New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Unhealthy Skepticism: Foregone Conclusions and Bernie Sanders

By Roberta Millstein

Philosophers, and many thoughtful people more generally, pride themselves on having a healthy skepticism toward claims made by the media, by politicians, by scientists – by pretty much anyone. And rightly so. Many issues are complex and have not just two sides, but multiple sides. One ought not accept proffered claims without examining all of the evidence and without thinking about whether the evidence supports the claims being made. But are there times when a healthy skepticism becomes unhealthy?

In my field, philosophy of science, we often have meta-discussions about the extent to which we should accept scientific findings or question them. But even the most naturalistic philosopher of science thinks that we ought to be skeptical of scientific findings at least some of the time and under some circumstances.

In politics, some claim that we are starting to see a surge from U.S. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. But some are skeptical. Some think that Sanders doesn't actually have a chance of winning the Democratic nomination or the U.S. Presidency. Should we be skeptical, too – would that be a healthy skepticism?

I don't think it is. I don't think we should have the same skepticism toward towards claims about future political outcomes as we have towards scientific claims. The reason is simple: in evaluating scientific claims, we are evaluating existing evidence. As new evidence comes in, we might change our evaluation, but our beliefs, whether in favor or against a given claim, are not affecting the evidence or the truth of the claim itself.

But when evaluating claims about future political events, the situation is different. To see this, let's suppose that Jane Voter likes Sanders's platform, agrees with his values and proposals, but, being of skeptical bent, Jane decides that Sanders is too much of a long shot and doesn't really have a chance. This belief leads her not to support Sanders's campaign; it also leads her to suggest to her friends and and family that it would be a waste of time to do so.

The more Janes there are in the world, the more they can convince their friends and family, the more their beliefs become a foregone conclusion. That is, unlike like beliefs about scientific claims, beliefs about political outcomes actually change the outcomes. The skepticism becomes unhealthy.

We should act to bring about the outcomes that we find desirable, not sabotage those outcomes while brandishing the banner of skepticism.

Why is this philosophy?

By Roberta Millstein

Most philosophers of science have been on the receiving end of this question at one time or another. A friend of mine recently called it a type of hate speech. I think my friend was joking. But maybe not. Philosophers of science struggle to get into grad programs, to obtain jobs, to earn promotion and tenure, to be perceived as "central" and important figures in the field, all because their work is not seen as philosophical. So, while it may not be hate speech, it is speech that does genuine harm.

This isn't a new issue and it's one that others have touched before. But a number of recent events have brought the issue to mind for me and emphasized the importance of continuing to discuss it. One in particular was a conversation with a colleague whose opinion I value and whose good faith I have utter confidence in. And yet this colleague had doubts about an essay being philosophical even as I could see that it fell squarely within the domain of philosophy of science. The colleague was willing to take my word for it, but the fact that such a well meaning person had doubts really brought home to me the fact that this is (at least in some case) simply a lack of awareness about philosophy of science. Thus this post. I can't hope to fully convince anyone in a blog post length entry, but I can at least point to some of the other events that have got me thinking about this topic again.

The second event was the excellent essay "Philosophical Enough" by Subrena Smith, a recent Featured Philosop-her. Smith rightly points out:

The Philosophical Education of Scientists

By: Samir Chopra

Yesterday, in my Twentieth Century Philosophy class, we worked our way through Bertrand Russell's essay on "Appearance and Reality" (excerpted, along with "The Value of Philosophy" and "Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description" from Russell's 'popular' work The Problems of Philosophy.) I introduced the class to Russell's notion of physical objects being inferences from sense-data, and then went on to his discussions of idealism, materialism, and realism as metaphysical responses to the epistemological problems created by such an understanding of objects. This discussion led to the epistemological stances--rationalism and empiricism--that these metaphysical positions might generate. (There was also a digression into the distinction between necessary and contingent truths.)

At one point, shortly after I had made a statement to the effect that science could be seen as informed by materialist, realist, and empiricist conceptions of its metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions, I blurted out, "Really, scientists who think philosophy is useless and irrelevant to their work are stupid and ungrateful."  This was an embarrassingly intemperate remark to have made in a classroom, and sure enough, it provoked some amused twittering from my students, waking up many who were only paying partial attention at that time to my ramblings.

Concerning events at the journal Science

By Roberta Millstein

My friend Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, a historian of science at the University of Florida, has drawn my attention to a number of concerning events at the eminent journal Science.

