The Egg Came First

It is only natural that, when confronted with timeless and confounding questions, your friends should turn to you, the philosopher. Sooner or later, then, they will ask you which came first, the chicken or the egg. You must be prepared to discuss this issue in pedantic depth or lose your reputation for intimidating scholarly acumen. Only after understanding this issue will you be prepared for even deeper and more troubling questions such as "Is water wet? Or is water only something that makes other things wet?"

The question invites us to consider a sequence of the following sort, stretching back in time: chicken, egg, chicken, egg, chicken.... The first term of the series can be chosen arbitrarily. The question is the terminus. If one assumes an infinite past and everlasting species, there may be no terminus. However, the cosmological assumptions behind such a view are highly doubtful. Therefore, it seems, there must be a terminus member of the series, temporally first, either a chicken or an egg. The question which came first is often posed rhetorically as though it were obvious that there could be no good epistemic grounds for choice. However, as I aim to show, this appearance of irresolvability is misleading. The egg came first.

Young Earth Creationist views merit brief treatment. If God created chickens on the Fourth Day along with "every kind of winged creature", then the question is whether He chose to create the chicken first, the egg first, both types simultaneously, or a being at the very instant of transition between egg and chicken (when it is arguably either both or neither). The question thus dissolves into the general mystery of God's will. Textual evidence somewhat favors either the chicken or both, since God said "let birds fly above the earth" and the Bible then immediately states "and so it was", before transition to the Fifth Day. So at least some winged creatures were already flying on the Fourth Day, and one day is ordinarily insufficient time for eggs to mature into flying birds. Since chickens aren't much prone to fly, though, it's dubious whether such observations extend to them, unless God implemented a regular rule in which winged creatures were created either mature or simultaneously in a mix of mature and immature states. And in any case, it is granted on all sides that events were unusual and not subject to the normal laws of development during the first Six Days.

In we accept the theory of evolution, as I think we should, then the chicken derives from a lineage that ultimately traces back to non-chickens. (The issues here are the same whether we consider the domestic chicken to be its own species or whether we lump it together with the rest of gallus gallus including the Red Junglefowl from which the domestic chicken appears to be mostly descended.) The first chicken arose either as a hybrid of two non-chickens or via mutation from a non-chicken. Consider the mutation case first. It's improbable (though not impossible) that between any two generations in avian history, X and X-1, there would be enough differentiation for a clean classification of X as a chicken and X-1 as a non-chicken. Thus we appear to have a Sorites case. Just as it seems that adding one grain to a non-heap can't make it a heap, resulting in the paradox that no addition of single grains could ever make a heap, so also one might worry that one generation's difference could never (at least with any realistic likelihood) make the difference between a chicken and a non-chicken, resulting in the paradox of chickens in the primordial soup.

Now there are things philosophers can do about these paradoxes. Somehow heaps arise, despite the argument above. One simple approach is epistemicism, according to which there really is a sharp line in the world such that X-1 is a non-heap and X is a heap, X-1 is a non-chicken and X is a chicken. On this view, our inability to discern this line is merely an epistemic failure on our part. Apparent vagueness is really only ignorance. Another simple approach is to allow that there really are vague properties in the world that defy classification in the two-valued logic of true and false. On this view, between X, which is definitely a chicken, and X-N, which is definitely a non-chicken, there are some vague cases of which it is neither true nor false that it is a chicken, or somehow both true and false, or somewhere between true and false, or something like that. There are also more complicated views, too, than these, but we needn't enter them, because one key point remains the same across all these Sorites approaches: The Sorites cases progress not as follows: X chicken, X-1 egg, X-2 chicken, X-3 egg, X-4 chicken.... Rather, they progress in chicken-egg pairs. From a genetic perspective, since the chicken and egg share DNA, they form a single Sorites unit. Within this unit, the egg clearly comes first, since the chicken is born from the egg, sharing its DNA, and there is a DNA difference between the egg and the hen from which that egg is laid. For a ridiculous argument to the contrary, see here.

If we turn to the possibility of speciation by hybridization, similar considerations apply.

A much poorer argument for the same conclusion runs as follows: Whatever ancestor species gave rise to chickens presumably laid eggs. Therefore, there were eggs long before there were chickens. Therefore, the egg came first. The weakness in this argument is that it misconstrues the original question. The question is not "Which came first, chickens or eggs?" but rather "Which came first, the first chicken or the first chicken egg?"

However, the poverty of this last argument does raise vividly the issue of how one assigns eggs to species. The egg-first conclusion could be evaded if we typed eggs by reference to the mother: If the mother is a chicken, the egg is a chicken egg; if the mother is not a chicken, the egg is not a chicken egg. David Papineau succinctly offers the two relevant considerations against such a view here. First, if we type by DNA, which would seem to be the default biological standard, the egg shares more of its DNA with the hatchling than with its parent. Second, as anyone can see via intuitive armchair reflection on a priori principles: "If a kangaroo laid an egg from which an ostrich hatched, that would surely be an ostrich egg, not a kangaroo egg."

