New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

SPEP program on-line

The program for the up and coming SPEP conference in New Orleans* is on-line here.

Compared to the last two years, Badiou and German Idealism are very well represented this year. Cool stuff! 

I'm pouring a little bit of rum** on the ground every night in the hope that it will propitiate whatever gods might have some say with respect to hurricanes. Two years ago a pretty nasty one walloped the East Coast during SPEP.

[Notes:

*Which is a fun place, if you dutifully consult your Fodor's*** guide. The last Central APA in New Orleans was kind of a depressing affair during the evening talk times. It was a little bit like the hotel in The Shining, symmetrical framing and all.

**I'm not really a pagan, but hurricanes do kind of bring that out in you. It's not just the kind of waving-with-your-arms-to-get-the-already-released-bowling-ball-to-move type superstition. It's also that every time one misses Baton Rouge, my relief at not being hit myself substantially outweighs my upset for those currently suffering elsewhere. It's not a very Christian attitude. This beign said, anyone but a saint who has lived through one of those things understands the sentiment. Now I'm going to get back to my Voltaire. . .

***Not that Fodor, this is SPEP after all.****

****As much as I miss discussions of innateness, languages of thought, semantic atomism, anti-evolution, etc. at SPEP, it is a bit of a relief not to have to worry about feeling like a jerk for never laughing whenever various of Fodor's pets and older female family members are jokingly mentioned.]

Cool conference on analytical existentialism

I'm breaking our policy* of not posting calls for papers for three reasons: (1) two friends of the blog are involved in this, (2) the topic concerns things we've blogged about at newapps before, and (3) crossover material is part of this blog's raison d'etre (prounounce that like Joe Bob Briggs would).

The department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium, is pleased to host a workshop on "Analytical Existentialism," October 20–21, 2014

Keynote: LA Paul (UNC): "Transformative Experiences"

We welcome abstracts on topics related to Analytical Existentialism, which is the use of an analytical style to investigate topics that matter to us as human beings capable of feelings and anxieties or joys while doing justice to our first-person (even phenomenological) perspective. In particular, we welcome papers that instantiate and theorize Analytical Existentialism (and its history) as well as criticize it. In addition, we welcome papers on transformative experiences from any perspective, including phenomenological and other non-analytical traditions.

 

Please send abstracts (maximum 500 words) to Eric Schliesser by August 15.

Cool stuff!

 

[*The exception who proves the rule!]

Yosef Kirman - After The Blockade (A Chronicle)

Who is the hidden one? The last one here? After the blockade?
Who, in the violated courtyard, walks around on feathers of torn bedding,
strewn about,
Who walks on wrecked crockery and kitchen gear, thrown, broken, of no human use?
and too on family photographs of those driven from their homes ,pursued
to be destroyed?
The armoire is turned round and the person gunned down, lies at the open door,
but his wife and children, those he loved, still live,
they were just now brought to the Umschlag Platz,
and they receive, as promised would be parceled out,
a two kilo bread for every head-;
God how long will their lives endure in your care? How long?
And this tragedy goes on day after day? Day after day?

Vico and Nietzsche

Gary Shaprio raised the issue of the relationship between Nietzsche and Vico in the comment thread of my recent post on Vico (comments 2 and 5), and that is a topic well worth exploring a bit further. I've looked at it in the past in my personal blog, but too far back to bring in thoughts I've had in the last year, which has included some intense study of both Vico's  New Science and Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. I won't get into the exact lines of possible influence, because that really is deep and complicated work on the detail of intellectual history, though also it must be said if not carried out in the right spirit it carries the danger of ignoring the elements of diffusion, convergence, and relayed unconscious influence in the history of philosophy. Or maybe that is just my justification for making big comparisons and not working so much on the details of intellectual transmission. 

