New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Calling Out Silencing Techniques in Class

[This is a guest-post by Rachel McKinnon, and a useful follow-up to this invited post.--ES]

Silencing techniques are things people say to get someone to drop out of a discussion, either by leaving or becoming and remaining silent. There are a variety of forms that this can take. This post has an illuminating taxonomy with a plethora of useful examples, all of which can be changed mutatis mutandis to philosophy contexts. Inspired by the post I offer some examples:

Questioning motives:

You're only saying that because you're a woman [or black/trans*/queer/whatever].

Othering:

That's exactly what I'd expect from a feminist." [Focal stress usually  on the identity term.] You're just part of the feminist take-over of this department.

Justice (in addition to charity) for adjuncts

Sign the Petition.

On the Shoulders of Others

Three illustrations of why scientists need to know history:

[1] Biologists often appeal to founders in the field such as Darwin or Haeckel, either as a point of contrast or as intellectual ancestor - but are their depictions accurate?

[2] Scientists need to know the nature of the scientific practice, e.g., the refutations of well accepted theories, the failures, the dead ends.

[3] Terms like "fitness" may be loaded with historical baggage that scientists are not aware of, but which affects their reception.--Roberta Millstein. [Numbers added to facilitate discussion.--ES]

The image(s) of science that philosophers of (the) science(s) describe and promote often has an afterlife in (the) science(s).

Ever since Kuhn projected his experiences within and about physics onto a persuasive and widely discussed image of science, philosophers of science and the scientists that embrace Kuhn and his image [see here], have thought that progressive science requires certain features (paradigmatic consensus, mythic history, puzzle-solving, etc.)* In the exchange over her post, Millstein offered three reasons for thinking that praticing scientists need to know an accurate history. Let's grant a critic that [1] is not very persuasive. For those kind of appeals are primarily rhetorical techniques; there is a sense in which the truth does not matter in such appeals. Let's grant a critic that [2] can be achieved without knowledge of history (which now is conceived as a repository of error). So, [2] is not intrinsic to scientific practice, but it does not mean that history does not have this useful, therapeutic role. 

On the Origin of Philosophical Blogging

NewAPPS is about three years old now. We have a wider, more durable, and pleasingly engaged audience than we ever imagined. Our activism and discussion about professional issues have generated quite a bit of publicity and controversy. Yet,  one feature has not received much public comment: week in week out, we produce free-standing philosophical essays (generally between 800-1200 words) that are nothing like journal articles nor (generally) even appropriate as drafts of journal articles. Of course, often we develop themes and even an identity over (explicitly and implicitly connected) series, but, in principle, each of the posts is independent. While plenty of other philosophical blogs also offer free-standing philosophical essays, these tend to be longer, or more narrowly focused on an area of expertise, and (generally) not as frequent. (Of course, many of us were inspired by Crookedtimber and Thoughts Arguments and Rants.) To be 'historical' about it, our philosophical blogging is -- despite our analytical or continental identity -- closer in spirit to the kind of thing one might find in Bacon's or Montaigne's essays than anything we have been trained to write.

Can you tell I am pretty proud of this? (Yeah, check 'vanity' in Montaigne!)

While there are precedents in the Ancient world (Epicurus' and Cicero's Letters), Seneca's Letters are the ground-zero for philosophical essayists. (I welcome alternative candidates.) I have been blogging about the Letters, but an extended discussion with my PhD students* made me realize the significance of Seneca's adopted constraints of form. For, the first four letters conform to a very tight 'template.' (These letters have an average of 383 words!) I am using 'template' to capture something about structure/form.

• Each letter starts with an arresting and almost invasive claim.
• Each letter encourages the recipient/reader to memorize some non-philosophical claim.
• Each letter draws attention to the teacher-student relationship and, in doing so, draws attention to some persona, 'Seneca,' behind the letters.