One was an appalling magazine cover, for which they were roundly and rightly criticized. The Editor-in-Chief issued a non-apology for the cover, saying that she is "truly sorry for any discomfort that this cover may have caused anyone" and promising "that we will strive to do much better in the future to be sensitive to all groups and not assume that context and intent will speak for themselves." 

A second recent development is the shortening of book reviews to 600 words, with an increased focus on popular books and fewer reviews coming from scholars in the history and philosophy of science as compared to the past. This is an unfortunate loss of an important perspective from Science.

Now, a blog post from Michael Balter, who has been with the journal for over 21 years, talks about some of the behind-the-scenes troubles at Science and its publishing organization, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). These include the recent dismissal of four women in the art and production departments, with essentially no notice in three cases and very little notice in the fourth case, and the absence of any serious response to the concerns expressed by the overwhelming majority of Science's news staff about the way these dismissals were handled.

I am not in a position to fully comment on these recent developments; I am only reporting what I have read and what I have been told. But as a member of the AAAS Section on History and Philosophy of Science (Section L) I am very concerned. Indeed, perhaps given the important role that Science plays, we should all be concerned about what what is involved with the "strategic transformation that AAAS is currently undergoing, to enhance its engagement with its members and to be in the forefront of the multimedia landscape of the future."

Mechanism, Salience, and Belief Change

New APPS readers probably remember Helen De Cruz's excellent post on the polarized debate surrounding evolutionary science (which was picked up by NPR), as well as Roberta Millstein's follow-up post on the perhaps equally polarized debate concerning climate change. Both posts cite the work of Dan Kahan, who has a distinct take on these issues:

"I study risk perception and science communication. I’m going to tell you what I regard as the single most consequential insight you can learn from empirical research in these fields if your goal is to promote constructive public engagement with climate science in American society. It's this: What people “believe” about global warming doesn’t reflect what they know; it expresses who they are."

I just attended a talk by Michael Ranney, who opposes Kahan's position. In Ranney's view, communicating the mechanism of global climate change is enough to change the minds of people on both sides of the political spectrum. (Check out the videos!) Ranney shows, surprisingly, that just about no one understands the mechanism of climate change (Study 1). Further, he shows that revealing that mechanism changes participants' minds about climate change (Study 2). 

Why might this be?

On evolutionary biology and giving religion a "pass"

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

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

Thinking about the technological singularity

Next Saturday, the University of Leuven is hosting an outreach event called Philosophy Festival ("Feest van de Filosofie"). This year's theme is people & technology ("mens & techniek"). I was asked to join a panel discussion on the technological singularity. The introduction will be given by a computer engineer (Philip Dutré, Leuven). There will be a philosopher of technology (Peter-Paul Verbeek, Twente) and a philosopher of probability (me, Groningen); and the moderator is a philosopher, too (Filip Mattens, Leuven). So far, I have not worked on this topic, although it does combine a number of my interests: materials science, philosophy of science, and science fiction.

The idea of a technological singularity (often associated with Ray Kurzweil) originates from the observation that the rate of technological innovations seems to be speeding up. Extrapolating these past and current trends suggests that there may be a point in the future at which systems that have been built by humans (software, robots, ...) will become more intelligent than humans. This is called the technological singularity. Moreover, once there are systems that are able to develop systems that are more intelligent than systems of the previous generation, there may be an intelligence explosion. The possibilities of later generations of such systems are inconceivable to humans. (This theme has been explored in many science fiction stories, including the robot stories by Isaac Asimov (1950's and later), the television series "Battlestar Galactica" (2004-2009), and the movie "Her" (2013).)

Even this brief introduction gives us plenty of opportunity for reflection on concepts (What is intelligence?) and consequences (What will happen to humans in a post-singularity world?). I am planning to analyze a very basic assumption, by raising the following question: When are we justified to pick a particular trend that has been observed in the past (e.g., Moore's observation of an exponential increase in the number of transistors on commercial chips) and extrapolate it into the future? Viewed in this way, the current topic is an example of the general problem of induction.