Types of men that can't sit still

1. Leg bouncers - Tend to bounce at a rhythm of around ten times per second, achieved by pressing and releasing the forward part of the metatarsals on the floor while the calcaneus remains consistently raised.
2. Foot bouncers - Legs are crossed, and the tallus of the raised foot is held still, while the phalanges move side to side at about ten cycles per second.
3. Thigh massagers - Feet are ususally flat on the floor, and knees move closer together and further apart at a rate of about three times per second.  Each knee moves horizontally about three to five inches each half cycle with the average distance between the knees somewhere between one and a little over two feet, depending on the particular man who can't sit still's style of thigh massage.
4. Foot rotators - Langorous, veering into laconicity, phalanges make a slow circle at about once per second.
5. Gum chewers - Styles may vary.

Probability in Many Worlds: Is the cart in front of the horse?

I know a few regular readers of this blog have views about the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.   I want to ask a question about what is supposed to be the response to a basic worry about a whole family of approaches.  (David Wallace's recent book would be an obvious case, but so would Sean Carrol's recent contributions.)

 

The many worlds interpretation basically says that whenever you make a "meausurement" in QM, (say you have a particle that is spin up in the y direction and you measure spin in the x direction,) the world contintues to evolve according to the Schroedinger equation, and the only thing that makes it look like the measurement has a determinate outcome is that the world splits into two emergent worlds, with an emergent observer in each one.    The trick of all this, of course, is to somehow explain why there is probability when all of the outcomes are occuring.  One problem I have with all of these attempts to get probability out of  is that they all go like this.

1. Assume decoherence gets you branches in some preferred basis.
2. Give an argument that the Born rule applied to the amplitudes of these branches yields something worthy of the name ‘probability.’

The problem is that these steps happen in the reverse order that one would like them to happen.

Yisroel Rabon - Pain

Do you know the pain of women you sometimes see flying
on carts with bottles of vitriol in fingers that burn?

Do you know the sorrow of strong wild madmen,
when hoses of water stream on their bare necks?

Do you know the hatred to life of people dying
with a rope on their neck and a bullet in their skull?

Do you know the grief of children from beds of sin,
who are found strangled in toilets?

Do you know the pain of waxen fading lips
of the dying who no longer have strength to sob?

Can you fathom the pain of pregnant mothers
who in their bellies carry dead children?

Yehuda Amichai - The Diameter of the Bomb

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.

Happy Birthday, Paul's Boutique! (hat tip Joshua Heller)

Twenty five years ago today, the last great example of an artform destroyed by the Disney copywrite regime.The band members are still being sued for the sampling.

I was going to post one of the videos from the album, but MCA would have preferred the video at right.

Privacy, Chastisement and Biopower

I’m teaching a course on privacy and surveillance this fall, and one of the things I’ve been doing is reading up on aspects of privacy theory that I didn’t know much about, such as the feminist critique of privacy.  The basic feminist argument is that “family privacy” has been historically used as a cover to shield domestic abuse from legal scrutiny (and not only against women – see this disturbing Supreme Court case about a stepfather who beat a four year old into serious and permanent cognitive disability; the Rhenquist Court argues that state social services had no enforceable obligation to intervene because of family privacy).  It is in this context that I ran across Reva Siegel’s (Law, Yale) fantastic article on the way that claims of domestic privacy emerged out of the collapse of a husband’s legal right to “chastise” (beat) his wife.  Siegel’s larger purpose is to study the ways that legal reforms can serve to “modernize” status regimes, a process in which old hierarchies are given new justifications and (perhaps) weakened, but not eliminated.  It’s not that the legal reforms don’t achieve anything – it’s that it’s very, very difficult to dismantle regimes of social privilege, and that (as Foucault noted), power always entails resistance.

Here, I want to focus briefly on the move from chastisement to privacy, because I think it suggests something important for our understanding of biopolitics.  As Siegel outlines it, the basic story is that, over the course of the nineteenth century, a couple of groups made substantial inroads into the old common law right of chastisement: temperance groups used stories of horrific abuse of women by drunk husbands to advocate banning alcohol, and feminist groups use the same stories to advocate for the banning of wife-beating.  The feminists eventually won, and a pair of state supreme court cases around 1870 (one in Alabama and one in North Carolina) emphatically – perhaps a little too emphatically – pronounced wife beating to be the unwelcome vestige of a primitive, bygone era.