(HT: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, who in turn credited Roy Sorenson.)

Update, Feb. 2:
In the comments, Papineau reveals that he has recanted in light of considerations advanced by Mohan Matthen in his important but so far sadly neglected "Chicken, Eggs, and Speciation" -- considerations also briefly mentioned by Ron Mallon in his comment. Although I find merit in these remarks, I am not convinced and I believe Papineau has abandoned the egg-first view too precipitously.

Matthen argues that: "Speciation occurs when a population comes to be reproductively isolated because the last individual that formerly bridged that population to others died, or because this individual ceased to be fertile (or when other integrating factors cease to operate)" (2009, p. 110). He suggests that this event will normally occur when both soon-to-be-chickens and soon-to-be-chicken-eggs exist in the population. Thus, he concludes, a whole population of chickens and eggs is simultaneously created in a single instant. In assessing this view let me note first that depending on the size of the population and its egg-laying habits, this view might suggest a likelihood of chickens first. Suppose that in a small population of ancestral pre-chickens the last bridge individual dies outside of laying season; or suppose that the end of an individual's last laying season marks the end of an individual's fertility. If there are no out-of-season eggs at the crucial moment, then chickens came first.

More importantly, however, Matthen's criterion of speciation leads to highly counterintuitive and impractical results. Matthen defines reproductive isolation between populations in terms of the probability of gene transfer between those populations. (Also relevant to his distinction is the shape of the graph of the likelihood of gene transfer by number of generations, but that complication isn't relevant to the present issue.) But probability of gene transfer can be very sharply affected by factors that don't seem to create comparably sizable influences on species boundaries. So, for example, when human beings migrated to North America, the probability of gene transfer with the ancestral population declined sharply, and soon became essentially zero (and in any case in excess of the probability of gene transfer between geographically coincident hybridizing species). By Matthen's criterion, this would be a speciating event. After Columbus, gene transfer probability slowly rose and by now gene transfer is very high between individuals with Native American ancestry and those without. Thus, by Matthen's criterion, Native Americans were for several thousand years a distinct species -- not homo sapiens! -- and now they are homo sapiens again. If the moment of change was Columbus's first landing (or some other discrete moment), then the anchoring of a ship, or some other event, perhaps a romantic interlude between Pocahontas and John Smith, caused everyone on the two continents simultaneously to change species!

More simply, we might imagine a chicken permanently trapped in an inescapable cage. Its probability of exchanging genes with other individuals is now zero. Since Matthen allows for species consisting of a single individual, this chicken has now speciated. Depending on how we interpret the counterfactual probabilities, we might even imagine opening and shutting the door repeatedly (perhaps due to some crazy low-probability event) causing that individual to flash repeatedly back and forth between being a chicken and being a non-chicken, with no differences in morphology, actual behavior, location, or sexual preference during the period. On the surface, it seems that Matthen's criterion might even result in all infertile individuals belonging to singleton species.

There are both philosophical and practical biological reasons not to lightly say that individuals may change species during their lifetimes. One consideration is that of animal identity. If I point at an individual chicken and ask at what point the entity at which I am pointing ceases to exist, there are good practical (and maybe metaphysical) reasons to think that the entity does not cease to exist when a single feather falls off, nor to think that it continues to exist despite being smushed into gravy. The most natural and practical approach, it seems, is to say that the entity to which I intend to refer (in the normal case) is essentially a chicken and thus that it continues to exist exactly as long as it remains a chicken. Consequently, on the assumption that the individual pre-chicken avians don't cease to exist when they become reproductively isolated, they remain non-chickens despite overall changes in the makeup of the avian population. (These individuals may, nonetheless, give birth to chickens.) Nor does it seem that any important scientific biological purpose would be served by requiring the relabeling of individual organisms, depending on population movements, once those organisms are properly classified. Long-enduring organisms, such as trees, seem best classified as members of the ancestral population they were born into, even if their species has moved on since. Long-lived individuals can remain as living remnants of the ancestral species -- a species with temporally ragged but individual-respecting borders. The attractiveness of this view is especially evident if we consider the possibility of thawing a long-frozen dinosaur egg.

Matthen argues as follows against the those who embrace either an egg-first or a chicken-first view: The first chicken would need to have descendants by breeding with a non-chicken, but since by definition species are reproductively isolated this view leads to contradiction. This consequence is easily evaded with the right theory of vagueness and a suitable interpretation of the reproductive isolation criterion. On my preferred theory of vagueness, there will be individuals of which it's neither determinately true nor determinately false that they are chickens. We can then define reproductive isolation as the view that no individual of which it is determinately true that it is a member of species X can reproduce with an individual of which it is determinately false that it is a member of species X. As long as all breeding is between determinate members and individuals in the indeterminate middle, the reproductive isolation criterion is satisfied. (This is not to concede, however, that species should be defined entirely in terms of reproductive isolation, given the problems in articulating that criterion plausibly, some of which are noted above.)