Referee-report sharing

[This post was inspired and encouraged by Sebastian Lutz; he should not be held responsible for the informal presentation of these matters.--ES]

Refereeing is a crucial professional obligation, especially now that most philosophers depend on (multiple) publication(s) for appointments and advancement. It also plays a non-trivial role in improving the quality of what is published. Yet, (a) refereeing is rarely taught. Even (b) experienced referees almost never get feedback on the quality of refereeing, so it is difficult to learn to calibrate one’s judgment. Moreover, (c) the relationship between the referee report and editorial decision-making is often opaque: (i)  few journals tell referees of the decision; (ii) sometimes the referee report and the decision seem not well connected; (iii) sometimes the referee report and the final publication seem not well connected. This last feature also makes refereeing unsatisfying (and may well be connected with the difficulty finding referees reported by Brogaard). I continue to referee, perhaps out of a sense of duty, but primarily because it forces me to read, engage with and reflect on recent work beyond my circle of intellectual friends before publication.

Now, recently I refereed a paper for a journal that asked me to also referee the revised paper (after resubmission). I was amazed to discover a whole package that included the original paper, all the original referee reports (including my own), and the revised paper. I found it fascinating to read the two other original referee reports. (It was also amusing because one of them suggested that the author should engage with Schliesser!)  It turned out that the three of us all saw what mattered about the paper, while also raising interesting (I think) objections that were subtly different. I was really impressed by the professionalism and thorough refereeing of the other two referees.  But this got me thinking, Why can’t referees see each other’s anonymous (!) reports after submitting their reports?* I write 'after' because the reports ought to be independent. It’s seems feasible with manuscript-central software. Can anybody offer an argument against this proposal?

Penn State suspends plan--APA's role highlighted in Chronicle

A few days ago we published a letter from the American Philosophical Association Committee on the Status of Women to Penn State on Penn State's planned discriminatory violations of privacy rights. The Chronicle reports that "has dropped a controversial plan to levy a $1,200 annual fine on employees who fail to answer health-related questions that many faculty members called too invasive." The Chronicle reports that:

In addition, this week the chairwoman of the American Philosophical Association's Committee on the Status of Women wrote a letter* to Penn State administrators saying questions about female employees' pregnancy plans were not only invasive but discriminatory.

"Penn State's health-care provider targets women employees by imposing on them a special burden of disclosure about their sexual intent," wrote Hilde Lindemann, a professor of philosophy at Michigan State University. "Are male employees required to disclose their intended sexual activity over the year?"

One small note: the university has not "dropped" the plan, but only suspended it (as the Chronicle's article makes clear); so vigilance is required. Meanwhile, congratulations to the employees of Penn State! And thank you to the APA and to Prof. Lindemann as well as her whole committee for your efforts.

The State of Nature and Emendation in Seneca (and Spinoza, and Adam Smith)

No man has ever been so advanced by Fortune that she not threaten him as greatly as she had previously indulged him. Do not trust her seeming calm; in a moment the sea is moved to its depths.—Seneca, Letter 4. 

In context, Seneca’s acceptance of epistemic uncertainty (or here) is as much about natural events (the sea) as political events—in the previous line we’re reminded of the fates of Pompey, Crassus, and Lepidus. Political mastery does not guarantee immunity against a violent end. Seneca is not blind to the probable destination of his political fall. More important, the violent underpinning of Roman political institutions means that nobody is truly master [dominus] in their “own homes” [domesticis]: “just as many have been killed by angry slaves as by angry kings.” Somebody that “scorns his own life” [vitam suam contemptsit] will not be afraid to die, in order to kill. Seneca offers a veritable picture of a state of nature under the rule of law: “every one possesses the power which you fear.”*

One might think that Seneca is anticipating Spinoza: the state of nature is never fully absent in civil society. But Seneca’s position here is compatible with a more optimistic possibility: if one can remove the sources of anger and scorn of self, one might have a more secure and, perhaps, even less uncertain environment. One may not be able to calms the sea, but the ship of state might be made more even-keeled. It is an open question if Seneca’s proposed emendation of minds [emendato animo] is strictly limited to a kind of enjoyable [freuris] self-help (recall), or (if we cheating-ly glace ahead toward Letter 7) also by way of improved state institutions and social norms.   