Got Water? (part n)

Shocking report here on how bad the California ground water situation is to go along with the terrible drought conditions.  Groundwater is the only thing keeping California afloat, so to speak, through the last 3 consecutive years of drought.

 

 

Hilary Putnam doesn't give an eff about the Oxford Comma

A couple of times I've co-written with people who don't use the Oxford comma. It can end up being a big headache when the usage isn't consistent, and then it's also weird to realize just how many times you conjoin three or more words in a phrase.

Putnam's book came out in Cambridge University Press, so I guess it's O.K. that he didn't use it.

The wikipedia article is quite nice, though the anti-Oxford comma section isn't sourced and the supposed ambiguity introduced by the Oxford comma is unconvincing, because the same phrase is also ambiguous without it. The pro-Oxford comma section gives examples that are ambiguous without it and not ambiguous with it, e.g. a book dedication that reads "to my parents, Any Rand and God" versus "to my parents, Ayn Rand, and God."

Vampire Weekend's eponymous song is pretty, though it's possibly NSFW because of f-bombs. I don't know what it's about, but the odd specificity of the lyrics ("Why would you lie about how much coal you own?") work very well. When I first heard the song I though it was pro-Oxford comma, and was pretty disappointing when I read the lyrics.

After the kerfuffle over Weird Al's song, pro-Oxford Comma partisans are probably just going to have to continue to wait for our anthem.

Wildcard Skepticism

Might there be excellent reasons to embrace radical skepticism, of which we are entirely unaware?

You know brain-in-a-vat skepticism -- the view that maybe last night while I was sleeping, alien superscientists removed my brain, envatted it, and are now stimulating it to create the false impression that I'm still living a normal life. I see no reason to regard that scenario as at all likely. Somewhat more likely, I argue -- not very likely, but I think reasonably drawing a wee smidgen of doubt -- are dream skepticism (might I now be asleep and dreaming?), simulation skepticism (might I be an artificial intelligence living in a small, simulated world?), and cosmological skepticism (might the cosmos in general, or my position in it, be radically different than I think, e.g., might I be a Boltzmann brain?).

"1% skepticism", as I define it, is the view that it's reasonable for me to assign about a 1% credence to the possibility that I am actually now enduring some radically skeptical scenario of this sort (and thus about a 99% credence in non-skeptical realism, the view that the world is more or less how I think it is).

Now, how do I arrive at this "about 1%" skeptical credence? Although the only skeptical possibilities to which I am inclined to assign non-trivial credence are the three just mentioned (dream, simulation, and cosmological), it also seems reasonable for me to reserve a bit of my credence space, a bit of room for doubt, for the possibility that there is some skeptical scenario that I haven't yet considered, or that I've considered but dismissed and should take more seriously than I do. I'll call this wildcard skepticism. It's a kind of meta-level doubt. It's a recognition of the possibility that I might be underappreciating the skeptical possibilities. This recognition, this wildcard skepticism, should slightly increase my credence that I am currently in a radically skeptical scenario.

Eric Kaplan, Comedian-Philosopher, Has a New Blog.

Eric Kaplan, who overlapped with me in grad school at Berkeley but who is now much more famous as a comedy writer for Big Bang Theory, Futurama, and several other shows, has been cooking up weird philosophical-comical blog posts since March at his Wordpress blog here.

Check it out!

This is the way the world ends. . .

I've long been obsessed with what it would have been like to be a Saxon in post-Roman Britain. Roman concrete was so good that for hundreds of years Saxons inhabited Roman buildings. But their architectural wherewithal was primitive compared to the Romans, so as the roofs collapsed on the Roman buildings they would replace them with leaky timber and thatch jobs. What must that have been like, to live and die in hundreds of years old ruins that are still better than anything you can build?