The Base Rate of Kant

People sometimes say that increasing specialization within philosophy means that there could never be another figure like Locke or Hume or Kant -- a figure with giant impact across a broad range of philosophical subdisciplines. The massive growth of the research university has created armies of specialists in each subfield whose copious volumes one must master to become a major player in the subfield; and no one person could master the work of a broad range of subfields.

Let's consider the merits of this theory.

First: Is there any need for a theory to explain the recent lack of Kants? Well, what's the base rate of Kant? We could calculate rate per century or we could calculate rate per professional philosopher.

Consider by century: It seems plausible that no philosopher of at least the past 60 years has achieved the kind of huge, broad impact of Locke, Hume, or Kant. Lewis, Quine, Rawls, and Foucault had huge impacts in clusters of areas but not across as broad a range of areas. Others like McDowell and Rorty have had substantial impact in a broad range of areas but not impact of near-Kantian magnitude. Going back another several decades we get perhaps some near misses, including Wittgenstein, Russell, Heidegger, and Nietzsche, who worked ambitiously in a wide range of areas but whose impact across that range was uneven. Going back two centuries brings in Hegel, Mill, Marx, and Comte about whom historical judgment seems to be highly spatiotemporally variable. In contrast, Locke, Hume, and Kant span a bit over a century between them. But still, three within about hundred years followed by a 200 year break with some near misses isn't really anomalous if we're comparing a peak against an ordinary run.

(I don't mention Descartes despite his huge importance because he didn't have the same kind of impact in ethics/political as did the other three. Also, here is evidence that my judgments about importance aren't too idiosyncratic.)

If we consider the rate of Kants per thousand working professional philosophers, it does seem to be vastly higher in the early modern era than recently. But field-changing ideas can only occur so fast -- probably not much more than once per generation per subfield, since few philosophers are going to be ready to retool every ten years for the newest thing. Probably Kant rate per generation, in cultures with lively enough philosophical communities, is a better way to conceptualize the denominator of the expected base rate.

Thus, I don't think that the recent lack of Kants is a fact so anomalous that it cries out for explanation. There's only so much space at the top for heroes and field definers. Inevitably, Kants will be rare.

But maybe it's still true that the size of the community in each subfield makes it impossible for any one philosopher in the foreseeable future to have a huge impact across the subfields? Maybe a new Kant simply couldn't arise in a discipline as populous as 21st century philosophy? I see two reasons for skepticism about that theory.

(1.) People with huge impact are sometimes young. This was true historically (e.g., Hume was 26 when he finished the Treatise) and it seems to be still true (e.g., Lewis did much of his most influential work when he was in his 20s and 30s). If Lewis (or Kripke, or Chalmers, or...) could master enough of one subfield in 10 years to have a huge impact by age 30, then by age 60 -- and philosophers are by no means washed out by age 60 -- they ought to be able to master, well enough to potentially have a huge impact, several disparate subfields. Nor does it seem that there should be substantial barriers to this in practice. Although sociologically it would be difficult to leap from math to philosophy to physics to have huge impacts in all three fields -- so maybe there will never be another Descartes -- philosophy is not so sociologically divided. Setting aside language-driven divides, the sharpest sociological divide seems to be between "value theory" fields (ethics/aesthetics/political) and "LEMMings" fields (language/epistemology/metaphysics/mind plus logic). But even that divide is quite permeable. There are plenty of philosophers with interests and ambitions on both sides of the divide, and no one finds it odd.

(2.) Across academia as a whole, field-transforming contributions are sometimes achieved by adopting a novel angle or method and then applying it fruitfully both to traditional problems and to new previously unthought-of problems. In philosophy, this means having a new (implicit or explicit) metaphilosophy. Although none of the metaphilosophical revolutions of the past hundred years have generated a Kant, I think we can imagine how they might have, had things played out somewhat differently. Had there been a single dominant figure in the linguistic turn who managed to compellingly apply early linguistic-turnish thoughts to both metaphysics and epistemology and to ethics and political philosophy, that person might have had approximately Kant-sized influence. I see no reason to think such a scenario implausibly unlikely. Similarly, there could have been, I think, a Kant-sized ordinary language philosopher or logical positivist. More recently -- in my opinion! -- philosophy has received a charge of new ideas from the methods and results of empirical psychology, now that psychology has matured past Freudian and behaviorist strictures. People like Jesse Prinz and Shaun Nichols have been able to master enough of the literature in disparate areas of philosophy to have impact in those areas partly through applying methods and ideas from psychology. So I see no reason a great philosopher couldn't arise with a fresh angle, a new approach, applied compellingly to a broad range of the biggest issues, with a consequent Kant-like impact. We won't see it coming in advance -- but that's just us, stuck in our paradigms. Although it is impossible to have encyclopedic mastery of the ever-increasing existing literature across a wide range of subfields of philosophy, such encyclopedic mastery has never been a prerequisite of field-changing genius.