The hypothesis "The observed trend will continue to hold" is only one among many. Let me offer two alternative hypotheses:

Positive interactions between scientists and philosophers

Many philosophers of science are understandably excited about Neil deGrasse Tyson's reinvorgoration of the TV show Cosmos.  After all, most of us are pretty excited about science and anything that improves the public's scientific literacy.  Thus, it is extremely disappointing to hear him articulate the comments that he does at about 1:02:46 of this video.* He says that a "philosopher is a would-be scientist without a laboratory" and that we have been "rendered essentially obsolete."  He later suggests that there is much positive work that a philosophers can do (in ethics, for example), but doesn't seem to think that there can be any good philosophy of science.  (Richard Dawkins, who is also shown in the video, seems to take a slightly more positive view of the field). 

This morning, I saw two things that shook the cobwebs: 1) Eric Winsberg's intriguing post about dark matter, and, more to the point at hand, the fact that he was at an event that involved astronmers and philosophers, and 2) with the web announcement for a “Genomics and Philosophy of Race” Conference that I am a part of, involving both biologists and philosophers (not to mention historians and sociologists).  These two events are only two of the many, many productive collaborations between scientists and philosophers of science.  We need to do a better job telling people about them, and about telling the general public what philosophers of science do.

* H/T to Lucas Matthews, graduate stuent at the University of Utah, for the pointer to the video and NdGT's attitude toward philosophy of science

as goes generalized philosophy of science?

I had a weird visceral thought after reading two recent NDPR reviews:

• The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Physics (ed. Robert Batterman, including a cool piece by friend of the blog David Wallace), and
• Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics (Hsiang-Ke Chao, Szu-Ting Chen, and Roberta L. Millstein, of newapps fame)

If Plutynski and Weatherall's reviews are right (and they read wonderfully) both books in different ways seem to me to mark decisive moves away from Generalized Philosophy of Science. The very first paragraph of Weatherall's reads:

If this collection has an overarching theme, it is that the details matter. If philosophers hope to understand contemporary physics, we need to engage in depth both with the technicalities of our best physical theories and the practicalities of how those theories are applied. The authors in this volume brush aside an older tradition in the philosophy of physics -- and the philosophy of science more generally -- in which actual physics entered only to illustrate high-level accounts of theories, explanation, or reduction. Of course, by itself, dismissing this tradition is hardly worth remarking on: such an approach to philosophy of physics has been going out of fashion for decades. Taken as whole, however, this volume pushes the theme still further, in ways that mark important shifts in recent philosophy of physics.

And Plytinski's second paragraph is:

Origins of the first people in the Americas

I have nothing particularly interesting to say on the topic, but this account of recent science on the migration of people to the Americas is fascinating.  What is most cool is the way that three distinct scientific routes - genetics, archeology, and linguistics - are converging on an account.

Recently discovered: 100+ computer-generated papers. Relation to spamference?

On the Nature website, Richard Van Noorden reports that a French computer scientist, Cyril Labbé, has discovered over 120 computer-generated papers that have been published in conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Over 100 of these papers were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and 16 others appeared in Springer publications.

The papers have been composed using SCIgen, which only requires the user to input author names, and automatically generates random papers that look like Computer Science, but which are actually meaningless. Cyril Labbé has written a program that is able to recognize papers that have been generated by SCIgen. (The program compares the vocabulary of a text to that of a reference corpus; in particular, it measures the inter-textual distance as the proportion of word-tokens shared by two texts. For details of the method, see Labbé's 2012 paper published in Scientometrics.)

The proceedings issues that appeared in Springer publications were (supposed to be) peer-reviewed; for the IEEE proceedings, it is less clear whether they underwent peer review. In any case, the former examples show that the peer review system is not always watertight, not just in the case of open-access journals (which was also discussed here at NewApps).

Most of the conferences took place in China and most of the authors have Chinese affiliations. Of course, it remains to be checked whether the author names correspond to real scholars and if so, whether they were aware of the submission in their name. Nature was able to contact one actual researcher: he does not know why his name appeared in the author list of such a computer-generated paper.

Below the fold, I offer a speculation on the motivation behind the submission of these fake papers.

Time capsule from 1958: Women in Physics

After a recent move and going through my storage facility, I came across the following memo (below the fold--click to enlarge) among some of my late mother’s things.   The date is February 19th, 1958, and the author is Nobel Prize winner Polykarp Kush.  My mother was then a graduate student in Physics at Columbia University.  Do read it for yourself in all its blue mimeographed glory, but the money line is, of course, “If your personal lives are of such complexity that they require a continuing contact with family and friends in time that should be devoted to a serious concern with physics, I very much doubt that you have the makings of a good physicist.”  I heard my mother joke about seeing this memo posted in her lab at least a half-dozen times, but I never knew she kept a copy of the memo for fifty years!  She left physics with a Masters degree and returned to graduate school to get her PhD in data analysis in the late 70s.  She always told the memo-story as if it were a knee-slapper (“Physicists in those days were such characters!”) and she never really mentioned the climate for women as a reason why she left Physics.

