Everything Is Sandcastles

Yesterday, Rivka Weinberg spoke at UCR from her forthcoming book, The Meaning of It All, on how time erodes meaning. As is often noted, in a thousand years it will (probably) be as though you had never lived. Everything you strived for will have crumbled to dust. Weinberg doesn't argue that this renders our efforts entirely meaningless -- but it does deprive them of a meaning they would have had, if they had endured. We ought to admit, she says, that this is disheartening, rather than brushing it off with a breezy recommendation to "live in the moment".

Weinberg carves out an exception to time's corrosive power: what she calls atelic goods (drawing on Kieran Setiya's work on the "midlife crisis"). Atelic goods are complete in the moment: strolling through the woods, enjoying a sunset, licking an ice cream cone. Contrast these with telic goods, which aim toward an endpoint: walking to the store, taking the perfect sunset photo, finishing the cone.

In her talk, Weinberg argued that time drained meaning from telic goods -- not entirely, but substantially -- while leaving atelic goods mostly untouched. Yet she cautioned against retreating wholly into atelic pleasures. A life composed only of strolls and sunsets would be vapid. Telic goods, like building a career and cultivating long-term relationships, are essential to a full life.

But during the discussion period, Weinberg introduced the idea of sandcastles as an interesting middle case. (I don't recall this in the talk itself, but it moved fast and I haven't seen a written version.) Building a sandcastle is telic: It unfolds over time and can be interrupted before completion. But it's also ephemeral. Nothing is lost if the sandcastle is gone tomorrow. It was never meant to last, any more than an ice cream cone.

Maybe everything is sandcastles.

Weinberg gave examples of paradigmatic telic goods whose meanings are ravaged by time: Martin Luther King's activism, Jonas Salk's work on the polio vaccine. In a thousand years -- or ten thousand, almost certainly a billion -- it will be as if King and Salk had never existed. But should King have felt disappointed that his activism wouldn't ripple through deep time? Maybe not. Maybe he should have regarded it as a sandcastle: designed for a particular time, not reduced in meaning because it didn't endure forever.

When I raised this during Q&A, I didn't fully grasp Weinberg's reply. The sandcastle example is hers, so I might not be doing her view full justice -- but let me run with the idea.

If we think of all of our projects as sandcastle building, then they aren't necessarily ravaged by time. Of course, many will be wiped away too early. The waves will sweep in before your castle is complete or while you were still relishing its beauty. A rude stranger might trample it. Maybe almost every truly important project loses its impact before we're ready. But that's not an inevitability built into the structure of telic meaning and the nature of time. It's a contingent fact about the fragile, unstable nature of our chosen projects in a risky world.

Maybe, by shaping our intentions differently, or thinking about our projects differently, we reduce their vulnerability. Suppose I build a sandcastle knowing there's a 50% chance it will be swept away before I finish -- and thus, perhaps, not intending to finish but intending only to get as far as I can. If the wave comes early, I can still be disappointed -- but the wave no longer robs the act of its intended meaning. I did, in fact, get as far as I could. And if I build right at the water's edge, knowing there's a 90% chance I won't complete the castle's final envisioned tower, then finishing is a delightful surprise: a bonus meaning, so to speak, beyond my expectation. If brevity is the default intention and expectation, then the collapse of my castles does not deprive my actions of their expected or intended meaning, while unlikely endurance adds meaning relative to base line.

Could we adopt the same attitude to our relationships and careers? The waves of life could sweep them away any day. A realistic sense of hazard might be folded into the intention itself. I intend to start a marriage and nurture it -- not with the expectation that we will still be happily together at eighty, but with the hope that we might. If we make it, wonderful! Like a sandcastle surviving high tide. If it happens, I'm surprised and delighted, and I'll do what I can for that. Similarly, I intend to begin a career and pursue it. If the wave comes, well, the plan was always only to build toward something that I knew from the start would sooner or later be taken by the surf.

There will still be grief and regret. Things rarely go as well as they might have gone. But if I fully embrace this mindset (let's be honest: I can't), my projects won't have less meaning than intended, even if the waves take them sooner than I would have liked.

[remember this meme from 2007?]

When Is a Theory Superficial?

by Jeremy Pober and Eric Schwitzgebel

Twelve years ago, one of us (ES) distinguished two kinds of theories: superficial and deep. Nearly any phenomenon can be approached in a superficial or deep manner. A superficial judge of human beauty treats it as skin deep. A superficial reading of Shakespeare takes characters at their word and focuses on the obvious aspects of each scene. A superficial housecleaning ignores the backsides and undersides of household items.

And of course one can have a superficial theory of belief. Phenomenal dispositionalism is intended to be such a theory. According to phenomenal dispositionalism, whether someone believes that P is a matter of whether they have certain behavioral, phenomenal (i.e., experiential), and cognitive dispositions, specifically, the dispositions that are "stereotypical" of a person who believes that P. Compare: To be an extravert just is to have the behavioral, phenomenal, and cognitive dispositions stereotypical of extraversion.

Superficial theories contrast with deep theories. Among theories of belief, the main contrast has been with the computationalist, representationalist functionalism made famous by Jerry Fodor (1987) and recently defended by Jake Quilty-Dunn and Eric Mandelbaum.

But what makes a theory of some property P superficial (or deep)? Twelve years ago, ES offered an answer: It depends on the theory's relationship to surface properties. Surface properties are observable features of a phenomenon that a theory of P is designed to explain (in a loose sense of "observable"[1]).

What relation to surface properties must a theory have to be superficial or deep? Back in 2013, ES said that "relative to a class of surface phenomena... a property is superficial if it identifies possession of the property simply with patterns in the surface phenomena" (2013, 77). And a theory is deep "relative to a class of surface phenomena... if it identifies possession of the property with some feature other than patterns in those same surface phenomena -- some feature that presumably explains or causes or underwrites those surface patterns" (ibid.).

This definition fits our toy examples above. A superficial judge of beauty relies on the most easily observable physical patterns, a superficial reading of Shakespeare focuses on surface-level dialogue, and a superficial house-cleaning treats looking clean as clean.

However, we have reason to be unsatisfied with this definition. [ES thanks JP for emphasizing this point in a series of discussions.]

Consider poison, a "causal concept" in David Armstrong (1968)'s sense: a concept defined by its causes and/or effects. Poison can be defined in terms of biologically harming a person when ingested (with refinements to differentiate poisoning from, say, drinking lava).[2] If I explain a death by saying that a person was poisoned, you can infer that the death was caused by ingestion rather than, say, hypothermia. That's informative -- but much less informative than saying that the person ingested cyanide, because chemical types like cyanide are defined structurally, allowing detailed explanations of how they interact with human physiology.