Caveats:

* This isn't to say that I'm particularly fond of Kant! I'm just making a sociological point, and he seems the best example. (See here and here for rough criticism.)

* One way in which it might be harder now to have a broad impact across subfields with a new approach is that once that approach catches on in one subfield, there will be a larger pool of people than there used to be who might quickly adopt it to other subfields, attenuating the aspiring Great Philosopher's direct impact on those subfields.

* Our perspective on the past is probably distorted by the Winnowing of Greats. Appropriately winnowed, maybe David Lewis (or whoever) will some day stand out like Kant. (And yes, I know that much of this post in is conflict with much of that earlier post. I take an appropriately Whitmanian attitude.)

Broad-Ranging Interview on My Work

by Richard Marshall, here at 3:AM Magazine. Rereading the interview now, I find myself pretty happy with it, other than that I probably should have given somewhat briefer answers to the first few questions.

This interview does a nice job of motivating and tying together, in an accessible way, the various themes of my work, which might otherwise seem to be unconnected (history of psychology, Chinese philosophy, the moral behavior of ethicists, science fiction, the untrustworthiness of philosophical intuition...).

Kant Meets Cyberpunk

In 1992, my first year of graduate school, I read William Gibson's cyberpunk classic Neuromancer and, by chance, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason at the same time. It seemed to me that the two were intimately connected, but various older grad students in my Kant class pooh-poohed my ideas about this and I lacked the intellectual confidence to pursue it farther.

But the thought has stayed with me. In Neuromancer, like in Tron, there's an artificial environment that one can travel in virtually. One "enters" it by jacking into a neural interface. Also like Tron, but unlike The Matrix, the artificial environment of Neuromancer substantially differs in its basic structural features from the real-world environment. Derived from early computer graphics programs, Neuromancer's cyberspace matrix is composed of lines of light arranged into geometrical figures in simple colors; space is experienced in discrete units and movement is in rectangular clicks. As I seem to remember having imagined it, and as we might as well imagine it for present purposes (though now looking through the text, this not accurate), everything is laid out rectilinearly and the only colors are simple primaries.

So now imagine that you were born jacked into such a matrix. You might think that objects were necessarily laid out in straight lines at right angles and possessed of only primary colors, and that space came in discrete units. But this would be a feature, not of things as they are "in themselves", but rather of how your mind processes the structured input it is given. We might even imagine (and maybe it's true) that a human mind that developed in such a matrix couldn't even conceive of curves, oblique angles, tertiary colors, or continuous space. For such a mind, objects as presented in the cyberspace matrix would be the only empirically available reality, and what we non-cyberspace-embedded folks consider to be the real world would be an incomprehensible "noumenal realm" behind those appearances. Conversely, we might imagine -- though it's impossible to depict vividly in a novel -- this matrix-grown strange baby to have new sensory modalities and new basic ways of cognizing the world that are unfamiliar to us, especially if its brain is artificially enhanced (a fourth "spatial" dimension for matrix-informational layout would be a conservative start).

The analogy to Kant is imperfect. Kantian purists will, I suppose, cringe at the comparison. Time, causation, three-dimensionality, and many other properties are shared by the Neuromancer matrix and the reality outside of the matrix. And the features of the matrix available to the embedded mind might not be given "a priori" in a strict Kantian sense (whatever Kant's sense is). I'm sure there are other important disanalogies too. But as a way of getting a toehold on the Kantian picture, I still rather like the comparison. We are born into naturally given matrixes that necessarily structure our experiential encounter with the world, and out of which we cannot break, even in imagination. All this that I see and hear is just user interface.

Such thoughts are doubly apt, perhaps, if we are actually already living in a giant computer simulation.

Consciousness Online

Consciousness Online is an online consciousness conference now in its fourth year, organized by Richard Brown. It will be happening February 17 to March 2. The program has a terrific line-up of speakers. Check it out!

The Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind: Short, Folksy Version

Crazyism in the metaphysics of mind, as I define it, is the view that something bizarre and undeserving of credence -- something "crazy" -- must be among the core truths about the metaphysics of mind.

On December 3, I presented a short, folksy version of this idea as a TEDx talk for the first of hopefully many TEDxUCR events. (Thanks, TEDxUCR organizers!) If you want more than a blog post but less than a 40-page manuscript (plus references), you might be interested to see the (poor quality but audible) TEDx video or prepared text.

For All X, There's Philosophy of X...

... one only needs to plunge to the foundation. The issues at the foundation are always the same: What there really is, how we know about it, what separates the good from the bad.

If one delves deeply enough, with sufficient generality and abstraction, the foundational issues about X will reveal their kinship with foundational issues in other areas. Discussion of them can thus be illuminated by knowledge of how similar issues are treated in other areas -- the philosopher's special expertise.