Speaking of Hoaxes

This is funny. [HT Steffen Ducheyne on FB]

A footnote to the Sokal Hoax

Let's stipulate that there is genuine bullshit (see Frankfurt 1986). Let's also stipulate there is bullshit in the Humanities, even in philosophy.

A lot of people I know in philosophy are pretty confident that much of what passes in Literary Theory and the philosophies that influence(d) it is bullshit. I have seen testimony people that ardently defend this view who have studied quite a bit of, say, Continental philosophy and reached this conclusion. (Of course, in reality, a lot more folk are dismissive on the basis of extremely slender personal, intellectual investment.)  When pressed for evidence, the Sokal Hoax is trotted out as exhibit A. It made a great splash inside the academy and the popular media that covers it. Rather than interpreting the case as an instance of bad refereeing, editorial misjudgment, whole areas of thought got written off by quite a few people.

I just learned that a paper was retracted from Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics--a very fine physics journal published by a reputable institute. It frankly reports, "The Editorial Board has investigated this and found that the XPS spectra shown in figure 3 all exhibit an identical noise pattern that is unphysical." [HT Retractionwatch] In other words, the journal published artfully presented bullshit. (It recently announced that it "is now using ScholarOne Manuscripts for submission and peer-review management.") Undoubtedly, this incident is unpleasant for all the parties involved, but nobody in their right mind will draw any inferences about physics from it.

The moral: very good journals can publish bullshit, and the refereeing institutions of all disciplines need constant maintenance.

On Refereeing a book ms.

[Rachel McKinnon solicited this post from me. She should be blamed for any insights.--ES]

Refereeing a book manuscript for a university press can be a daunting enterprise. If you don't watch out, it can be very time-consuming (some of us should be kept off the streets--you know who you are). Crucially, the norms that apply are not entirely clear. For example, if you find an invalid argument on p. 275, it might, after all, be worth repairing given all the other riches. But what if you find lots of problems (lack of citations, garden path arguments, etc), yet judge that the book will make a major contribution? Now, book-refereeing is rarely masked--referees nearly always know the identity of the author. Is there something to be gained to see the -- let's stipulate, dead-wrong -- views of, say, an influential PhD supervisor in print, rather than propogated in the works of the students?

More subtly, the interests of presses and the discipline do not coincide. Here's a concrete example: whatever you think of the substance of Nagel's Mind and Cosmos, it is undeniable that it could have benefitted from more exacting refereeing. Leaving aside his engagement with the (philosophy of) sciences, it is undeniable that  if Nagel had engaged with more recent analytic metaphysics he could have given a far better and more favorable account of the nature of the problem-space.  But, of course, if it had been seriously revised in light of serious refereeing it would have been almost certainly less readable and, perhaps, less controversial; it might also not have read anymore as Nagel's last will to the profession.

Here follow some de-feasible considerations that might inform book refereeing:

1. [A] Your main job as a referee is to help an editor -- almost never a professional philosopher -- figure out the significance of the book and anticipate how people in the field might respond to it. [Bl Your duty to the profession is to uphold scholarly standards (quality, citation practices, etc.).

Another ranking of journals

With interesting results. (It will give cheer to the logicians.) It's based on the so-called SJR indicator. [HT: Jean-Yves Beziau, who is the Editor-in-Chief at Logica Universalis]

Popper, Middlemarch and falsifiability

Victor Gijsbers has a nice analysis of this passage:

Doubtless a vigorous error vigorously pursued has kept the embryos of truth a-breathing: the quest of gold being at the same time a questioning of substances, the body of chemistry is prepared for its soul, and Lavoisier is born. But Mr. Casaubon's theory of the elements which made the seed of all tradition was not likely to bruise itself unawares against discoveries: it floated among flexible conjectures no more solid than those etymologies which seemed strong because of likeness in sound until it was shown that likeness in sound made them impossible: it was a method of interpretation which was not tested by the necessity of forming anything which had sharper collisions than an elaborate notion of Gog and Magog: it was as free from interruption as a plan for threading the stars together.