I think with many things like this the change must be so gradual that nobody ever gets alarmed by it. Every moment in the progressing crappiness just seems like the way things statically are.

LSU is about six years into budget cutting that resulted from unsustainable tax cuts for the wealthy. Part of the result of this is that we have an atrocious backlog for building repair and rennovation. The money amounts are well into the tens of millions of dollars, so bad that it's hard for the administrators to triage. Just this year a six hundred pound chunk of ceiling fell in the dilapidated art studio. It might have killed a student, yet we still don't have the money to fix the building. Cracks in the stucco in my building have caused extensive water damage. Every year or so they cosmetically fix the bubbling over paint on the inside of my office wall, but haven't yet fixed the exterior of the building. The toilets are also slowly dying. About half of them don't flush appropriately, and only work if you hold the handle down for a long time, which of course many people don't do. As a result, by the end of the day most of the bathrooms have raw sewage in the toilets. It smells nauseating, sometimes out in the hallway.

Maybe it's just nostalgia from my youth in the 70s, but I think that public infrastructure has gotten increasingly crappy during the course of my life. When I was a kid we didn't have days long power outages every year from inclement weather. I remember airports as feeling almost like church or art museums, quiet, reverential in a strange way, and clean. It's interesting to think how far down this slope we might slide as we become increasingly a nation of private opulence for a very few and public squalor for everyone else. But maybe nobody will notice much.

More moral depravity on display in discussions of Gaza

from Thane Rosembaum, professor of law at NYU, here. [Update:  Rosenbaum's status at NYU is unclear.  See comments below.]  He argues that Gaza civilians aren't really innocent civilians because they elected Hamas. Isn't this the same argument that Osama bin Laden made for the legitimacy of 9/11?

Rosembaum goes on to say: " children whose parents are not card-carrying Hamas loyalists. These are the true innocents of Gaza."  One doesn't need to be an astute reader of Grice to realize the implication is clearly that children of parents who are card-carrying Hamas loyalists are deserving of all the violence and killing that is directed at them.  Of course, its not hard to think of past world leaders who have had similar attitudes about rightful punishment.

(and then, I am also reminded of this:

 

 

The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool.

Interesting article here by Princeton English professor Raphael Allison comparing literary theorists and rock bands. There's some good stuff on the anthropology of subcultures to explain the weird ways that people talk at thea annual MLA convention, but the author's main conceit is as far as I can tell completely undermined by the radical uncoolness of professors.

Remember Colin McGinn's blog post about epatering the bourgeoisie, where he places himself as a cultural force alongside John Lennon and Kingsley Amis? It was sad in part because you realized that this deeply uncool person somehow made it that far in life with no idea how uncool he is, and also how this blithe unawareness was so central to his downfall. What is it about the ecosystem of academic stardom that makes that even remotely possible? I think this is related to my earlier post about how fame robs the famous of the moral friction that keeps the rest of us from being complete fools.

Allison kind of gets this, as he explores the tension between the radical pose of much literary theory and the deeply conventional lives of university professors filling out their TPS reports. But then Allison responds to the cognitive dissonance by arguing that this is similar to the way mods reappropriated conventional business suits and scooters as they rebelled against  British society. The end result is kind of like the unconvincing speech by the ghost of Jim Morrison in Wayne's World II where Garth learns that you can do your homework during the week and party out on Friday night.

Obviously, neither Mike Myers nor Raphael Allison read Lester Bangs, whose character in Almost Famous partakes in the following bit of dialogue:

Lester Bangs: The Doors? Jim Morrison? He's a drunken buffoon posing as a poet.
Alice Wisdom: I like The Doors.
Lester Bangs: Give me The Guess Who. They got the courage to be drunken buffoons, which makes them poetic.