Consider the philosophy of hair, for example. At the foundation: What is a haircut, really? How much does it depend on the intent of the hairdresser? What makes a haircut good or bad? For example, must it please its bearer? Is it relative to fashion, and if so how locally? How, if at all, can we settle disputes about the quality of a haircut? A true philosopher of hair will have informed opinions about such matters. The answers to these questions might differ from the answers to similar questions about, say, painting as an art or about the morality of charitable giving, but a family resemblance should be evident, along with the possibility of cross-fertilization.

Consider also: The philosophy of Coke cans, the philosophy of starlight, the philosophy of football, the philosophy of birds, the philosophy of siblinghood.

To the person with the right turn of mind, perhaps, all thought becomes philosophy.

Is Solipsism Simple?

Solipsism is the view that nothing exists but one's own stream of conscious experience. In The Problems of Philosophy (1912), Bertrand Russell says that although it's logically possible that solipsism is true, solipsism should be rejected as less simple than the hypothesis that an external world exists. But is realism about the external world really simpler than solipsism?

On the face of it, you might think solipsism is simpler. After all, it involves radically fewer entities. That's the great Ockhamesque beauty of it. Solipsism may be crazy, but at least it's simple!

Russell employs two arguments against the simplicity of solipsism. First:

If [a] cat exists whether I see it or not, we can understand from our own experience how it gets hungry between one meal and the next; but if it does not exist when I am not seeing it, it seems odd that appetite should grow during non-existence as fast as during existence (p. 23).

Second:

When human beings speak -- that is, when we hear certain noises which we associate with ideas, and simultaneously see certain motions of lips and expressions of face -- it is very difficult to suppose that what we hear is not the expression of thought, as we know it would be if we emitted the same sounds (p. 23-24).

Thus, he concludes, "every principle of simplicity urges us to adopt the natural view, that there really are objects other than ourselves" (p. 24).

Now, I'm inclined to think that Russell's argument here is very inadequate. But let me quickly say that I've found it surprisingly difficult to uncover what I'd consider to be better arguments against solipsism in the philosophical literature. Plus, Russell is famous! So let's take him seriously.

To see the core problem with Russell's argument, consider dreams. In dreams, cats can grow quite quickly hungry between appearances, despite their nonexistence in the interval. And the voices and faces seen in dreams reveal the real existence of no other independent mind. It seems no great violation of simplicity to suppose that, in a dream, the appearances of the cat and the voices and faces are concocted on the spot by me. No need to posit a giant, really existing universe, light-years upon light-years wide! And the solipsist, it seems, can just treat waking experiences the same way. Simple!

Russell is of course aware of dream skepticism, addressing it thus:

But dreams are more or less suggested by what we call waking life, and are capable of being more or less accounted for on scientific principles if we assume there really is a physical world (p. 24).

I think one might just as easily turn this argument on its head. If we assume solipsism rather than realism, we can invoke principles explaining why cats and people seem to behave as they do: They are imperfect projections of me upon my imagined world, based on what I know from introspection about myself. That theory is of course sketchy and incomplete, but so is the current scientific account of the content of dreams!

Now it might seem that postulating an external world behind appearances can at least explain correlations that must remain unexplained in solipsism. For example, if there is a real penny that I'm both looking at and manually rotating, the real existence of arm and coin explains why such-and-such changes in visual experience co-occur with such-and-such changes in tactile and proprioceptive experience.

I see two obvious replies for the solipsist:

First, why can't it simply be a law of my experience that such-and-such tactile and proprioceptive experiences will tend to co-occur with such-and-such visual experiences? Surely there's a theoretically discoverable structure to such co-occurrences -- a structure not so different, perhaps, and probably simpler, than that employed in the realist's account of tactile and visual perception and motor control and its relation to external objects. After all, realists' psychological theories, if they're really going to explain the relation among the experiences, require complicated overlapping and competing brain mechanisms for determining, among other things, visual shape and orientation from optical input.

And second, if simplicity really favors the theory with fewer unexplained coincidences, won't solipsism win hands down, even if it leaves a few things unexplained that the realist can explain? The small world of the solipsist will have vastly fewer such coincidences in total, and vastly fewer free parameters, than the enormously large, fine-textured, and richly populated world of the realist.

Call for Papers: Consciousness and Moral Cognition

The editors at Review of Philosophy and Psychology invite submissions for a special issue on consciousness attribution in moral cognition. Guest authors include: Kurt Gray (Maryland), Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh) and Justin Sytsma (East Tennessee State), and Anthony I. Jack (Case Western Reserve) and Philip Robbins (Missouri).

Submissions are due March 31, 2011.

The full CFP, including relevant dates and submission details, is available here.

Abbreviated CFP: When people regard other entities as objects of ethical concern whose interests must be taken into account in moral deliberations, does the attribution of consciousness to these entities play an essential role in the process? In recent years, philosophers and psychologists have begun to sketch limited answers to this general question. However, much progress remains to be made. We invite contributions to a special issue of The Review of Philosophy and Psychology on the role of consciousness attribution in moral cognition from researchers working in fields including developmental, evolutionary, perceptual, and social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy.