A theory of health that only has non-structural causal concepts like "poison" (or "medicine") would be a superficial theory of health. A deep theory, in contrast, invokes underlying mechanisms.

Yet, by ES's 2013 definition, a theory appealing to poison wouldn't count as superficial, because ingesting poison isn't merely related to death as two parts of a superficial pattern. Poison causes death.[3]

In a new draft, ES proposes a revised definition: a theory of property P is superficial if "whether an entity has property [P] is determined (that is, constituted or grounded...) entirely by superficial facts about that entity", where superficial facts are readily observed facts. For causal concepts, being the cause of is a constitutive relationship. This new definition thus accommodates causal superficialism, where poisons cause death and medicines cause recoveries, as inferable from readily observable relationships (such as randomized controlled trials), without appeal to deeper structural features.

That's a good thing! Otherwise, phenomenal dispositionalism only counts as a superficial theory of belief if dispositions don't cause their manifestations. Some philosophers of mind (e.g., Ryle 1949) indeed view dispositions non-causally. But others, like Armstrong (1968), propose a "realist" conception: Dispositions are type-identical to their causal bases. Fragility, for example, is identified with the microstructural features that cause fragile objects to break when struck.[4]

In his original articulation of phenomenal dispositionalism, ES expressed willingness to accept such a realist view (2002, 273n18). This version of dispositionalism can be considered equivalent to a version of functionalism (which holds that mental states can be defined in terms of their causal relations to inputs, outputs, and other mental states). Georges Rey (1997) calls this type of functionalism superficial functionalism, where all functional/causal roles are defined only in relation to behavior, thought, experience, and "similar" states (e.g., desire is similar to belief, so a superficial functionalist theory of belief can include relations to desires).[5]

Of course, deep theories also often employ causal explanations. So if causal superficial theories are possible, what distinguishes them from deep theories? The answer is that causal posits in superficial theories have minimal explanatory content, whereas deep theories have excess explanatory content.[6] Posits with minimal explanatory content explain all that they were posited to explain and no more, whereas posits with excess content make further falsifiable predictions.

Consider the difference between a geneticist working right after Gregor Mendel published his work on heritability, and one working after Franklin, Watson, and Crick had mapped the structure of DNA and demonstrated how it instantiated genetic material. Mendel's theory, which gives us the posits of trait, gene, allele, and dominant/recessive, is a powerful theory (much like belief/desire psychology), but it doesn't explain how genes and alleles have the properties that they do. An allele is just the genetic material for a variant in phenotype, e.g., blood type A versus B or O. But in the initial Mendelian framework, it was defined as "whatever is responsible for variance in (e.g.) blood type".

[illustration of Mendel's superficial causal theory; image source]

Contrast with someone working in the latter half of the 20th century. They know that genetic information is realized in DNA (& RNA), which via its repeating base patterns and double helix structure, acts as a base code for the information that constitutes alleles. In other words, they know how genes carry genetic information.[7]

Superficial theories needn't be acausal, but if they posit causal relationships, those relationships must exist among the readily observable features, without invoking hidden structures or mechanisms that yield additional explanatory content. In contrast, the later 20th century theory makes many more falsifiable predictions -- those that follow from the structure of DNA -- and thus has excess explanatory content.

--------------------------------------------

[1] This might not match the sense of "observable" sometimes used in philosophy of science. Dennett (1994) defines observable from his perspective of "urbane verificationism" and, for a theory of attitudes, takes the same list of surface properties to be observable as ES: behavior, thought, and experience.

[2] More precisely, poison is always a two-place predicate, poison-for-S where S is some group of organisms such as a species. When no such group is specified, we can treat instances of poison as poison-for-humans. We are ignoring contact poisons and other complications.

[3] Thus the distinction between superficial and deep theories is not a distinction about noncausal versus causal explanations. Consequently, the superficial/deep distinction as applied to the attitudes does not end up reducing to Devin Curry's distinction between beliefs as properties of persons and beliefs as "cogs" of cognitive science (Curry 2021).

[4] The standard way of defining a causal basis is in terms of physical properties, such as microstructural properties defining "fragility". However this is not a strict requirement. One can posit a mental kind (as in Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum 2018 where representations are the causal bases of dispositions constitutive of belief stereotypes) or even a higher-order kind (as in Prior, Pargetter, and Jackson 1982).

[5] Rey (1994; 1997) invokes this term in a debate with Dan Dennett that parallels the debate between ES and Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum. While the overall debate turns on different issues, the definition of superficialist theories of belief lines up. Examples of this sort of functionalism plausibly include David Armstrong (1968), the David Lewis of "An Argument for the Identity Theory" (1966) but maybe not the David Lewis of "Mad Pain and Martin Pain" (1980), and Adam Pautz 2021).

[6] Term adopted from Lakatos's (1968) notion of "excess" explanatory content.

[7] The DNA example also lets us talk about different levels or degrees of depth. The late 20th century theory of a gene is a deep one, but so is a theory mid-way between that and Mendel's. In the first years of the 20th century scientists identified chromosomes as the realizer of genes, but did not know that chromosomes were made of DNA (they thought they were proteins). This theory too is deep -- there are excess predictions made by the assignment of genetic material to chromosomes -- but not as deep as later views, because not nearly as many excess predictions were made. We can tentatively call such a theory formally deep, whereas a theory that more fully explains how the posit in question (genes, beliefs) has the properties that it does is substantively deep.

People with Unusual, Minority, Culturally Atypical, or Historically Underrepresented Experiences and Worldviews Should be Overrepresented in Philosophy, Rather than Underrepresented

Saturday's post finding that only 16% of Authors in Elite Philosophy Journals Are Women brought out the misogynist bros on Twitter, but also some remarks from well-meaning people along the lines of "maybe women (ethnic minorities, etc.) just aren't that interested in philosophy".

I expressed my rejection of this perspective in a post for the Blog of the APA in 2020. Perhaps it warrants reposting:

There is nothing about philosophy, as a type of inquiry into fundamental facts about our world, that should make it more attractive to White men than to Black women. Philosophical reflection is an essential part of the human condition, of interest to people of all cultures, races, classes, and social groups. If our discipline and society were in a healthy, egalitarian condition, we should, in fact, expect people from minority groups to be overrepresented in academic philosophy, rather than underrepresented. Academic philosophy should celebrate diversity of opinion, encourage challenges to orthodoxy, and reward fresh perspectives that come from inhabiting cultures and having life experiences different from the mainstream. We should be eager, not reluctant, to hear from a wide range of voices. We should especially welcome, rather than create an inhospitable or cool environment for, people with unusual or minority or culturally atypical or historically underrepresented experiences and worldviews. The productive engine of philosophy depends on novelty and difference.