Philosopher defends philosophy funding by calling politician "dog-whistler"

Philosopher Paul Redding responds to pre-election public ridicule from an Austrialian politician. I quote the two concluding paragraphs of his piece first:

We sought ways around the gridlock of current debates over the role of religion in public life by examining the way an early 18th century philosopher and theologian had responded to similar circumstances by refashioning the concept of God to accommodate modern ways of thought. The Australian Research Council’s panel of experts, acting on the advice of independent specialist assessors, deemed it worth pursuing. On the basis of its title alone, however, Briggs deems it “ridiculous”.

On Representative Agents and Friendship (Seneca, Letter 3)

"Some men shrink into dark corners, to such a degree that they see darkly by day."--Pomponius, quoted by Seneca, Letter 3.

Our personality shapes, as Pomponius's maxim suggests, how we view the world. This is why any interpretation of a layered text often reveals as much about the interpreter as it does about the text. In the third letter, in the context of discussing a discussing true friendships [verae amicitiae], Seneca discusses three kinds of human types: (i) the gullible, (ii) the suspicious, and (iii) those that trust after a considered judgment (if this were a Platonic dialogue, we'd be looking for a fourth.)

Seneca does not explain much how good judgment is attained. He does exhibit a feature of it in the start of the letter:

You have sent a letter to me through the hand of a "friend" of yours, as you call him.  And in your very next sentence you warn me not to discuss with him all the matters that concern you, saying that even you yourself are not accustomed to do this; in oother words, you have in the same letter affirmed and denied that he is your friend. Now if you used this word of ours/a in the public [publico] sense, and called him "friend" in the same way in which we speak of all candidates for election as "honourable gentlemen,"...

Thus, a discerning judge pays attention to (a) the match between words and actions, and (b) does so by relying on (some) logic. More subtly, such a judge is aware that (c) the meaning of words is very context sensitive; in particular, (d) Seneca relies on a distinction between public the and private speech.* As we have seen, public speech is encountered in the market-place and politics, both the realm of uncertain uncertain and fickle popular opinion. One can have thousands of Facebook friends, but one's popularity need not imply credibility (and not all followers are steadfast).

Peter Ludlow Speaks Truth to Power in the NYT

Just as Hannah Arendt saw that the combined action of loyal managers can give rise to unspeakable systemic evil, so too generation W has seen that complicity within the surveillance state can give rise to evil as well — not the horrific evil that Eichmann’s bureaucratic efficiency brought us, but still an Orwellian future that must be avoided at all costs.--Peter Ludlow, "The Banality of Systematic Evil" in the NYT's The Stone.

The APA responds to Penn State's discriminatory violations of privacy rights

TO: David Gray, Senior Vice President for Finance and Busines

Susan Basso, Vice President for Human Resources

Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania

Dear Mr. Gray and Ms. Basso: 

According to an article in the 10 September Centre Daily Times and the 15 September New York Times, a health risk assessment questionnaire that is part of Penn State’s new employee wellness program asks women employees whether they plan to get pregnant in the next year. If the employee refuses to disclose this she is penalized $100 for every month she fails to yield up the information.

By requiring women employees to disclose information about their sex lives, Penn State violates their privacy rights and likely violates their rights under federal law (Title VII and The Pregnancy Discrimination Act, Title IX, privacy law, and equal protection). Highmark, Penn State’s health care provider, targets women employees by imposing on them a special burden of disclosure about their sexual intent. Are male employees required to disclose their intended sexual activity over the year? To avoid paying a fine, is a woman employee forced to lie? And if she has no plans but becomes pregnant accidentally, does that increase her insurance premiums?

Lehrer interviewed.

New blog, Aesthetics for Birds, has a nice interview with Keith Lehrer, although I would have liked to see a bit more critical engagement on the very notion of 'experience' that Lehrer relies on throughout the discussion (e.g, "The experience fills in the meaning of my words, I hope, adding something beyond linguistic meaning.").

We're either all imposters now, or none are...

Crookedtimber has a very good piece on a recent draft article by Anca Gheaus. I quote a sample:

One of her observations (true in my experience) is feeling like an imposters is often underlain by the assumption (which, if you reflected on it in the light of the evidence you would find ludicrous) that the pre-tokenistic method of selecting participants is purely meritocratic.