Vico's New Science, an under-acknowledged classic

This is the third and last of a brief sequnce of posts widely dispersed over time on three major texts, which I taught during the academic year that has just passed. The first was on the Essays of Montaigne  and the second was on Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws. These are rather different cases, so that wit Montaigne it is a case of Montaigne not getting adequate attention as a major figure in the history of philosophy, as  well as the attention he gets as a Renaissance literary figure and humanist. In the case of Montesquieu, the attention he get is appropriately directed at his contributions to political, social, legal, and historical thought, but despite his foundational role in all these areas he looks a bit second division, and marginal, a bit condescended to as an antiquarian of his time, and the amount of attention he gets is I believe believe below par given the level of his contributions. 

What I am discussing is this post is the New Science of Giambattista Vico. It makes a slightly ironic sequel to the post on Montesquieu, since there is case for saying that Montesquieu, along with Rousseau, plagiarised Vico, particularly considering that both spent enough time in Italy that they must have had conversations about the distinguished Professor in Naples, who was at least well known in the peninsula in his own lifetime.

New Philosopher's Carnival (#165)

Philosophers' Carnival #165 is HERE.

Join, or Die: Neoliberalism, Epistemontology, Social Harmony and the (Invisible) Invisible Hand

There's been a good bit conversation recently about the merits and demerits of "public philosophy" and, as someone who considers herself committed to public philosophy (whatever that is). I'm always happy to stumble across a piece of remarkably insightful philosophical work in the public realm.  Case in point:  Robin James (Philosophy, UNC-Charlotte) posted a really fascinating and original short-essay on the Cyborgology blog a couple of days ago entitled "An attempt at a precise & substantive definition of 'neoliberalism,' plus some thoughts on algorithms." There, she primarily aims to distinguish the sense in which we use the term "neoliberalism" to indicate an ideology from its use as a historical indicator, and she does so by employing some extremely helpful insights about algorithms, data analysis, the mathematics of music, harmony, and how we understand consonance and dissonance.  I'm deeply sympathetic with James' underlying motivation for this piece, namely, her concern that our use of the term "neoliberalism" (or its corresponding descriptor "neoliberal") has become so ubiquitous that it is in danger of being evacuated of "precise and substantive" meaning altogether.  I'm sympathetic, first, as a philosopher, for whom precise and substantive definitions are as essential as hammers and nails are to a carpenter. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I'm sympathetic with James' effort because as Jacques Derrida once said "the more confused the concept, the more it lends itself to opportunistic appropriation."  Especially in the last decade or so, "neoliberalism" is perhaps the sine qua non term that has been, by both the Left and the Right, opportunistically appropriated.

James' definition of neoliberalism's ideological position ("everything in the universe works like a deregulated, competitive, financialized, capitalist market") ends up relying heavily on her distinction of neoliberalism as a particular type of ideology, i.e., one "in which epistemology and ontology collapse into one another, an epistemontology." In sum, James conjectures that neoliberal epistemontology purports to know what it knows (objects, beings, states of affairs, persons, the world) vis-a-vis "the general field of reference of economic anaylsis."

Weird Al responds to Shelley on Twitter

(or at least I'd like to think he's a regular NewAPPS reader...)

Embodied cognition and trust in testimony

Thomas Reid argued that the human default trust in testimony is a gift of nature, which is sustained by two principles that "tally with each other", the propensity to speak the truth, and the tendency to trust what others tell us. Interestingly, he observed an embodied aspect of this trust:

It is the intention of nature, that we should be carried in arms before we are able to walk upon our legs; and it is likewise the intention of nature, that our belief should be guided by the authority and reason of others, before it can be guided by our own reason. The weakness of the infant, and the natural affection of the mother, plainly indicate the former; and the natural credulity of youth, and authority of age, as plainly indicate the latter. The infant, by proper nursing and care, acquires strength to walk without support (1764, Inquiry into the Human Mind, chapt VI, Of Seeing)

Reid's observations point to an intriguing possibility: to what extent is social cognition, such as trust in testimony, influenced by our bodily position, in particular the position we have as helpless infants? The Japanese primatologist Tetsuro Matsuzawa has argued that the supine position (that is, position on the back) of human newborns, has been a decisive factor in the evolution of human social cognition.