16% of Authors in Elite Philosophy Journals Are Women

In some ways, the gender situation has been improving in philosophy. Women now constitute about 40% of graduating majors in philosophy in the U.S., up from about 32% in the 1980s-2010s. There is, I think, substantially more awareness of gender issues and the desirability of gender diversity than there was fifteen years ago. And yet, at the highest levels of impact and prestige, philosophy remains overwhelmingly male.

One measure of this is authorship in elite philosophy journals. For this post, I examined the past two years' tables of contents of Philosophical Review, Mind, Journal of Philosophy, and Nous -- widely considered to be the most elite general philosophy journals in mainstream Anglophone philosophy. (Some rankings put Philosophy & Phenomenological Research alongside these four.) I estimated the gender of each author of each article, commentary, or response (excluding book reviews and editorial prefaces), based gender-typical name, gender-typical photo, pronoun use, and/or personal knowledge, generally using at least two criteria. Of 291 included authors, there were only two who were either non-binary or defied classification -- in both cases, based on an expressed preference for they/them pronouns. There's always a risk of mistake, but for the most part I expect that my gender classifications accurately reflect how the authors identify and are perceived, with at most a 1-2% error rate.

Overall, I found:

Authorship Rates In Four
Elite Philosophy Journals
(Past Two Years):
Women: 46 authorships
Men: 243 authorships
Nonbinary/unclassified: 2 authorships

Percent women: 16%

Women now earn about 30% of PhDs in the U.S. and constitute almost 30% of American Philosophical Association members who report their gender -- so authorship in these journals is substantially more skewed than faculty in the United States. Of course, many authors are neither located nor received their PhD in the U.S., so these percentages aren't strictly comparable. However, PhD and faculty percentages are broadly similar in the U.K. and, impressionistically, in other high-income Anglophone countries. (I'm less sure outside the English-speaking world, but researchers in non-Anglophone countries author only a small percentage of articles in elite Anglophone journals; see here for an analysis of the insularity of Anglophone philosophy.)

Now, one possible explanation of this skew is that women are more likely to specialize in ethics than in other areas of philosophy (see these ten-year-old data), and these four journals publish relatively little ethics. To explore this possibility, I did two things:

First, I coded each article in the big four journals as either "ethics" or "non-ethics", based on the title or the abstract if the title was ambiguous. I included political philosophy, social philosophy, metaethics, and history of ethics as ethics. (Of course, there were some gray-area cases and judgment calls.)

Second, I added two journals to my list: Ethics and Philosophy & Public Affairs, generally considered the two most elite ethics journals (though after the editorial turmoil at PPA last year, it's not clear whether this will remain true of PPA).

In the big four, I classifed 60/291 (21%) authorships as ethics. (Perhaps this is a slight underrepresentation of ethics in these journals, relative to the proportion of research faculty in the Anglophone world who specialize in ethics?) In these journals, I found that indeed women have a higher percentage of ethics authorships than non-ethics authorships:

Authorship by Gender
in Big 4 Philosophy Journals
Ethics vs. Non-Ethics
Ethics: 17/60 (28%)
Non-ethics: 29/231 (13%)
[Fisher's exact 2-tail, p = .005]

If we juice up the sample size by adding in Ethics and PPA, we get the following:

Authorship by Gender
in 6 Elite Philosophy Journals
Ethics vs. Non-Ethics
Ethics: 40/142 (29%)
Non-ethics: 29/231 (13%)
[Fisher's exact 2-tail, p < .001]

[corrected Apr 27]

Strikingly, women appear to be more than twice as likely to author ethics articles than non-ethics articles.

Ten years ago, I did some similar analyses, comparing ethics vs. non-ethics authorships in two-year bins every 20 years from 1955 to 2015. In those samples, too, I found women to author only a small percentage of articles in elite journals overall (13% in 2014-2015) and to be more likely to author in ethics, so the trends are historically consistent.

ETA April 28: To be clear, all four journals normally use double-anonymous refereeing.

Harmonizing with the Dao: Sketch of an Evaluative Framework

Increasingly, I find myself drawn to an ethics of harmonizing with the Dao. Invoking "the Dao" might sound mystical, non-Western, ancient, religious -- alien to mainstream secular 21st-century Anglophone metaphysics and ethics. But I don't think it needs to be. It just needs some clarification and secularization. As a first approximation, think of harmonizing with the Dao as akin to harmonizing with nature. Then broaden "nature" to include human patterns as well as non-human, and you're close to the ideal. Maybe we could equally call it an ethics of "harmonizing with the world" or simply an "ethics of harmony". But explicit reference to "the Dao" helps locate the idea's origins and its Daoist flavor.

[image source]

The Metaphysics of Dao

In the intended sense -- inspired by ancient Daoism and Confucianism, but adapted for a 21st century Anglophone context -- the "Dao" the world as a whole. However, it is not the world conceptualized as a collection of objects, but rather as a system of processes and patterns. The Dao is the spinning of Earth; the rise and fall of mountains and species; the rise and fall of cities and nations; human birth, childhood, adulthood, and death; people discovering and losing love; the way strangers greet each other; the growth of your fingernails; the falling of a leaf.

The Axiology of Dao

Some strands in the Daoist tradition hold that all manifestations of the Dao are equally good. But the more dominant strand holds that things can go better or worse. And certainly the Confucians, who also sought harmony with the Dao, held that things could go better or worse.

What constitutes things going better? I favor value pluralism: More than one type of thing has fundamental value. Happiness is valuable, of course. But so also is knowledge (even when it doesn't lead to happiness), beauty, human relationships, and even (I'd argue) the existence of stones.

One way to clarify our thoughts about value is the "distant planet thought experiment". Consider a planet on the far side of the galaxy, forever blocked by the galactic core, with which we will never interact. What would you hope for, for the sake of this planet? Most of us would not hope for a sterile rock, but rather for a planet rich with life -- and not just microbes, not just jungles of plants and animals, but a diverse range of entities capable of forming societies, capable of love and cooperation, art and science, engineering and sports, entities capable of generations-long endeavors and of philosophical wonder as they gaze up at the stars or down through their microscopes.

We might say that a planet, or a region of spacetime, is flourishing when it instantiates, or is on the path toward instantiating, such excellent patterns.

Conceptual Frameworks

Philosophers typically ask two questions when I propose harmonizing with the Dao as an ethical ideal. First, how does it differ from the more familiar (to them) ethics of consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics? Second, what specifically does it recommend?

To the first question: Unlike consequentialism, there is no single good or bundle of goods that you should maximize; unlike deontology, there is no one rule or set of rules you should follow (unless we interpret "harmonize with the Dao" as the rule); unlike virtue ethics, there is no canonical set of virtues the cultivation and instantiation of which is the foremost imperative. Instead, the animating idea is to flow harmoniously along with the Dao and participate in, rather than strain against, its flourishing.