How well-meant efforts can fuel skepticism about climate change, evolution and vaccines

In a series of experiments, the developmental psychologists Paul Harris, Kathleen Corriveau and Melissa Koenig have shown that young children are more confident about the existence of unobservable scientific entities than they are about the existence of unobservable (semi-)religious entities. 5-year-olds in the Boston area, for example, were more sure about the existence of germs and oxygen than they were about the existence of God and Santa Claus. The experimenters were surprised by this finding, and replicated in several settings, including children from religious households in Spain who were sent to religious (Catholic) schools, and children from a Mayan community in Mexico (Santa was replaced by local spirits that people widely express belief in). As I will show below the fold, a plausible explanation for why children are less confident about religious entities is that the testimony to religious entities differs from that of most scientific entities. It that’s true, we need to rethink how to spread and promote the acceptance of “controversial” scientific ideas like climate change, the safety of vaccines, and evolutionary theory. For, as I will argue, some well-meant efforts to promote such ideas may actually backfire and fuel skepticism. 

Orgasms and Adaptationism

If Elisabeth Lloyd’s take on the female orgasm is correct—i.e. if it is homologous to the male orgasm—then FEMALE ORGASM is not a proper evolutionary category. Homology is sameness. Hence, male and female orgasms belong to the same category. The orgasm is an adaptation, whether male or female (and Lloyd should agree). It is not a spandrel or by-product. 

I’ll get back to this in a moment, but first some background. There are five NewAPPSers who have a particular interest in the philosophy of biology. Roberta Millstein, Helen De Cruz, Catarina Dutilh Novaes, John Protevi, and myself. Aside from Roberta, each of us comes at it from a related area in which biological insight is important. For me, that area is perception. I have written quite a bit about biology, but my mind has always been at least half on the eye (and the ear, and the nose, and the tongue, . . .).

There is a divide among us with respect to a leading controversy in the field. Catarina is strongly anti-adaptationist and I am strongly adaptationist (perhaps because of my motivating interest in perception, which is exquistely adaptive).  Roberta, Helen, and John are somewhere in between, but likely closer to Catarina than to me. You can gauge where I stand when I tell you that in my view, Gould and Lewontin’s 1979 anti-adaptationist manifesto, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm” is one of the worst, and certainly one of the most mendacious, papers I have ever read in any field. Among the five of us, I am sure I am alone in this.

Given all of this, my take on adaptationism with regard to the orgasm may get a hotly negative response from my co-bloggers. Nevertheless, I’ll get on with it.

What female orgasm and deductive reasoning have in common: they are not adaptations

Evolutionary accounts of deductive reasoning have been enjoying a fair amount of popularity in the last decades. Some of those who have defended views of this kind are Cooper, Maddy, and more recently Joshua Schechter. The basic idea is that an explanation for why we have developed the ability to reason deductively (if indeed we have developed this ability!) is that it conferred a survival advantage to those individuals who possessed it among our ancestors, who in turn were reproductively more successful than those individuals in the ancestral population who did not possess this ability. In other words, deductive reasoning would have arisen as an adaptation in humans (and possibly in non-human animals too, but I will leave this question aside). Attractive though it may seem at first sight (and I confess having had a fair amount of sympathy for it for a while), this approach faces a number of difficulties, and in my opinion is ultimately untenable. (Some readers will not be surprised to hear this, if they recall a previous post where I argue that deductive reasoning is best seen as a cultural product, not as a biological, genetically encoded endowment in humans.)

In this post, I will spell out what I take to be the main flaw of such accounts, namely the fact that they seem incompatible with the empirical evidence on deductive reasoning in human reasoners as produced by experimental psychology. In this sense, these accounts fall prey to the same mistake that plagues many evolutionary accounts of female orgasm, in particular those according to which female orgasm has arisen as an adaptation in the human species. To draw the parallel between the case for deductive reasoning and the case for the female orgasm, I will rely on Elisabeth Lloyd’s fantastic book The Case of the Female Orgasm (which, as it so happens, I had the pleasure of re-reading during my vacation last week).