Sider on thinking the limits of the Linguistic Turn.

The reader may have a sense that we have gone off  the rails. To be honest, I share that sense. The claim that the category of sentence carves at the joints, for example...strains to the breaking-point my intuitive grip on the notion of joint carving...[I]t's evident from examples that there just is a metaphysically significant notion of saturation. I invite the skeptical reader not to simply dismiss the issue, but rather to join my struggle to make sense of this notion, and perhaps come up with something better. T.Sider, Writing the Book of the World (257) [emphasis in original--ES.]

An uncharitable -- not to be confused with the "skeptical" -- reader might interpret the passage above as a rhetorical way to dismiss an important worry (recall my earlier post). But this would miss what is at stake here;  Sider here recognizes (to speak pompously) the crucial, world-historical significance of his project, which madly pursues the 'linguistic turn' to its near-breaking point within analytical metaphysics. For, with 'saturation' Sider makes clear how his knee-jerk realism and his embrace of the method of final (or fundamental) language come together: the world consists of joints and these correspond to "a linguistic category: that of the complete sentence in a fundamental language. In a fundamental language, a language in which the category of sentence carves at the joints, sentences are always "metaphysically complete"--saturated." (254)

Now, this is not the place to offer Sider's ingenuous and persuasive argument for his idea that "there's something metaphysically distinctive...abut all parameters being filled. When all parameters are filled, we can call the result a [metaphysical] fact." (252). Let's accept that a fully regimented fundamental language contains a primitive operator that attaches to a dummy sentence-variable. We have here a way of thinking about submission to fact (recall and here) that is internally satisfying (and consistent). To put Sider's insight more informally, but it in the spirit of Sider, "when God created the world" she needed sentences to write the book of the world.

Sider's picture comes attractively close to offering a metaphysical bedrock that dispenses with the Principle of Sufficient Reason (and, thus, exorcise the ghost of Bradley's infinite regress that has haunted analytical philosophy since inception).

How to become Canonical

Why write at all if one respects the authority of canonical texts?

Our reading habits reveal our minds; reciprocally, the way and what we read can also shape, even nourish our minds. The words we read are not merely, as the saying goes, food for thought (and sometimes, thus, the semblance of thought), or trusted friends, but they can even be medicine of the mind. Seneca's second letter thus, takes for granted that words can impact us greatly. (The letter -- a compact 321 words -- turns on a series of equations among words, potions, nourishment, friendship, and location.) As we have already seen, this fact is crucial to the very possibility of escaping the ordinary exchange economy.

In the second letter, Seneca distinguishes sharply between unsteady, wandering minds and firmer ones. Now, it is possible that these are so by nature. But even the better sort of minds need cultivation; Seneca suggests that one can copy better readers (like him) and by imitating these good habits improve our minds. The better sort of readers have a limited set of enduring [certis] books that through repeated rediscovery nourish. By example Seneca shows that the better sort of reader is willing to be critical of such, canonical works--he makes a point of criticizing Epicurus. It's not that he disagrees with what Epicurus wishes to convey -- the opinion of the market-place can be wrong in rejecting all what it takes to be poverty --, but Seneca also criticizes Epicurus, in part, for embracing the axiology and conceptual apparatus of the market-place: Epicurus mistakenly treats poverty as something substantial that can be the subject of predication (such that there can be contented and miserable forms of poverty). Famously, Seneca insists that if one is cheerful, that is self-sufficient (i.e., one's needs do not go beyond one's possessions), one cannot be poor [Illa vero non est paupertas, si laeta est.], a position he already announces in his first letter.

On an alternative Political Economy (Seneca, Letter 1)

Omnia, Lucili, aliena sunt, tempus tantum nostrum est.--Seneca, Letter 1.