Humans and chimpanzees differ quite markedly in how much they trust others. For instance, although both chimpanzees and humans imitate, human children are more prone to overimitation than juvenile chimps, the children, but not the chimps, indiscriminately follow actions by an adult that are reduntant in obtaining a desired result (see e.g., here). 

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Vento no litoral'

As this is the last BMoF before the summer break, I had hoped to post something cheerful (especially since we are leaving for Brazil tomorrow). But after a week of so much tragedy – the horrific situation in Gaza, the MH17 flight shot down in Ukraine – it is hard to think of anything that might be remotely appropriate to post today. There is however a song by recent BMoF guests Legião Urbana, a beautiful song about death, which might be just right: 'Vento no litoral'. Renato Russo wrote it after his long-time boyfriend had died, a victim of AIDS (which would in turn take Russo’s life a few years later). To be sure, the song does not have a political dimension to go with the deaths in Gaza and in Ukraine, but insofar as these are also private deaths (many people are now mourning the loss of their mother, father, son, daughter, lover, friend etc.), the song is spot-on what it means to still be alive after the death of a loved one. “Where are you now, beside here inside of me?”

Weird Al comes out in favor of the Oxford comma! (circa 1:39)

Update: In the comments below philosopher Shelley Tremain takes issue with me posting this song and philosopher Christy Mag Uidur argues that the song's casual use of a derogatory term for disabled people is offensive. When I initially posted it I hadn't realized that it had the word "spastic" in it, nor even that it was historically a derogatory term for people with cerebral palsy.

This being said, given the satirical context, I don't have good intuitions about whether the usage is morally objectionable. First, having narrators over-commit to a premise to the point of offensiveness is a reliable trope in good satire (cf. Will Farrell's most brilliant routines on Saturday Night Live). I think that we would be much diminished as humans if the trope were hounded out of polite society. Second, but related, it's not Weird Al using the word, it's the song's narrator, who (as with many Weird Al songs) is himself part of what is being satirized. Third, as someone who had to cope with minor disabilities growing up, I can't help but find some of this concern paternalistic. I do think paternalism has a place, but I'm not quite convinced it does here.

All that being said, I do think that consequentialist concerns weigh very strong with respect to these kinds of issues. If the popularity of the song on facebook is causing a lot of harm, then it should not be popular.

Please add to the debate if you have any insight into this.*

[*Full disclosure: I've been a fan of Weird Al since My Bologna aired on the Doctor Demento Show when I was a kid. My wife and I saw him live in concert about seven years ago.]

Yo, Baudrillard and Rockets

“Yo” Is an App that doesn’t let you do much: it just lets you send or receive a “Yo” message to/from another subscriber.  Purists might insist on this being content, but it really is pretty de minimis,  which lets you ask the obvious question: why on earth would a communication technology that doesn’t really let you communicate anything interest anyone?  My colleague Robin James has a brilliant answer to that question, which is that Yo basically embodies what Jodi Dean calls “communicative capitalism.”  Here is James:

Yehuda Amichai - Tourists

Visits of condolence is all we get from them.
They squat at the Holocaust Memorial,
They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall
And they laugh behind heavy curtains
In their hotels.
They have their pictures taken
Together with our famous dead
At Rachel's Tomb and Herzl's Tomb
And on Ammunition Hill.
They weep over our sweet boys
And lust after our tough girls
And hang up their underwear
To dry quickly
In cool, blue bathrooms.

Once I sat on the steps by agate at David's Tower, I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists was standing around their guide and I became their target marker. "You see that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there's an arch from the Roman period. Just right of his head." "But he's moving, he's moving!" I said to myself: redemption will come only if their guide tells them, "You see that arch from the Roman period? It's not important: but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family."

Call for Collaborators: Minorities And Philosophy

In order to examine and address issues of participation faced by minority and underrepresented groups in academic philosophy (e.g. gender, race, native-language, sexual orientation, class, and disability minorities), a number of UK departments have recently started to build a UK network of chapters of MAP ( www.mapforthegap.com ). 