On Fundamental Assumptions in economics and philosophy

Ingrid Robeyns has a very nice post at Crookedtimber with an excellent discussion on why "economics should become much more aware of the values it (implicitly or explicitly) endorses. Those values are embedded in some of the basis concepts used but also in some of the assumptions in the theory-building." Her post includes a lovely, brief and clear treatment of the abuse of the Pareto-improvement criterion; it's worth your time to check it out.

However, I worry a bit about the meme that focuses on the lack of clarity about values by economists. For, it reinforces the convenient economist's (and philosopher's) distinction between positive and normative questions, embraced since Sidgwick encouraged the split between the two fields (recall and here). To put the worry more constructively and subtly reinterpret my two earlier posts (here and here) on Raj Chetty's widely discussed NYT op-ed piece: economists are not transparent about their status-quo bias that is embedded in their empirical methodology, which (recall (and here and here), takes important institutions and norms as given).[+] From the point of view of the political economy of economics this (relative) status-quo bias of policy oriented economics is to be expected because the demand for economists is fuelled by existing institutions. 

On the demise of the PSR and The Nature of Analytical Philosophy

One attractive story about the demise of the Principle Sufficient Reason (PSR) is that it was discarded in the founding of analytical philosophy together with the heritage of British Idealism and related polemics against Spinoza (and Bergson) by Bertrand Russell. When Russell was given the option, accept (a) Bradley's Regress or (b) the PSR, he chose neither; and he opted, instead, for (c) submission to scientific fact: "The scientific philosophy, therefore...aims only at understanding the world... without being turned aside from that submission to fact which is the essence of the scientific temper." (On Scientific Method In Philosophy [recall my discussion and Jeff Bell.] If the to-be-explained-facts are brute, then it is possible that even if they can be fully captured by integrated into a theory/model (etc.) some arbitrariness is inevitable (in, say, initial conditions). One might even think that this stance is (informally) justified by the "principle of indifference" that accompanies the embrace of a classical probability theory in one's inductive logic (see, Carnap).

On Fossils and Economists (and Spinozistic Anti-Mathematics)

"I have no great faith in political arithmetick, and I mean not to warrant the exactness of either of these computations." Adam Smith (1776) Wealth of Nations.

While Ancient writers (Pliny) certainly noted the existence of fossils, the meaning of the existence fossils was explosive during the eighteenth century. In posthumously published work on Discourse on Earthquakes (1705), the secretary of the Royal Society, Robert Hooke, had while surveying fossil evidence suggested that "There have been many other Species of Creatures in former Ages, of which we can find none at present; and that 'tis not unlikely also but that there may be divers new kinds now, which have not been from the beginning." (here)

As it happens, Adam Smith's two best friends in old age, James Hutton and Joseph Black, the editors of his posthumous (1795) work, Essays on Philosophical Subjects (EPS), understood what was at stake. For, in 1785 Hutton gave a public lecture, “Concerning the System of the Earth, Its Duration, and Stability,” at University of Edinburgh. Due to Hutton's illness, Black gave the lecture on Hutton’s behalf. In the lecture Hutton used geological and fossil evidence to argue that the Earth was almost certainly older than 6000 years. We do not know for sure if Smith attended the lecture, although he was in town.The argument was elaborated in far greater detail in Hutton's (1788) Theory of the Earth, which made him an international celebrity. The significance of this episode to the history of geology and Darwinism is much studied.

But what does this have to do with the history of economics?

Smith's closeness to Hutton may provide additional clues for one of the enduring mysteries of the history of economics: why did Adam Smith forsake the deployment of a mathematical model in the Wealth of Nations (1776)?

Copernicus, Spinoza, Rheticus, and Accomodation

True understanding of everything contained in the sacred writings is to be sought from them, and not elsewhere...we do not study the passages about nature as if Scripture were a philosophical textbook [of nature], but rather as books in which the Holy Spirit desired to teach us something necessary for our salvation...For who would deny that if God, the creator of nature, had desired to describe the nature of things for us by His Word, nothing in the whole world could have remained hidden to us, of which we now would not know exactly, the nature, causes, and powers?--G.J.Rheticus, translated by R. Hooykaas.