That's vague, of course. What specifically should you do, if your aim is to harmonize with the Dao?

I have some thoughts. But first, notice that consequentialism as a general ethical perspective is compatible with a wide range of possible concrete actions, depending on how it is developed and on the details of your situation. So also can deontological and virtue ethical perspectives be made compatible with a wide range of specific actions. What these broad ethical perspectives offer, primarily, is not specific advice but rather conceptual frameworks for ethical thinking -- in terms of consequences and expectations, or in terms of rules of different types, or in terms of a range of virtues and vices. So let's consider what broad concepts an ethics of harmony might employ, with the specific advice as an illustration of how those concepts might work.

Harmony and Disharmony, Illustrated in a University Context

Harmonizing with the flourishing patterns of the Dao involves participating in those patterns, enriching them, and enabling others to participate in and enrich those patterns. Suppose you think that one of the great processes worth preserving in the world is university education. You can participate in that process by being a good teacher, by being an administrator who helps things run smoothly, by being a custodian who helps keep the grounds clean, and so on. You can enrich it by helping to make it even more awesome than it already is -- for example by being an unusually inspiring teacher or by being not just an ordinary custodian but one who adds a bright smile to a student's day. You can enable others to participate in and enrich those patterns by helping hire a terrific teacher or custodian or by providing the type of environment that brings out the best in others.

We can see the university as a place where many lives converge either briefly or for decades. This convergence is valuable not just for what it yields but in itself. The processes constituting university life also participate in and enable other valuable processes, whether those are individual human lives, or other institutions that partly overlap with or depend on the university, or projects and events that happen within the university, or simply the natural and architectural beauty of an appealing campus.

Compare this way of thinking about the ethics of participation in a university with consequentialism (emphasizing the various goods that university education is expected to deliver), deontology (emphasizing the rules one ought to follow within a university), or virtue ethics (emphasizing the manifestation and cultivation of virtues such as curiosity and compassion). While I don't object to any of those ways of thinking about the ethics of university life, the Daoist perspective is, I hope, a valuable alternative lens.

Disharmony could involve cutting short, or attempting to cut short, an axiologically valuable pattern (rather than letting it come to its natural end), working against that pattern, or preventing others from harmonizing. Continuing the university example, cutting funding for valuable research, firing an excellent teacher, disrupting classes, littering, or flying a noisy helicopter overhead might all count as disharmonious. Other examples can include preventing access or undermining the conditions that allow students, faculty, or staff to flourish in their roles.

Comparisons with Music

You are not the melody-maker. "Harmony" suggests a contrast with "melody". You are not the melody-maker, the director, the first violinist, the lead singer, the lead guitarist -- at least not usually. Your typical role is to support an already-happening good thing.

Diversity and pluralism. There is more than one way to harmonize. A piece is richer when not everyone plays the same note.

Improvisation. Zhuangzi emphasized flowing along with things in an improvisational manner, rather than adhering to fixed rules. Often, the best music has improvisational elements, or at least room to allow one's mood of the moment to influence how one plays the notes. Spontaneous improvisation manifests harmony within the improviser, among the various unarticulated inclinations that arise without explicit cognitive control.

Aesthetic value. The boundary between aesthetic and ethical value (and other types of value) might not be as sharp as philosophers often suppose.

Conflicts of Harmony

A tree is a wondrous thing. Cutting it down cuts short an axiologically valuable pattern, and is normally out of harmony with the tree, the forest, and the lives it supports. But if the tree becomes lumber for a beautiful home, then that act belongs to another axiologically valuable pattern and is in harmony with the Dao of human cultural life.

Your wife wants one thing from you; your mother, another. Harmony with one might involve dissonance with the other. You might consider how sharp the dissonance is in each case. You might consider what patterns are being enacted in these relationships, and which are the more valuable patterns to sustain.

Like any ethical approach, harmonizing with the Dao must allow for conflicts and tradeoffs. The world makes competing demands and offers incompatible opportunities. There needn't be a formula for how to deal with all such cases. In some cases, creative thinking might allow one to support or integrate multiple patterns or integrate them into a whole: Removing a tree is sometimes overall good for a forest; occasional tension with a spouse may sustain a healthier relationship than shallow peace.

Sometimes the conflict is the harmony. Chess masters seek incompatible goals as part of the larger pattern of a competition. Predators consume prey in a healthy ecosystem. Law and politics require adversaries in a (hopefully) well-functioning social system.

My main overall thought is that we can build a fruitful framework for ethical thinking by taking the root project to be one of harmonizing with the awesome patterns and processes of the world.

New Paper in Draft: Superficialism about Belief, and How We Will Decide That Robots Believe

Comments welcome, as always, by email, as comments on this blog post, or through social media. This is intended as a submission to a special issue of Semiotic Studies on Krzysztof Poslajko's recent book Unreal Beliefs.

Superficialism about property X treats the possession, or not, of property X as determined entirely by superficial as opposed to deep facts. Belief should be understood superficially, as determined entirely by facts about actual and potential behavior, conscious experience, and transitional cognitive states ultimately understood in terms of actual and potential behavior and conscious experience. On both intuitive and pragmatic grounds, superficialism about belief is superior to accounts of belief in terms of deep cognitive or neural architecture, and it is not systematically inferior on scientific grounds. Behaviorist and interpretativist superficialism suggests that robots and Large Language Models already do, or will soon, believe. If consciousness is also essential to belief, the issue might soon become unclear for some of the most advanced systems. However, it will at least be practical to attribute some such systems belief* -- belief shorn of commitment to any conscious aspect -- and it will be forgivable if people forget to pronounce the asterisk. Krzysztof Poslajko should welcome this manner of thinking, though it needn't be as "antirealist" as Poslajko suggests.

Draft available here

Further Reflections on the Most-Cited Works in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Underranked Works and Concentration Percentage

A couple of weeks ago, I published a list of the 253 most-cited works since 1900 in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (The SEP had 1778 main-page entries as of my scrape last summer, and many of those entries have long reference lists.) Citation in the SEP is plausibly a better measure of impact in mainstream Anglophone philosophy than other bibliometric measures like Google Scholar and SCOPUS, which include citations by non-philosophical sources (which can dominate citations within philosophy, since philosophy is overall a relatively low-citation field) and which mix citation by sociologically elite venues with citation by less elite venues (and those citation patterns can be very different).

I think informed readers will tend to agree that the works near the top of the list (Rawls' Theory of Justice, Kripke's Naming and Necessity, etc.) are indeed among the most influential works in the mainstream Anglophone tradition -- more influential in mainstream Anglophone philosophy than, say, Foucault's Discipline and Punish or Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery, despite Foucault's and Popper's higher citation overall across all disciplines and sources.

