an accompanying authoritative interpretation that allows teaching elders to perform marriage ceremonies for same sex couples.

Most people don't understand just how democratic reformed churches are. In the PC(USA) each presbytery sends one teaching elder (minister) and one ruling elder (non-minister serving on the Session or Deaconite) to the General Assembly. A change to the Book of Order has to be ratified by the General Assembly and then by over half of the presbyteries in the two years before the next General Assembly. So when we moved to allow ordination of gay priests and as we now move towards full inclusion of GLTB in the church this isn't something foisted on us by Bishops who have all the power (as they do in the Episcopal and Roman Catholic churches). Everyone I've talked to thinks that the presbyteries will ratify this.

In other General Assembly news, it looks like the church will divest from three companies involved with apartheid in Israel. Story here.

Job Placement 2011-2014: Overview on AOS

In keeping with the earlier post on gender, this is an overview post on the distribution of (first-listed) areas of specialization among placed candidates. I now have data on 722 candidates who have been placed in tenure-track, postdoctoral, VAP, or instructor positions between late 2011 and mid 2014 (ending today), drawn from ProPhilosophy (2011-2012 and 2012-2013) and PhilAppointments (2013-2014). I aim to make the spreadsheet with this data available by around July 1st (I will continue to add new data until that date). 

Against Those Year-End Faculty Meetings to Discuss the Graduate Students

Every year's end at UC Riverside, the philosophy faculty meet for three hours "to discuss the graduate students". Back in the 1990s when I was a grad student, I seem to recall the Berkeley faculty doing the same thing. The practice appears to be fairly widespread. After years of feeling somewhat uncomfortable with it, I've tentatively decided I'm opposed. I'd be interested to hear from others with positive or negative views about it.

Now, there are some good things about these year-end meetings. Let's start with those.

At UCR, the formal purpose of the meeting is to give general faculty input to the graduate advisor, who can use that input to help her advising. The idea is that if the faculty as a whole think that a student is doing well and on track, the graduate advisor can communicate that encouraging news to the student; and also, when there are opportunities for awards and fellowships, the graduate advisor can consider those highly regarded students as candidates. And if the faculty as a whole think that a student is struggling, the faculty can diagnose the student's weaknesses and help the graduate advisor give the student advice that might help the student improve. Hypothetical examples (not direct quotes): "Some faculty were concerned about your inconsistent attendance at seminar meetings." "The sense of the faculty is that while you have considerable promise, your writing would be improved if you were more charitable toward the views of philosophers you disagree with."

Is this a violation of academic freedom?

Is there a word for this, where you not only have to waste time doing something absolutely meaningless ("Kafkaesque"?), but where it's also the case that successful completion of the meaningless tasks requires enthusiastic pretense that the task isn't meaningless?

Whatever the term is, it increasingly applies to university assessment procedures. Not only do you have to do a week or so of make-work, but more and more of the make-work is showing the people who check your reports exactly how the assessment process helps your classes get better and better to infinity.

Is this a violation of academic freedom? I did enough philosophy of mind (and virtue ethics) in the past to know how foolish it is to think that simple quantitative surveys of the type acceptable to the assessment Czars (who know nothing about the academic subjects in question) could yield useful information of the sort that would help improve programs. Decent practical reasoning doesn't work this way. I even have a paper with Jason Megill relevant to this topic, and a substantive blog post on four sources of stupidity relevant to assessment. Yet the metastasizing assessment (which at LSU has gone from yearly to now three times a year and almost certainly soon to be quarterly) regime forces me to say things inconsistent with commonsense and the relevant scholarship (again, some of which is my own).

Using Medicaid to Produce Homo Economicus

I am increasingly convinced that any Foucauldian effort to understand neoliberalism needs to focus on it as a strategy of subjectification (more specifically, it’s the strategy of subjectification specific to contemporary biopower, and it says that the truth of the human being is as homo economicus).  One reason I think this is that one finds repeated examples of where policy or governmental prescriptions specific to neoliberalism conflict with neoliberalism as a strategy of subjectification; in such cases, the strategy of subjectification generally seems to win.  Let me explain with an example which will hopefully serve as proof of concept of the admittedly very big thesis I’ve just announced.

Juan Cole on Seven Myths about the Sunni advance in Iraq

here.

"Warning Iraq against Shiite Iranian influence is like warning Italy against Vatican influence."

Disabled Scholars at Conferences

Shelley Tremain, the philosopher of disability, brought my attention to a recent article in the CHE entitled Indifference Toward Disabled Scholars, Especially at Conferences, Troubles a Disabilities Scholar .* In it, bioethicist William Peace details a "nightmare" he experience as a disabled scholar trying to attend a conference.

Peace also blogged about the experience here.

Tremain offers the following commentary:

-------

In my article "Introducing Feminist Philosophy of Disability" (https://independent.academia.edu/ShelleyTremain), I offered some details about ways in which the APA fails to treat disabled philosophers equally and promote our status within the discipline and profession. A recent petition that I and others circulated was motivated by this neglect. Some of the measures that the APA fails to take on our behalf concern the lack of information about disability (e.g., how to make conferences accessible, what APA chairs and presenters should do to make divisional meetings accessible, etc.) on the newly-furbished and inaccessible APA website. A recent conference on philosophy of disability at Syracuse University (at which all three APA disability representatives presented) demonstrates the impact that the APA's failure to provide leadership in this regard has throughout the profession. 

 

Chelsea Manning on limits on Press Freedom during the Iraq war

and its role in the roots of the current crisis, here.

 

"If you were following the news during the March 2010 elections in Iraq, you might remember that the American press was flooded with stories declaring the elections a success, complete with upbeat anecdotes and photographs of Iraqi women proudly displaying their ink-stained fingers. The subtext was that United States military operations had succeeded in creating a stable and democratic Iraq.

Those of us stationed there were acutely aware of a more complicated reality.

 

World Cup thread!

Here is a thread for people dying to discuss the World Cup with other philosophers!     I'll kick us off with these beautiful animations in the NYT explaining how the Dutch beat the Spanish so handily.

 

Post your predictions, comments on past games, etc here.   If discussions get lively, I'll open up new threads as the tournament progresses.

The Future of the European Polity II: Institutions (part one)

I've ended up writing two posts worth of material on European Union Institutions, so there will be a second part to this post, itself part of a series of posts on the direction of the EU. 

The European Union has got caught up in a strange mix of technocratic centralisation, inter-state politics, and federal political institutions, which is not a satisfactory form of federalism, or confederalism, or consociationism, or whatever transnational  or interstate political structure one might believe best describes the European Union now, or what it should become. The reasons for this mix are themselves a mix of shifting compromises over  time and the belief of Jean Monnet and other 'Founding Fathers' of the European Union, that European politics could follow on from 'institutionalisation', that is the formation of European institutions with economic and 'technocratic' functions that are somewhat below the horizon of everyday political awareness. This began with fostering trade between France and Germany in the post-war period, bringing great economic and political benefits at that time. The time has come for more explicit politics, including an acceptance that integrationist schemes must be abandoned if lacking political support from citizens of the European Union.