At 280 words -- shorter than most frivolous blog posts -- Seneca's first letter to Lucilius takes full advantage of the economy of Latin prose. Its brevity may, thus, be thought to be an exemplar of what it seems to preach (in the first sentence): not to lose time.* Economy is a major theme of the letter as it explores the nature of possession, scarcity, value, profit, and other familiar economic concepts. In fact, in the brief span of the letter Seneca introduces two conceptions of economy (or axiological frameworks): in one we exchange commodities governed by the values established in the market, that is, uncertain popular opinion; in the second necessary loss reigns.+ Given that Seneca devalues the "foolish" attachments formed in the former (and seems to embrace the latter), we ought to reconsider the idea that losing time is a problem.

In order to teach a political economy that is an alternative to the usual one, Seneca turns to a bit of metaphysics: time is our only intrinsic property--our other properties are alienable. Seneca suggests that time's supreme value is due both to this peculiar fact and the necessity of our mortality. In this first letter, Seneca does not fully explain why the time(s) of our lives is the only such intrinsic property. (One may wonder why not the space of our lives?) If we substitute dying (for time(s) of our lives), the thought presents itself that the reason why the time of our life is our only intrinsic property may be that one's death(s) is the only necessity in a life. (We can, after all, not pay our taxes.) 

Clearly, for Seneca to think or have a name is not necessary.

If time is of the essence, why write 280 words?

On 'postdoctoral tutors.'

I received my PhD from Columbia in June of 1950 but my education scarcely stopped there... I did not really know much about how to do any serious research and writing, since my graduate education did not involve the personal supervision of research of the kind so familiar to graduate students today. I was neither forced nor encouraged to produce early in my graduate career a publishable paper nor to because acquainted with the "how-to-do-it" aspects of research. I was, however, full of energy and brimming over with ideas. I thrashed around for a few months but fortunately I soon became acquainted with J. C. C. McKinsey, a logician who had recently joined the Department of Philosophy at Stanford. McKinsey served as my postdoctoral tutor.---Patrick Suppes.

It is (sound) conventional wisdom that one's fellow students can be as (or more) important as one's supervisors in one's education. But reading Suppes' autobiography reminded me of a bit of wisdom that my supervisor, Dan Garber, handed down to me during a 'reality-check moment' as I was contemplating a crucial career decision: if one is lucky (and wise) one's most important intellectual and professional mentors may be encountered on the job early in one's career. Much has changed since Suppes went to Stanford (and even since I obtained my first position), but Garber's point still stands. In the discipline this wisdom is obliquely recognized when people say that 'such-and-such department has a great track record hiring young people'. (I heard this a lot about Syracuse before and after I went there, but I am not impartial in this matter.) The truth would be better expressed as 'such-and-such department does a stellar job tutoring and developing recent hires.'

'What is Scientific Philosophy?'

"Scientific philosophy" as I will be using it here is an eighteenth century invention by now-forgotten philosophers (McLaurin, 's Gravesande) or not read as philosophers anymore (Euler) (and then opposed by now-canonical philosophers like Berkeley, Hume, Kant, and folk that are fun to read like Mandeville and Diderot) that, after the split between philosophy and science, was re-introduced into philosophy by people like Russell, and echoed by Carnap, and Reichenbach. Scientific philosophy has six characteristics:

1. Empirical ‘success’ trumps other (rational/methodological) claims. Given that scientific philosophers sometimes retreat to the idea that philosophy is an a priori discipline, the 'empirical' (in 1) is often re-packaged as, say, inference to the best explanation in light of a variety of enduring 'scientific virtues' (i.e., simplicity, scope, predictive power, fruitfulness, exactness, etc.) 
2. (a) Physics is the foundational science and/but it (b) has no need for ultimate foundations. While 2(a) may seem obvious (see, e.g., Ladymann & Ross) due to its universal scope, its foundational nature was contested well into the nineteenth century. One could imagine, say, the science of information taking over as the foundational science in the future.
3. Within scientific philosophy reason limits itself in various ways: in doing so (a) it avoid the fallacy of systematicity because it does not try to say everything about everything; (b) it embraces the intellectual division of labor (from 3(b)); it avoids the fallacy of (metaphysical) foundationalism because it has no need to try to to secure its practice in un-shakeable, first principles (see 2(b)). So, it is no surprise that Russell rejected the principle of sufficient reason or Bradley's regress argument. 
4. Scientific philosophy is a self-directed, autonomous practice; once one has mastered certain rigorous tools, one moves from one given experiment/solution (etc.) to the next problem. Given the emphasis on rigor, it is no surprise that:
5. Scientific philosophy is often opposed to a licentious or unintelligible alternative(s) associated with past failures, sometimes even moral. (Exhibit a.) It, thus, embraces commitments to transparency (and clarity). 
6. Scientific philosophy offers submission to the facts (recall) and is disciplined (recall) by way of a careful, painful, modest and most importantly open-ended progressive method. This entails that any scientific philosopher will enter a pre-existing, moving research trajectory and can expect to die before any destination is ever reached.