(What do I mean by "mainstream Anglophone philosophy"? I mean philosophy as practiced by professors in departments highly ranked in the Philosophical Gourmet Report, as published in journals that are highly ranked in Brian Leiter's polls (e.g., here), and -- though this would be circular for present purposes -- as recognized in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Even readers who dislike the philosophy of this tradition, or who see it as troublingly narrow, can I think recognize the sociological phenomenon of influence in these related ecologies, reasonably called "mainstream" in Anglophone academia.)

Underranked Works

Although SEP citation rates are, I think, a better measure of impact in mainstream Anglophone philosophy than any other existing bibliometric measure, that doesn't mean they are perfect. Works with a huge impact on a subdiscipline, or on a particular topic, will plausibly be underranked compared to works with substantial impact across a range of areas. The SEP will have only a limited number of entries for each subdiscipline or topic, and no matter how important the work is to that subdiscipline or topic, it can appear only once in each entry's bibliography.

This explains, I think, the relatively weak showings of some of the best-known articles in the field. For example:

119th (tied), 21 citations: Gettier, Edmund L., 1963, Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?

192nd (tied), 17 citations: Anscombe, G.E.M., 1958, Modern Moral Philosophy

unranked, 14 citations: Searle, John R, 1980, Minds, Brains, and Programs

unranked, 12 citations: Singer, Peter, 1972, Famine, Affluence, and Morality

unranked, 9 citations: Thomson, Judith Jarvis, 1971, A Defense of Abortion

This isn't intended as any kind of exhaustive or representative list of underranked works -- just a few examples that struck me as conspicuously underranked relative to their influence. Gettier's 1963 article is possibly the most influential work of 20th century epistemology (in mainstream Anglophone circles). Anscombe's 1958 article is often seen as a landmark in the resurgence of virtue ethics. Searle's 1980 "Chinese room" argument is perhaps the most influential work on philosophy of computation and artificial intelligence after Turing. Likewise, Singer's 1972 article on charitable donation (with its famous example of rescuing a drowning child in a nearby pond at the expense of your clothes) and Thomson's defense of abortion (with its violinist example) are known to virtually all mainstream Anglophone philosophers.

Works might also be underranked if the SEP has relatively few entries in their field or subfield. For example, I'd venture that epistemology has relatively few entries relative to its overall influence in mainstream Anglophone philosophy. And although feminism has probably been somewhat more influential in mainstream Anglophone philosophy than philosophy of race, SEP features many more entries on the former than the latter, possibly explaining why some important feminist works appear on the list (e.g., Butler's Gender Trouble at rank #61), while philosophy of race is poorly represented.

Influential authors and ideas might also fail to appear on this list, if the influence is spread among several works. For example, here are the ten most-cited authors who have no individual works represented among the top 253:

John Hawthorne (97 total citations)
Jonathan Bennett (83)
William Alston (77)
Judith Jarvis Thomson (72)
William G. Lycan (71)
Nicholas Rescher (71)
Peter Singer (71)
Ernest Sosa (69)
Jeremy Waldron (68)
Joel Feinberg (67)
Amartya Sen (67)

All of the above are among the top 86 most-cited authors born since 1900. So of course no negative inference about the importance of any individual author is justified by the absence that author's individual works from the works list.

What Percentage of an Author's Citations Are to Their Most-Cited Work?

By comparing my most-cited authors list with my most-cited works list, we can get a rough measure of how much an author's impact is concentrated in a single work vs. spread across multiple works. (Note that the lists are not quite comparable, since the authors list includes only authors born 1900 or later while the works list includes all works published 1900 or later, including works by authors born before 1900.)

Consider, for example, Thomas Kuhn. His Structure of Scientific Revolutions was one of the most influential works of philosophy of the second half of the 20th century. Fittingly, it appears 9th on my list of most influential works. But Kuhn himself appears relatively low on the list of most influential authors: 63rd. Looking at the raw numbers, we can see that 58 entries cite Structure and 71 entries cite any work by Kuhn. Thus, 82% of the Kuhn-citing entries cite Structure.

Contrast this with, say, David Lewis, who is the #1 most-cited contemporary author overall (with 307 entries citing his work) and whose most-cited work, On The Plurality of Worlds, ranks #6 (70 citing entries). For Lewis, 23% (70/307) of the entries that cite him cite his most-cited work.

I can't seem to think of a good name for this number, so I'll have to settle with a bad name: the concentration percentage. Here are the concentration percentages of the ten most-cited contemporary authors in the SEP:

1. Lewis, David K.: 23% (70/307)
2. Quine, Willard van Orman: 32% (69/213)
3. Putnam, Hilary: 24% (45/190)
4. Rawls, John: 76% (127/168)
5. Kripke, Saul A.: 58% (92/159)
6. Williamson, Timothy: 32% (48/152)
7. Davidson, Donald: 21% (31/151)
8. Williams, Bernard: 22% (32/146)
9. Nussbaum, Martha C.: 19% (26/140)
10. Nagel, Thomas: 24% (33/137)

Thus, we can see two clusters: A couple of authors had most of their citation impact through a single work: Rawls (via A Theory of Justice) and Kripke (via Naming and Necessity). The remaining authors had about a third to a fifth of their citation impact through a single work.

Among the top hundred authors, the ten most concentrated are:

Kuhn, Thomas S. (82%: Structure of Scientific Revolutions)
Rawls, John (76%: A Theory of Justice)
Parfit, Derek (71%: Reasons and Persons)
Scanlon, Thomas M. (66%: What We Owe to Each Other)
Kaplan, David (65%: Demonstratives)
Ryle, Gilbert (61%: The Concept of Mind)
Kripke, Saul A. (58%: Naming and Necessity)
Ayer, Alfred J. (54%: Language, Truth, and Logic)
Nozick, Robert (53%: Anarchy, State, and Utopia)
Evans, Gareth (53%: Varieties of Reference)

I confess to being surprised that some of these percentages aren't even higher. For example, I'd have guessed Ryle's impact was more than 61% concentrated on The Concept of Mind.

The ten least concentrated are:

Bennett, Jonathan (16%)
Pettit, Philip (16%)
Harman, Gilbert H. (16%)
Hawthorne, John (15%)
Thomson, Judith Jarvis (15%)
Lowe, E. J. (15%)
Waldron, Jeremy (15%)
Feinberg, Joel (13%)
Yablo, Stephen (13%)
Rescher, Nicholas (6%)

I'll venture a prediction. According to the phenomenon I've labeled "The Winnowing of Greats", the greater your distance from a group that varies in eminence, the greater the difference seems between the most eminent members of that group and the less eminent members. (This is to some extent because you have zero knowledge of most members below a certain level of eminence and to some extent because you overrely on second-hand summaries that highlight a few of the most eminent examples.) If this winnowing phenomenon applies to works as well as to authors, then as time creates distance from our era, all but the most influential works will largely be forgotten -- which will disproportionately favor highly concentrated authors in the historical memory.