Rheticus is Copernicus sole student. I was reminded of his significance by examining a PhD dissertation, "Lutheran Astronomers after the Fall (1540-1590): A reappraisal of the Renaissance dynamic of religion and astronomy," by the Ghent historian of science, Dr. Nienke Roelants (recall here and here). The quoted passage was probably written around 1541 (so before Copernicus death and the publication of On the Revolutions) as part of a short treatise on biblical interpretation in light of the embrace of mobility of the earth. It was only published as an addition to Gorleaus Idea Physicae in Utrecht in 1651.

Scientific metrics may allow for huge efficiency gains

Before long the metrics are so accurate, nobody needs to read any scientific papers. Nature has the story. [HT Andreas Ortmann on FB.]

Marc Hauser's Second Chance

One annoying feature of re-reading other people's scholarship, is the possibility of discovering that one's  treasured ideas may well be anticipated by others. Memory and self-deception can be funny like that. So, it's probably not uncommon that folk really fail to attribute to others what is due to them without realizing they are in the wrong. Even when the mistakes are honest, they still involve injustices, and these may be quite large given that they may, say, reinforce gender related unfairness,  too. Such injustices are not easy to excuse or forgive when one feels that one's work or presence has been silenced or unfairly ignored. Even so, we try to cope with this kind of injustice. Yet, faking data or copying (and pasting) texts without attribution is legitimately an unpardonable sin in the Academy, especially if it is part of a pattern of such (plagiarism/faking) cases. One might be willing to give a student a second chance, but recoil from letting a confirmed fraudulent senior scholar back into the fold. Paradoxically many of us treat such cases as worse sin than many crimes on the 'outside.' (Coetzee's Disgrace reflects on this.)

It is, thus, understandable that the good folk at Retractionwatch react with dismay that prominent scholars, including philosophy's very own Philip Pettit, are willing to endorse Marc Hauser's forthcoming book, Evilicious. What really rankles Retractionwatch is that Hauser has not  owned up to his record of misconduct and "only acknowledged “mistakes.”" (As they write: "But we do prefer when those given a second chance acknowledge that they did something wrong. That might start with noting a retraction, instead of continuing to list the retracted paper among your publications.")

Elsevier, do we have a problem? Or, a real hoax in the sciences

Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications (BBRC), a journal that proudly lists that it is "the fastest submission-to-print journal! Number 1 journal in the Thomson's JCR ranking for Biophysics in terms of Total Cites, Number of Articles and Eigen Factor ™ score." It is a "5-Year Impact Factor: 2.500." Apparently, sometimes speed does not pay because the journal has been victim of a spectacular hoax (recall). Nature reports:

Ghost writing is taking on an altogether different meaning in a mysterious case of alleged scientific fraud. The authors of a paper published in July (A. Vezyraki et al. Biochem. Biophys. Res. Commun. http://doi.org/nxb; 2013), which reported significant findings in obesity research, seem to be phantoms. They are not only unknown at the institution listed on the paper, but no trace of them as researchers can be found. [HT Stefan Heßbrüggen]

Oddly enough, so far there is no evidence that the hoax was perpetrated to expose the vulnerability of scientific refereeing practices. In fact, Nature quotes a scientists (the one who alerted the editors to the hoax), who "believes that the paper was intended to hurt him and his lab."

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. 

Gaps between science and humanities, or lack thereof: Philosophy of biology

I certainly applaud and concur with the spirit of Gary Gutting's recent piece, "Science’s Humanities Gap."  He agrees with Steven Pinker that specialists in any area are likely to benefit from acquaintance with relevant work beyond their disciplinary boundaries, but thinks that Pinker errs in saying that it is humanists who need to pay more attention to science.  Instead, Gutting says, "it’s humanists who are the choir and scientists who need a call to grace."  Gutting then goes on to characterize all of the areas in which philosophy has been informed by a deep knowledge of science.  All well and good.

However, I have a bone to pick with Gutting.  Here is the sum total of what he has to say about the philosophy of biology: "Philosophers of biology like David Hull have been similarly well versed in that discipline [as philosophers of physics have been versed in physics]."  It is true that Hull is a fine example of someone who was well-versed in biology, who engaged with biologists, and who inspired many other philosophers of biology to do likewise.  But that is just the point.  Many, many other philosophers of biology since Hull have immersed themselves in various areas of biology – far too many to list here, since such philosophers comprise a substantial portion of the field.  What I can attempt to list, however, is all of the different areas of biology that philosophers of biology engage with, knowing that I will miss some: systematics (an area that Hull particularly focused on), genetics, population genetics, paleobiology, developmental biology, evo-devo, molecular biology, genomics and other -omics, ecology, conservation biology, cell biology, behavioral biology.  Once all these areas are listed, it becomes clearer just how empirical the philosophy of biology has become.