Figlio responds to Criticism

I wrote the lead-author, David Figlio, of the piece that Ed and I have critically discussed. He responded promptly and helpfully to my questions (and piece). In particular, he emphasized that "by universal agreement, I was the only person to ever handle raw data, so Morty [Schapiro--ES] could never see individual student or faculty member names, or even departments." I quote the rest of his response in full:

We haven't yet controlled for class size, but I am certain, given the Northwestern circumstance, that what you propose won't be the driving force here. An initial view of the distribution of class sizes between long-term lecturers and tenure-track faculty showed that they have a high degree of overlap. We are in the process of trying a variety of additional sample splits; however, I can assure you that every specification we attempted yielded the same fundamental conclusion.

On the so-called "The Stanford School of Philosophy of Science."

Last week I received a widely distributed announcement on a conference celebrating "The 'Stanford School' of Philosophy of Science." The 'core' members of this school are taken to be: Nancy Cartwright (Durham), John Dupré (Exeter), Peter Galison (Harvard), Peter Godfrey-Smith (CUNY), Patrick Suppes (Stanford). The parenthesis are the current affiliation of the 'core' members; this immediately suggests that if there is a 'school' at all we are either dealing with a historical phenomenon or very distributed one. Scanning the list of the 'next generation' confirms that Stanford is not the current base of the purported school.

First, I adore much of the work done by many in the 'core,' but the idea that this group is a 'school' is deeply flawed. For, Suppes is far better understood (as he does himself) as belonging to the first generation (including Kyburg, Pap, Isaac Levi) intellectual off-spring of Ernest Nagel, who successfully created American analytical philosophy by combining the Scientific wing of Pragmatism with the new approaches emanating from Vienna, especially, and Cambridge (recall and here). In his autobiography, Suppes describes how assimilated from Nagel the significance of history of science. 

A question about that Northwestern teaching quality study

Prompted by Ed's excellent piece, I looked at the NBER working paper that undoubtedly will be used to undermine tenure at a variety of universities. It is worth noting that one of the authors of the piece is the current President of Northwestern University; undoubtedly this helped with gaining access to the data. But it also makes one wonder if, perhaps, there wasn't a directed search in the data. After all, one can get a bit too close to the subject studied. It would be nice if some independent statistician can obtain access to the raw data.

The end of open-ended progress is near...

It may well be irrational to believe that history is progress after the unprecedented moral and political calamities of the twentieth century. But it does not follow, as [John] Gray apparently assumes, that history has no meaning. There is another possibility. To my knowledge Gray never endorses it, and it extremely difficult for a post-Darwinian mind to grap, but it has been presumed true by most civilizations and philosophies of the past, and is still so regarded by many non-Westernized cultures today. The possibility is that history does indeed have a meaning, purpose and end, and that these can easily be discerned by human beings, but that the direction of history's development is backward not forwards. History is not progress but regress, not advance but decline, and it leads to destruction rather than to utopia.--David Hawkes reviewing John Gray "The Silence of Animals" in TLS (30 August, 2013).

Let's distinguish four main conceptions of history:

Eternal Return. Within philosophy this goes back to Book 3 of Plato's Laws. It was revived by Nietzsche (and is part of the sub-structure of much continental philosophy and via Ian Hacking it is seeping into philosophy of science). It accords well with a cyclical conception of history with a rise and fall narrative or with periodic destruction of civilization(s) (think of the Atlantis story in the Timaeus and Bacon's riff on it). I expect it to become increasingly attractive to people as we head for man-made environmental catastrophe.