[click image to enlarge and clarify]

The Gender and Race/Ethnicity of Authors of the Most-Cited Works of Mainstream Anglophone Philosophy

As is well-known, mainstream Anglophone philosophy has tended to be overwhelmingly non-Hispanic White -- though there's some evidence of recent changes in the student population which might start to trickle into the professoriate. Generally, the higher the level of prestige, the more skewed the ratios. In my 2024 analysis of the 376 most-cited authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, I found that women or nonbinary authors constituted 12% of the list and Hispanic or non-White authors constituted 3%.

How well represented are these groups among authors of the 253 most-cited works in the Stanford Encyclopedia? Here, the skew is even more extreme. Of the 265 included work-author combinations (almost all of the included works are solo-authored), I count 24 works (9%) by women, 2 (1%) non-binary authored works (both by Judith Butler), one (0.4%) by a Hispanic/Latino person (Linda Martín Alcoff), one (0.4%) by an Asian (Jaegwon Kim), and none by any authors that are known by me to identify or be perceived as Black or African American, American Indian / Alaska Native, or Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander (using the race/ethnicity categories of the US Census). Corrections welcome if I'm misclassified anyone!

Here it is as a pie chart. If you squint, you might be able to see the lines for the Hispanic or non-White groups.

[pie chart comparing 236 non-Hispanic White men with 25 non-Hispanic White women or nonbinary, 1 Hispanic or non-White man, and 1 Hispanic or non-White woman or nonbinary]

The 253 Most Cited Works in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Last summer, Jordan Jackson and I scraped the bibliographies of all the main-page entries of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the leading source of review articles in mainstream Anglophone philosophy. Since 2010, I've been analyzing citation patterns in the SEP. Generally, I find SEP citation rates to more plausibly measure influence in mainstream Anglophone philosophy than other bibliometric measures, such those derived from Web of Science or Google Scholar. (For example, by the SEP method the top five most cited philosophers born 1900 or later are David Lewis, W.V.O. Quine, Hilary Putnam, John Rawls, and Saul Kripke.)

Most of my SEP-based analyses aggregate by author, but it's also revealing to aggregate by work cited, for a couple of reasons. First, my author-based analyses probably overstate the influence of authors with moderate impact across many fields compared to authors with transformative impact in just one or a few fields. Second, tracking influential works is an interesting project in its own right.

Before proceeding to the list, notes and caveats.

(1.) Each work counts once per main-page bibliographic entry in the SEP. Thus, a work with a total of 33 is cited in 33 different main page entries. Subpage entries are not included.

(2.) What counts as the "same work"? The distinction admits vague and contentious cases, and implementing it mechanically raises further problems. Here's what I did: To count as the same work, the work had to begin with exactly the same title words (excluding punctuation marks, "a", "an", or "the"). Later editions were counted as the same work as earlier editions (including a few cases of "such-and-such revisited" or the like) and articles republished in collections were counted as the same work if the particular article rather than the collection as a whole was cited. Also, works that appeared first as articles then later were expanded into books with the same or similar title were counted as the same work. Multi-volume works counted as the same work, unless the title was "Complete Works" or similar.

(3.) I only included works with publication dates from 1900-2024. Older works tend not to be cited in a consistent, easily scraped format, so results for those works are inaccurate and potentially misleading.

(4.) I did not attempt to match works cited both in English and in their original language. Some translated works make the list simply in virtue of citation under their English-language title; and some untranslated works make the list simply in virtue of citation under their original-language title. Obviously, this systematically undercounts works that are cited under both their English and original-language titles.

(4.) Citations in the role of editor are not included.

(5.) Please excuse the haphazard cut-and-paste formatting. Dates are sometimes first appearance, sometimes later appearance or edition or translation.

(6.) Technical details: The matching algorithm looked for matches in the first four letters of the author's name and the first five letters of the first text appearing after numbers, punctuation marks, "the", "an", or "a", which for standardly formatted entries is the title. I then alphabetically sorted and hand-checked all bibliographic lines with at least 15 exact matches of both of the two parameters. This took several hours and was probably imperfect, but was not as difficult as it might seem. Note also: The scrape was conducted last summer, so recent entries and recent updates won't figure into the totals.

(7.) Corrections welcome, as long as they are consistent with the principles above and don't constitute a general revision, unsystematically applied on one author's behalf, of the method described in the technical details.

(8.) I'll follow up, probably in the next week or two, with some reflections on the list.

(9.) You can see the 2020 results here.

ETA Apr 9: Two follow-up posts:

The Gender and Race/Ethnicity of Authors of the Most-Cited Works of Mainstream Anglophone Philosophy (Mar 31)

Further Reflections on the Most-Cited Works in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Underranked Works and Concentration Percentage (Apr 8)

[cover of Rawls's A Theory of Justice]