With 24 active chapters to date, MAP (Minorities And Philosophy) is already a successful and widespread organization in the US and elsewhere. If you would like to have a MAP chapter at your own institution, this Call For Collaborators is for you. MAP chapters are generally run by graduate students (typically 3 or 4 per department), with some help from academic staff members; undergraduate participation is also encouraged. 

At this stage we would be happy to hear especially from graduate students (groups or individuals) at UK Philosophy departments as well as from UK Philosophy academic staff who would like to coordinate graduate student interest in their institutions. Please contact Filippo Contesi (filippo.contesi at gmail dot com). 

 

 

maybe the real worry about counterpart theory is something like this?

John Divers' Possible Worlds has a nice discussion of the worry that counterpart theory doesn't adequately justify the extent to which we are ego-concerned with our own possibilities. If the possible Humphrey that won the election is a distinct creature in a universe not spatially connected to ours, what does that matter to the actual Humphrey, very much concerned with the possibility of his own winning or losing?

Divers does a very good job on behalf of the counterpart theorist in trying to undermine this worry. It mostly involves showing how non-philosophical sentences involving ego concern end up coming out true as interpreted by the counterpart theorist. It's a little bit weak in that properties we might take to be intrinsic end up being relational. This is only a weakness because Lewis and Divers take this kind of thing to be a criticism of the person who holds that worlds overlap (the same Humphrey existing at multiple worlds), and this is why Divers himself only considers counterpart theorists who believe in the reality of non-actual possible worlds, and actualists who don't. But if you have to explain putatively intrinsic things relationally, why not do it to avoid counterparts in the first place? I think for Lewis the other part of the puzzle is a horror at ontic vagueness, which the overlapper would be more likely to face. For Lewis the possible worlds and objects aren't vague, but there is vagueness in our decision to take certain objects to be counterparts or not.

I'm still not up to date on this literature, but I think that Divers at least doesn't present the best argument to justify Kripke's original worry about ego concern. This is clear if we consider duplicates instead of counterparts. Duplicates are objects existing in the same world that could serve as counterparts if they existed in different worlds.* Given the kinds of recombination principles that Lewis and Divers countenance, it should follow that for any two counterparts at different worlds, there is a world where objects indiscernible to both counterparts (as well as the environmental aspects that make them work as counterparts) exist.

Why Recency and Time Frame Matter

A few days ago I posted a list of features that I take to be essential to an ideal report on placement, seeking comments and suggestions. One of the features I mention there is recency. All departments are likely to place more candidates given more time, but this slope is steeper for certain departments. Moreover,  placement varies year to year. Thus, one's choice of time frame can substantially alter data on placement. This is the reason that Brian Leiter's numbers for NYU look better than mine (here and here)--I looked at the years 2012 to 2014 (3 years in the recent past), whereas he looked at the years 2005 to 2010 (6 years in the distant past).* Looking at NYU's placement page, one can easily see that the percentage of graduates placed in tenure-track jobs drops as one reaches the present. As I said, this is likely true for all departments. This means that if you look at data in the distant past, it might not matter what the length of the time frame is, but if you look at data ending in the recent past, the length of time frame makes an impact. That is, for NYU for the years starting in 2005, a 6-year time frame has 87% TT placement, a 5-year time frame has 90% TT placement, a 4-year time frame has 88% TT placement, and a 3-year time frame has 90% TT placement. But for the years ending in 2013, a 6-year time frame has 69% TT placement, a 5-year time frame has 65% TT placement, a 4-year time frame has 56% TT placement, and a 3-year time frame has 56% TT placement. Note that even the 6-year window ending in 2013 is associated with much lower placement than any of the windows starting in 2005. It seems obvious to me that we should favor more recent data, since they reveal which departments place students more quickly than others and since they are more relevant to students looking at graduate programs. Beyond that, it is not obvious just what length of time we should choose (3, 4, 5, or 6 years) or just which year we should use as the endpoint. 