The problem with giving short shrift to philosophy of biology is that one might actually walk away with the opposite impression of what was intended, i.e., one might get the mistaken impression that not much science-oriented philosophy of biology is going on.  And that would be a shame, particularly since Pinker could do with a greater appreciation of the philosophy of biology, such as Elisabeth Lloyd's excellent shredding of his views in"Kanzi, evolution, and language."

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.

Recycling Sexist Stereotypes in Philosophy of Science.

These are all general merits of the book, which make it refreshing, stimulating, and well worth the reading time of Joe the Philosopher of Science (not to mention Joe the Doctor). In addition, the prose is clear and lively.--Alex Broadbent, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 80, No. 1 (January 2013), pp. 165-6.

I am all for clear and lively prose, especially in reviews. But  "Joe the Philosopher of Science" and "Joe the Doctor" is inappropriate language for a professional review in a leading journal. It recycles stereotypes (cf. stereotype  threat) without any philosophical benefit, or economy of prose.

Moreover, 'Joe the doctor' is also a terrible statistical generalization. In the US women were 47.0% of all first year medical school students in 2010-2011 and women are 45.4% of all residents/fellows. In Britain: women doctors will outnumber men by 2017. Finally, there is a very a good chance that when Prof. Broadbent needs medical care in South Africa his physician will be female. My unsolicited advise, don't call her "Joe," Prof.[*]

 

[*] My wife is a surgeon, so maybe I am not impartial observer here.  

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”.

'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.

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.

"Junior members should cut their teeth on lesser subjects"

But if cattle and horses and lions had hands
or could paint with their hands and create works such as men do,
horses like horses and cattle like cattle
also would depict the gods' shapes and make their bodies
of such a sort as the form they themselves have.--Xenophanes

"Not all ethical issues are equally important. Many ethicists spend their professional lives performing in sideshows.

However entertaining the sideshow, sideshow performers do not deserve the same recognition or remuneration as those performing on our philosophical Broadways.

What really matters now is not the nuance of our approach to mitochondrial manipulation for glycogen storage diseases, or yet another set of footnotes to footnotes to footnotes in the debate about the naturalistic fallacy. It is: (a) Whether or not we should be allowed to destroy our planet (and if not, how to stop it happening); and (b) Whether or not it is fine to allow 20,000 children in the developing world to die daily of hunger and entirely avoidable disease  (and if not, how to stop it happening). My concern in this post is mainly with (a). A habitable planet is a prerequisite for all the rest of our ethical cogitation. If we can’t live here at all, it’s pointless trying to draft the small print of living....

So:  University philosophy departments should be restructured. The junior members should cut their teeth on lesser subjects such as the mind-body problem. As their experience, status and salary rises, they should increasingly specialise in problems (a) and (b). By the time they have reached the top of the tree, that’s all they should be doing. Anyone who wants to spend their lives paddling around in the philosophical shallows, along with Kant and Wittgenstein, should of course be free to do so, but should realise that it will condemn them to a life of penury and obscurity."--Charles Foster. [HT Ingrid Robeyns.]

Foster relies on the -- welcome to me (now that I am balding and greying) -- premise that philosophy has a very long apprenticeship. Let's grant this for the sake of argument and learn to ignore the purported boy-wonders in our midst (there might be other good benefits that flow from not focusing on them). Sadly, Foster does not suggests that ethical reflection requires considerable schooling in life--a point I have long been more partial to. Foster unabashedly endorses [A] a practical conception of philosophy; in fact, in the post he relies on [A] as a tacit premise because while at first he only speaks of "ethical issues," "ethicists," and "ethical cogitation," his conclusions involve the organization of philosophy an sich. This is why Foster's really important ethicist reminds me of Xenophanes' cattle and horses and lions. Foster's post (and the  subsequent discussion) is primarily useful for posting what is often said sotte vocce, especially in contexts where philosophers need to prove their usefulness. Blessed are those who work in an environment -- primarily rich private institutions -- where their philosophical lack of utility is status-enhancing!