1. (127 citing entries) Rawls, John, 1971, A Theory of Justice
2. (92) Kripke, Saul, 1972, Naming and Necessity
3. (79) Parfit, Derek, 1984, Reasons and Persons
4. (72) Nozick, Robert, 1974, Anarchy, State, and Utopia
5. (71) Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1953 [2001], Philosophical Investigations
6. (70) Lewis, David, 1986, On the Plurality of Worlds
7. (69) Quine, W. V. O., 1960. Word and Object
8. (67) Scanlon, T. M., 1998, What We Owe to Each Other
9. (58) Kuhn, Thomas S., 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
10. (57) Rawls, John, 1996, Political Liberalism
11. (54) Chalmers, David J., 1996, The Conscious Mind
12. (49) Russell, Betrand, 1903, The Principles of Mathematics
13. (48) Lewis, David, 1973. Counterfactuals
13. (48) Sidgwick, Henry, 1907, The Methods of Ethics
13. (48) Williamson, Timothy, 2000, Knowledge and its Limits
16. (47) Kaplan, David, 1977, Demonstratives
16. (47) Moore, G.E., 1903, Principia Ethica
18. (45) Putnam, Hilary, 1975, The Meaning of "Meaning"
18. (45) Quine, W.V.O., 1951, Two Dogmas of Empiricism
20. (43) Jackson, Frank, 1998, From Metaphysics to Ethics
21. (41) Ayer, A.J., 1936, Language, Truth and Logic
22. (39) Carnap, Rudolf, 1956, Meaning and necessity
22. (39) Ross, W.D., 1931, The Right and the Good
22. (39) Ryle, Gilbert, 1949. The Concept of Mind
22. (39) van Fraassen, Bas C., 1980, The Scientific Image
26. (37) Dummett, Michael, 1973, Frege: Philosophy of Language
26. (37) Evans, Gareth, 1982, The Varieties of Reference
26. (37) Mackie, J. L., 1977, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong
26. (37) Russell, Bertrand, 1905, On Denoting
26. (37) Whitehead, Alfred North and Bertrand Russell, 1910-1913, Principia Mathematica
31. (36) Goodman, Nelson, 1954. Fact, Fiction and Forecast
32. (35) Popper, Karl R., 1959, The Logic of Scientific Discovery
32. (35) Wittgenstein, L., 1922, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
34. (34) Fodor, Jerry A., 1987, Psychosemantics
34. (34) Korsgaard, Christine M., 1996, Sources of Normativity
34. (34) Lewis, David K., 1969, Convention: A Philosophical Study
34. (34) Nozick, Robert, 1981, Philosophical Explanations
34. (34) Raz, Joseph, 1986, The Morality of Freedom
34. (34) Woodward, James, 2003, Making Things Happen
40. (33) Gauthier, David, 1986, Morals by Agreement
40. (33) McDowell, John, 1994, Mind and World
40. (33) Nagel, Thomas, 1986, The View from Nowhere
40. (33) Russell, Bertrand, 1912, The Problems of Philosophy
44. (32) Parfit, Derek, 2017, On What Matters
44. (32) Williams, Bernard, 1985, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy
46. (31) Davidson, Donald, 1980, Essays on Actions and Events
46. (31) Gibbard, Allan, 1990, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings
46. (31) Strawson, P.F., 1959. Individuals
49. (29) Finnis, John. M, 1980, Natural Law and Natural Rights
49. (29) Fricker, Miranda, 2007, Epistemic Injustice
49. (29) Longino, Helen E., 1990, Science as Social Knowledge
52. (28) Anscombe, G. E. M., 1957, Intention
52. (28) Brandom, Robert B., 1994, Making It Explicit
52. (28) Jackson, Frank, 1982, Epiphenomenal Qualia
52. (28) Pearl, Judea, 2000, Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference
52. (28) Plantinga, Alvin, 1974, The Nature of Necessity
52. (28) Quine, W. V. O., 1948, On What There Is
52. (28) Rawls, John, 2001, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement
52. (28) Sellars, Wilfrid, 1956, Empiricism and the philosophy of mind
52. (28) van Inwagen, Peter, 1990, Material Beings
61. (27) Armstrong, David M., 1997, A World of States of Affairs
61. (27) Butler, Judith, 1990, Gender Trouble
61. (27) Dennett, Daniel C., 1991, Consciousness Explained
61. (27) Dretske, Fred I., 1981, Knowledge and the Flow of Information
61. (27) Hare, R.M., 1952, The Language of Morals
61. (27) Lewis, David, 1983, New Work for a Theory of Universals
61. (27) Millikan, Ruth Garrett, 1984, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories
61. (27) Nagel, Thomas, 1974, What is It Like to Be a Bat?
61. (27) Smith, Michael, 1994, The Moral Problem
61. (27) Young, Iris Marion, 1990, Justice and the Politics of Difference
71. (26) Carnap, Rudolf, 1950, Logical Foundations of Probability
71. (26) Frankfurt, Harry, 1971, Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person
71. (26) Grice, Herbert Paul, 1989, Studies in the Way of Words
71. (26) Jeffrey, Richard C., 1965 [1983], The Logic of Decision
71. (26) Kripke, Saul, 1982, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language
71. (26) Nussbaum, Martha C., 2006, Frontiers of Justice
71. (26) Searle, John R., 1983, Intentionality
78. (25) Anderson, Elizabeth S., 1999, What Is the Point of Equality?
78. (25) Armstrong, David M., 1968, A Materialist Theory of Mind
78. (25) Dworkin, Ronald, 1977, Taking Rights Seriously
78. (25) Fodor, Jerry A., 1975, The Language of Thought
78. (25) Hart, H.L.A., 1961, The Concept of Law
78. (25) Hempel, Carl G., 1965, Aspects of Scientific Explanation
78. (25) Kneale, William and Martha Kneale, 1962. The Development of Logic
78. (25) MacIntyre, Alasdair, 1984. After Virtue
78. (25) Nagel, Ernest, 1961, The Structure of Science
78. (25) Ramsey, Frank P., 1931, Truth and Probability
78. (25) Rawls, John, 1999, The Law of Peoples
78. (25) Russell, Bertrand, 1918/1919, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism
78. (25) Stalnaker, Robert, 1984, Inquiry
78. (25) Williamson, Timothy, 2007, The Philosophy of Philosophy
92. (24) Blackburn, Simon, 1998, Ruling Passions
92. (24) Brink, David O., 1989. Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics
92. (24) Burge, Tyler, 1979, Individualism and the Mental
92. (24) Dupré, John, 1993, The Disorder of Things
92. (24) Fine, Kit, 1994, Essence and Modality
92. (24) Hare, R.M., 1981, Moral Thinking
92. (24) Lewis, D., 1986, Philosophical Papers
92. (24) Quine, W. V. O., 1970, Philosophy of Logic
100. (23) Carnap, Rudolf, 1950, Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology
100. (23) Cartwright, Nancy, 1983, How the laws of physics lie
100. (23) Gilligan, Carol, 1982, In a Different Voice
100. (23) Griffin, James, 1986, Well-Being: its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance
100. (23) Kitcher, Philip, 1993, The Advancement of Science
100. (23) Putnam, Hilary, 1981, Reason, Truth and History
100. (23) Savage, Leonard J., 1954, The Foundations of Statistics
100. (23) Searle, John R., 1969, Speech Acts
100. (23) Shafer-Landau, Russ, 2005, Moral Realism
100. (23) Spirtes, Peter, Clark Glymour, and Richard Scheines, 1993, Causation, Prediction, and Search