Yet, one's choice of time frame has a large impact on comparative placement data. Let's compare NYU's placement page to the placement pages of those departments that I found with these methods to have the highest tenure-track placement rates: Berkeley, Princeton, Pittsburgh HPS, and UCLA. If we look at NYU's worst time frame it comes out behind all the others (2010-2013: NYU 56%, UCLA 59%, Berkeley 63%, Princeton 65%, and Pittsburgh HPS 88%). If we look at NYU's best time frame it comes out ahead of all the others (2006-2009: NYU 94%, UCLA 67%, Berkeley 78%, Princeton 86%, and Pittsburgh HPS 93%). If, on the other hand, we look at multiple time frames then a new type of comparison is possible. We can determine, for example, which department has the least low value for tenure-track placement, given any time frame in the period from 2005 to 2013 (with a 3-year minimum time frame and a 6-year maximum time frame). In that case, Pittsburgh HPS comes out on top. It's lowest value is 85%. In comparison, the lowest value for Princeton is 65% (2010-2013), the lowest value for Berkeley is 59% (2009-2012), the lowest value for UCLA is 52% (2009-2012), and the lowest value for NYU is 56% (2010-2013). So if we look at the least low placement for all of these time frames, NYU comes out second to last. Finally, if we look at the full range, from 2005 to 2013, NYU comes out in the middle (Pittsburgh HPS 93%, Princeton 76%, NYU 74%, Berkeley 70%, UCLA 65%). 

Suffice it to say, these decisions make a substantial impact on one's results. For that reason, one should attend carefully to justifications on recency and time frame. I will remove the links to Brian Leiter's two posts on placement data here, since I am concerned that they will mislead students. If I had written those posts, I would certainly take them down knowing what I have made clear in this post (i.e. that the numbers for NYU are inflated for the very time frame that Brian Leiter chose to look at, relative to other departments). I have emailed Brian a link to this post.

As for my data, I use the years 2012 to 2014 because those are the most recent years and the years for which I have large data sets. (ProPhilosophy was kind enough to email departments directly in 2012 and 2013, which substantially increased the number of reported hires for those two years.) To go prior to 2012 I would have to either look at individual placement pages for all 118 departments, many of which do not have data of the sort I need, or use what I know to be a skewed sample from the Leiter Reports blog. I have made clear that any rankings I produce are a work in progress and should not be taken as authoritative. (That is one reason I post them to blogs, and not an independent website.) But as time goes on and this process is improved I will have to start making decisions about which time frames matter. I may well follow the lead of David Marshall Miller in reporting multiple time frames, since this might be helpful for students. Suggestions on this point are welcome. (The data that I used for this post are after the break. Feel free to suggest corrections where needed.)

*I hope that this does not need saying, but I am not picking on NYU here. One of my dissertation advisors was at NYU and one of my best friends is currently a student there. I am looking at NYU because it appears to be a focal point in Brian Leiter's criticism of my work. If one were to look at other measures beyond just tenure-track placement, NYU may well fare better than it does here. 

Update (7/14/14): In order to satisfy the worry that NYU is particularly burdened by graduates of the JD/PhD program in this measure (2 graduates from NYU left academia for law in this time period, compared to 1 from Princeton, 3 from Berkeley, and perhaps 2 from UCLA), I compared NYU to these other programs while leaving out all those graduates who left academia. In that case, as I point out in the comment below, it is still clear that time frame matters and, in particular, that the time frame of 2005-2010 overly inflates NYU's record (2008-2013 puts NYU in the middle of the group, at 80%, whereas 2005-2010 puts it at 95%, square with Berkeley and Pittsburgh HPS, ahead of UCLA and Princeton. It might be worth noting that with the same methods Fordham University placed 69% of its graduates into tenure-track jobs between 2008 and 2013). See my comment below for details.

Red Aunts - 1998