Against Increasing the Power of Grant Agencies in Philosophy

Clark Glymour has an opinion piece urging philosophers to reach out beyond their disciplinary circles and encouraging the pursuit of big-dollar grants. Adam Briggle and Robert Frodeman say much the same thing. (Glymour emphasizes philosophy of science and Briggle & Frodeman applied ethics.) I agree that philosophers as a group should reach out more than they do. But I think the increasing emphasis on grant-getting in academia is a disease to be fought, not a trend to be encouraged.

Academic research scientists spend a lot of time applying for grant money. This is time that they are not spending doing scientific research. I've often heard that applying for an NSF grant takes about as much time as writing a journal article. Now, most scientists need money to do their research and there should be mechanisms to fund worthy projects, so maybe for them passionate summers of grant application are a worthy investment. But do philosophers need to be doing that? I doubt philosophy is best served by encouraging philosophers to spend more time thinking up ways to request money.

Furthermore, for both scientists and philosophers I think a better model would be a hybrid in which it is possible to apply for grants but in which, also, productive researchers could be awarded research money without having to apply for it. Look, V.S. Ramachandran is going to do something interesting with his research money no matter what, right? Philip Kitcher too. Let them spend their time doing what they do best and monitor the funds post facto. Let us all have a certain small amount of money to attend (and sometimes organize) conferences, without our having to manufacture elaborate bureaucratic pleas in advance. The same total funding could go out, with much less time wasted, if grant writing were only for exceptional cases and exceptional expenses.

A very different type of reason to resist the increasing academic focus on grant-getting is this: Grant-driven bureaucracy decreases the power of researchers to set their own research agenda and increases the power of the grant agencies to set the agenda. Maybe that's part of what Glymour and Briggle & Frodeman want, since they seem to distrust philosophers' ability to choose worthy topics of research for themselves. But philosophy in particular has often been advanced by people working outside the mainstream, on projects that might not have been seen as valuable by the well-established old-school researchers and administrators that tend to serve on grant committees. In ancient Greece, the sophists were the ones getting grants, while Socrates was fightin the powa.

If you want to apply for grants, terrific! I have no problem with that. Get some good money to do your good work. Organize an interesting conference; fly across the world to thumb through the archives; get some time away from teaching to write your book. Absolutely! But let's not try to push the discipline as a whole more into the grant-getting game than it already is.

Frege's Puzzle and In-Between Cases of Believing

There's a huge literature in philosophy of language on what's called "Frege's puzzle" about belief reports. Almost all the participants in this literature seem to take for granted something that I reject: that sentences ascribing beliefs must be determinately true or false, at least once those sentences are disambiguated or contextualized in the right way.

Frege's puzzle is this. Lois Lane believes, it seems, that Superman is strong. And Clark Kent is, of course, Superman. So it seems to follow that Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent is strong. But Lois would deny that Clark Kent is strong, and it seems wrong to say that she believes it. So what's going on? There are several standard options, but all lead to trouble of one sort or another. (If you don't like Superman, try Twain/Clemens or Unabomber/Kaczynski.)

On a dispositional approach to belief of the sort I favor, to believe some proposition P -- the proposition, say, that that guy (variously known as "Superman" or "Clark Kent") is strong -- is to be disposed to act and react, both outwardly and inwardly, as though P were true. (On my version of dispositionalism, this means being disposed to act and react in ways that ordinary people would regard as characteristic of belief that P.) Lois has some such dispositions: For example, she's disposed to say "Superman is strong". But she notably lacks others: She's not disposed to say "Clark Kent is strong". She's disposed to ask Superman/Clark Kent to lift her up in the air when he's in costume but not when he's in street clothes.

Personality traits also involve clusters of dispositions, so consider them as an analogy. If someone is disposed to be courageous in some circumstances and not courageous in other circumstances, it might be neither quite right to say that she is courageous nor quite right to say that she isn't. "Courageous" is a vague predicate, and we might have an in-between case, in which neither simple ascription nor simple denial is entirely appropriate (though there may also be contexts in which simple ascription or denial works well enough -- e.g., battlefields vs. faculty meetings if she has battlefield courage but not interpersonal courage). Compare also "Amir is tall", said of a man who is 5'11". Lois's belief about Superman/Clark Kent might similarly be an in-between case in the application of a vague predicate.