Not Forwarding Referee Comments

Recently, one of my papers got rejected at a very good journal that I admire very much and that I have been happy to referee for. The editor accompanied the the rejection with the claim that "our policy is not to send referee's reports or comments on papers that have not been accepted or recommended for revision." I hastened to the journal website and -- indeed! -- the policy is clearly announced in the author's guidelines. So, I have no standing to complain.  Note to self: do read these more carefully in the future.

But...such a policy does come with a foreseeable cost: I am far less inclined to referee for this journal again now that I know there is a good chance my (often elaborate) comments are not forwarded to the author. And even if I were to referee again, it would be with less care and scruples. While a referee report is primarily intended for an editor to make an informed judgment, I always hope that the (refereed) author's work is thereby improved. I do not want to be accused of idealism, but as scholars we really are in this together.

Reformed Political Pluralism

This splendid review by Kelly Sorensen of Wolterstorff's recent volume of essays (edited by the distinguished philosopher, Terence Cuneo [this goes unremarked in the review]) calls attention to six "arguments against public reason liberalism." The first two are described as follows:

First, public reason liberalism actually is not realistic enough. One's capable adult fellow citizens clearly do not universally endorse the same reasons. So public reason liberalism has to idealize -- it has to imagine what reasons capable adult fellow citizens would endorse if they met certain hypothetical conditions, with the presumption that a consensus or convergence about these reasons would emerge. The hypothetical conditions vary from one brand of public reason liberalism to another...Why think disagreement about these reasons will disappear under idealization? ... So public reason liberalism is not realistic enough: we are stuck with pluralism, and we cannot idealize our way out of it.

Second, public reason liberalism is paternalistic and patronizing, despite its lip service to respect. Suppose Jones favors some policy on religious reasons that do not qualify as public reasons. Smith, a fan of public reason liberalism, is stuck with telling Jones, "You shouldn't express your reasons in public discussion, and you shouldn't vote on them. Here instead are the kinds of reasons that count -- reasons you would endorse if you were not under-informed and rationally impaired." Jones will of course find this condescending and patronizing. 

Some might wish to explore the degree public reason Liberalism (Rawls, Larmore, etc.) can respond to these problems or needs to be amended by what Sorensen calls "aspirational public reason liberalism." That's not my concern here. Rather, it's fascinating (to me) to see the embrace of political pluralism by a central figure in Reformed philosophy and theology. (Now, one might claim that this just continues Dooyeweerd's embrace of pluralism in a religiously divided society, but Dooyeweerd's philosophy has its own problem(s) with paternalism. [Recall this on Dooyeweerd & Plantinga.]) Progressive and Conservative American protestant political thought is generally characterized by monistic conceptions of the good, which animate a variety of (often noble) moral 'crusades.'

A New Album (*Interlocuter*) for Charity by The Monads!

Our friends, The 21_st Century Monads, write:

So what we are going to do is this. You can purchase the uncompressed .wav files by taking the following steps. First, make a donation to the charity of your choice in the amount that you think is appropriate.  There is no minimum donation, but we of course recommend that you be generous!  

Second, send an email to the following email address:

[email protected]

In this email, simply tell us that you have made a charitable donation; you don’t need to tell us where if you don’t want to.  We’d appreciate if you’d tell us the amount donated since we would like to know how much money has been raised in this fashion. However, we won’t require that you do this.  There is no minimum amount you must donate (and obviously no maximum amount either).  We are simply going to take your word that you have made a donation.

After you have sent the email, you will receive an email in response that will contain a link directing you where to download a .zip file that contains all the songs.   Also included in this package will be liner notes, a .pdf with a printable cd-booklet, and bonus remixes of four of the songs.

No money needs to go into our pockets even temporarily and there are no overhead costs.   Every cent of every dollar you donate will go straight to the charity of your choice, and in return you get the full album immediately in a higher-resolution format.   We aren't trying to make money with this endeavor -- we are trying to do a little good for others.