You'll probably object that Lois simply and fully believes that Superman is strong, and it's not an in-between case at all. I have two replies. First, that way of putting it -- in terms of Superman rather than Clark Kent -- highlights certain aspects of Lois's dispositional profile over others, thus creating a conversational context that tends to favor believes-strong ascription (like a battlefield context might favor ascription of courage to a person who has battlefield courage but not other sorts of courage). Second, consider a version of the case in which the belief ascriber doesn't have the name "Clark Kent" available, but only the name "Superman". The ascriber and his friend are looking through a window at Superman/Clark Kent in street clothes. The ascriber's friend, who doesn't know that Lois is deceived, asks, "Does Lois believe that Superman is strong?" What should the ascriber reply? He should say, "Well, um, it's a complicated case!" I see no point in insisting that underneath that hedge there needs to be a determinate metaphysical or psychological or (disambiguated [update Dec. 16: e.g., "de re / de dicto"]) linguistic fact that yes-she-really-does (or no-she-really-doesn't), any more than there always has to be a determinate fact about whether someone is tall simpliciter or courageous simpliciter.

Now this is a heck of a mess in philosophy of language, and I haven't thought through all the implications. I'm inclined to think that excessive realism about the identity of propositions is part of the problem too. I don't claim that this is a full or non-problematic solution to Frege's puzzle. But it seems to me that this general type of approach should be more visible among the options than it is.

[HT: Lewis Powell on Kripke's Puzzle.]

Descartes, Moore, Whatevs!

On Nature's website:

“Descartes said that if there's something you can be certain of in this world, it's that your hand is your hand,” says Ehrsson.

Um, whoops! Descartes said that what he couldn't doubt was his own thinking. It was G.E. Moore who famously said it would be absurd to suggest that he didn't know that "here is a hand".

Descartes, G.E. Moore, whatever! It's only philosophy, after all -- not something worth bothering to get right in the the flagship journal of the natural sciences.

(If I sound prickly, maybe it's because I'm currently on hold with AT&T, about to talk to my eleventh representative in two months about being double billed for internet service.)

Update, Dec. 15: The author of the piece has now corrected the error. It turns out that philosophy is worth getting right after all!

Creativity and Dishonesty

A recent paper by Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely suggests that relatively creative people are more likely to be dishonest than are relatively less creative people because they are better at concocting rationalizations for potential dishonesty. I can't say I'm entirely swooned by Gino & Ariely's methodology, which measures dishonesty by seeing whether people will give wrong answers in psychology laboratory studies when they are paid to give those wrong answers. (If psychologist says: "Roll a die, I'm not going to check the outcome, but I'll pay you $1 if you say it's a 1 and $6 if you say it's a 6", how exactly should the participant react to what's going on here?) I'd rather see more naturalistic observations of behavior in real-life situations, or at least better cover stories. Nor do I think Gino & Ariely do a terrific job of establishing that ability to creatively rationalize is the real mediator of the apparent difference in honesty.

Nonetheless, the conclusion is interesting, the mechanism plausible, and the results at least suggestive. And their picture fits nicely with my favorite hypothesis about the apparent fact that professional ethicists behave no morally better than do socially similar non-ethicists. Philosophical moral reflection, I'm inclined to think, rather than being inert, is bivalent: On the one hand, it highlights the moral dimension of things and can help you appreciate moral truths; but on the other hand, people who are skilled at it will also be skilled at finding superficially plausible rationalizations of attractive misconduct which might then allow them to feel freer to engage in that misconduct (e.g., stealing a library book). Professional ethicists develop their creativity in exactly an area in which being creative brings substantial moral hazards.

The Baby Boom Philosophy Bust

In 2010, I compiled a list of the top 200 most-cited contemporary authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (By "contemporary" I mean born in 1900 or later.) One striking feature of this list is the underrepresentation of baby boomers, especially near the top.

Let's compare the representation of people born 1931-1945 (the fifteen years before the baby boom) with those born in 1946-1960 (the bulk of the baby boom), among the top 25.

Among the pre-baby boomers, we find:

David Lewis (#1)
Saul Kripke (#6)
Thomas Nagel (tied #7)
Jerry Fodor (#9)
Daniel Dennett (tied #10)
Frank Jackson (tied #10)
Robert Nozick (tied #13)
John Searle (tied #13)
Gilbert Harman (#16)
Ronald Dworkin (#18)
Joseph Raz (tied #19)
Bas Van Fraassen (tied #19)
Fred Dretske (tied #22)
Peter Van Inwagen (tied #22)
Alvin Goldman (tied #24).

Among the baby boomers we find:

Martha Nussbaum (tied #19)
Philip Kitcher (tied #24).

These numbers seem to suggest that the depression-era and World War II babies have had a much larger impact than the baby boomers on mainstream Anglophone philosophy.

You might have thought the reverse would be the case. Aren't there more baby boomers? Haven't baby boomers been culturally dominant in other areas of society? So what's going on here?

One possibility is that the boomers haven't yet had time to achieve maximum influence on the field. Someone born in 1940 has had ten more years to write and to influence peers and students than has someone born in 1950. Although I think there is something to this thought, especially for the younger boomers, I suspect it's not the primary explanation. A boomer born in 1950 would be sixty years old by 2010. The large majority of philosophers who have a big impact on the field achieve a substantial proportion of that impact well before the age of sixty. Certainly that's true of the top philosophers on the list above -- Lewis, Kripke, Nagel, and Fodor. Their most influential work was in the 1960s to early 1990s. The boomers have had plenty of time to generate the same kind of influence, if it were simply a matter of catching up from a later start. In fact, contemporary Anglophone philosophers seem to have their average peak influence from about age 55-70, declining thereafter. On average, the baby boomers should be enjoying peak citation rates right now, and the depression babies should be starting to wane.

Here's an alternative diagnosis: College enrollment grew explosively in the 1960s and then flattened out. The pre-baby-boomers were hired in large numbers in the 1960s to teach the baby boomers. The pre-baby boomers rose quickly to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s and set the agenda for philosophy during that period. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, the pre-baby-boomers remained dominant. During the 1980s, when the baby boomers should have been exploding onto the philosophical scene, they instead struggled to find faculty positions, journal space, and professional attention in a field still dominated by the depression-era and World War II babies.

This started to change, I think, with the retirement of the depression babies and the hiring boom of Gen-Xers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It remains to be seen if history will repeat itself.

Is it Psychologically Possible for the Skeptic to Suspend All Belief?

I keep bumping into this question. Casey Perin gave a talk on it at UCR; Daniel Greco has a forthcoming paper on it in Phil Review. Benj Hellie launched an extended Facebook conversation about it. Can the radical skeptic live his skepticism? I submit the following for your consideration.

First, a bit about belief. I've argued that to believe some proposition P is nothing more or less than to be disposed to act and react in a broadly belief-that-P-ish way -- that is, to be disposed, circumstances to being right, to say things like "P", to build one's plans on the likelihood of P's truth, to feel surprised should P prove false, etc. Among the relevant dispositions is the disposition to consciously judge that P is the case, that is, to momentarily explicitly regard P as true, to endorse P intellectually (though not necessarily in language). Dispositions to judge that P often pull apart from the other dispositions constitutive of belief, for example in self-deception, implicit bias, conceptual confusion, and momentary forgetting. (See here and here.) To believe that P is to steer one's way through the world as though P were the case. One important part of the steering, but not the only part, is being disposed to explicitly judge that P is the case.

Okay, now skepticism. My paradigm radical skeptics are Sextus Empiricus, Montaigne (of the Apology), and Zhuangzi (of Inner Chapter 2). When such radical skeptics say they aim to suspend all belief, I recommend that we interpret them as really endorsing two goals: (a.) suspending all judgment, and (b.) standing openly ready, with equanimity, for alternative possibilities.

Arguments that it's impossible to suspend all belief tend to be, at root, arguments that it's impossible to refrain from action and that action requires belief. Perhaps it is impossible to refrain from all action. No skeptic advises sitting all day in bed (as though that weren't itself an action). Sextus advises acting from habit; Zhuangzi seems to endorse well-trained spontaneity. (Of course, they can't insist dogmatically on this, and Zhuangzi actively undermines himself.) If the runaway carriage is speeding toward the skeptic, the skeptic will leap aside. On my account of belief, such a disposition is partly constitutive of believing that the carriage is heading your way. So the skeptic will have at least part of the dispositional profile constitutive of that belief. This much I accept.

But it's not clear that the skeptic needs to match the entire dispositional profile constitutive of believing the carriage is coming. In particular, it's not clear that the skeptic needs to consciously judge that the carriage is coming. Maybe most of us would in fact reach such a judgment, but spontaneous skillful action without conscious judgment is sometimes thought to be characteristic of "flow" states of peak performance; and Heidegger seems to have valued them and regarded them as prevalent; and perhaps certain types of meditative practice aim at them. Suspension of judgment seems consistent with action, perhaps even highly skilled action. Though suspension of judgment isn't suspension of the entirety of the dispositional profile characteristic of belief, it's suspension of an important part of the profile -- perhaps enough so that the skeptic achieves what I call a state of in-between believing, in which there's enough deviation from the relevant dispositional profile that it's neither quite right to say he believes nor quite right to say he fails to believe.

The skeptic will also, I suggest, stand openly ready, with equanimity, for alternative possibilities. The skeptic will leap away from the carriage, but she won't be as much surprised as the non-skeptic would be if the carriage suddenly turns into a rooster. The skeptic will utter affirmations -- Zhuangzi compares our utterances to the cheeping of baby birds -- but with an openness to the opposing view. The skeptic will be less perturbed by apparent misfortune (for maybe it's really good fortune in disguise) and thus perhaps achieve a certain tranquility unavailable to dogmatists (as emphasized by both Sextus and Zhuangzi). The skeptic stands humbly aware, before God or the universe, of his flawed, infinitesmal perspective (as expressed by Montaigne).

Judgment is stoppered; action still flows; there's a humility, openness, tranquility, lack of surprise. None of this seems psychologically impossible to me. In certain moods, I even find it an appealing prospect.