100. (23) Stalnaker, Robert C., 1968, A Theory of Conditionals
100. (23) Turing, Alan M., 1936 [1965], On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem
112. (22) Davidson, Donald, 1963. Actions, Reasons, Causes
112. (22) Dretske, Fred, 1995, Naturalizing the Mind
112. (22) Fodor, Jerry A., 1983, Modularity of Mind
112. (22) Machamer, Peter, Lindley Darden, and Carl F. Craver, 2000, Thinking about Mechanisms
112. (22) Street, Sharon, 2006, A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value
112. (22) van Fraassen, Bas C., 1989, Laws and Symmetry
112. (22) Zalta, Edward N., 1983, Abstract Objects
119. (21) Alcoff, Linda Martin, 2006. Visible Identities
119. (21) Brandt, Richard B., 1979, A Theory of the Good and the Right
119. (21) Cartwright, Nancy, 1999, The Dappled World
119. (21) Dawkins, Richard, 1976, The Selfish Gene
119. (21) Dworkin, Ronald, 1986, Law's Empire,
119. (21) Field, Hartry, 1989, Realism, Mathematics and Modality
119. (21) Fodor, Jerry A., 1974, Special Sciences (or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis)
119. (21) Gettier, Edmund L., 1963, Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?
119. (21) Longino, H. 2001, The Fate of Knowledge
119. (21) Nussbaum, Martha C., 2000. Women and Human Development
119. (21) Okin, Susan Moller, 1989, Justice, Gender, and the Family
119. (21) Sober, Elliott and David Wilson, 1998, Unto Others
119. (21) Strawson, Peter F., 1962, Freedom and Resentment
119. (21) Tye, Michael, 1995, Ten Problems of Consciousness
119. (21) Walzer, Michael, 1983, Spheres of Justice
119. (21) Wiggins, David, 1980, Sameness and Substance
135. (20) Austin, J.L., 1962, How to Do Things with Words
135. (20) Chisholm, Roderick M., 1957, Perceiving
135. (20) Dancy, Jonathan, 2004, Ethics Without Principles
135. (20) Darwall, Stephen, 2006. The Second-Person Standpoint
135. (20) Davidson, Donald, 1984, Inquiries into truth and interpretation
135. (20) Dennett, Daniel C., 1987, The Intentional Stance
135. (20) Dworkin, Ronald, 2000. Sovereign Virtue
135. (20) Feyerabend, Paul K., 1975, Against Method
135. (20) Gödel, Kurt, 1931, Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I
135. (20) Husserl, Edmund, 1900-01, Logische Untersuchungen
135. (20) Quine, Willard Van Orman, 1953, From A Logical Point of View
135. (20) Reichenbach, Hans, 1938, Experience and Prediction
135. (20) Rorty, Richard, 1979, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
135. (20) Rosen, Gideon, 2010, Metaphysical Dependence
135. (20) Wright, Crispin, 1983, Frege's Conception of Numbers as Objects
135. (20) Zalta, Edward N., 1988, Intensional Logic and the Metaphysics of Intentionality
151. (19) Anderson, Alan and Nuel Belnap, 1975, Entailment: The logic of relevance and necessity
151. (19) Blackburn, Simon, 1984. Spreading the Word
151. (19) Blackburn, Simon, 1993, Essays in Quasi-Realism
151. (19) Chisholm, Roderick M., 1976, Person and Object
151. (19) Craver, Carl F., 2007, Explaining the Brain
151. (19) Fischer, John Martin and Ravizza, Mark, 1998. Responsibility and Control
151. (19) Grice, H. P., 1975, Logic and Conversation
151. (19) Hintikka, Jaakko, 1962, Knowledge and Belief
151. (19) Keynes, John Maynard, 1921, A Treatise on Probability
151. (19) Lewis, David, 1979, Attitudes De Dicto and De Se
151. (19) Parsons, Terence, 1980, Nonexistent Objects
151. (19) Pogge, Thomas, 2002 [2008], World Poverty and Human Rights
151. (19) Priest, Graham, 1987, In Contradiction
151. (19) Salmon, Nathan, 1986, Frege's Puzzle
151. (19) Sider, Theodore, 2001, Four-Dimensionalism
151. (19) Tarski, A., 1983, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics
151. (19) Thomasson, Amie L., 1999, Fiction and Metaphysics
151. (19) Williamson, Timothy, 2013. Modal Logic as Metaphysics
169. (18) Armstrong, D., 1989, Universals: An Opinionated Introduction
169. (18) Barnes, Jonathan, 1982, The Presocratic Philosophers
169. (18) Chisholm, Roderick M., 1966, Theory of Knowledge
169. (18) Fodor, J., 1992, A Theory of Content and Other Essays
169. (18) Gibbard, Allan, 2003, Thinking How to Live
169. (18) Goodman, Nelson, 1968, Languages of Art
169. (18) Hacking, Ian, 1983, Representing and Intervening
169. (18) Harman, Gilbert, 1986, Change in View
169. (18) Hilbert, David and Wilhelm Ackermann, 1928, Grundzüge der Theoretischen Logik
169. (18) Kahneman, Daniel, 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow
169. (18) Kittay, Eva Feder, 1999, Love's Labor
169. (18) Lewis, David K., 1991, Parts of Classes
169. (18) Lewis, David, 1973, Causation
169. (18) Moore, G. E., 1912. Ethics
169. (18) Noë, Alva, 2004, Action in Perception
169. (18) Prior, Arthur N., 1967, Past, Present and Future
169. (18) Salmon, Wesley, 1984, Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World
169. (18) Schaffer, Jonathan, 2009, On What Grounds What
169. (18) Searle, John R., 1992, The Rediscovery of the Mind
169. (18) Stich, Stephen P., 1983, From folk psychology to cognitive science
169. (18) Taylor, Charles, 1989, Sources of the Self
169. (18) Walton, Kendall, 1990, Mimesis as Make-Believe
169. (18) Wright, Crispin, 1992, Truth and Objectivity
192. (17) Annas, Julia, 1993, The Morality of Happiness
192. (17) Anscombe, G.E.M., 1958, Modern Moral Philosophy
192. (17) Benacerraf, Paul, 1973, Mathematical Truth
192. (17) Carnap, Rudolf, 1928. Der logische Aufbau der Welt
192. (17) Davidson, Donald, 1970, Mental Events
192. (17) Dretske, Fred, 1988, Explaining behavior
192. (17) Field, Hartry, 1980, Science Without Numbers
192. (17) Goldman, Alvin, 1979, What is Justified Belief?
192. (17) Graham, Angus C., 1989, Disputers of the Tao
192. (17) Grice, H. P., 1957, Meaning
192. (17) Guthrie, W.K.C., 1962-1981, A History of Greek Philosophy
192. (17) Hooker, Brad, 2000, Ideal Code, Real World
192. (17) Howson, Colin and Peter Urbach, 2006, Scientific Reasoning
192. (17) Hull, David L., 1988, Science as a Process
192. (17) Kagan, Shelly, 1989, The Limits of Morality
192. (17) Kim, Jaegwon, 1998, Mind in a Physical World
192. (17) Kleene, Stephen Cole, 1952, Introduction to Metamathematics
192. (17) Lewis, David, 1980, A Subjectivist's Guide to Objective Chance
192. (17) List, Christian and Philip Pettit, 2011, Group Agency
192. (17) MacKinnon, Catherine, 1989, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State
192. (17) Marr, David, 1982, Vision
192. (17) Peacocke, Christopher, 1992, A Study of Concepts
192. (17) Plantinga, Alvin, 2000, Warranted Christian Belief
192. (17) Ross, W.D., 1939, Foundations of Ethics
192. (17) Russell, B., 1914, Our Knowledge of the External World
192. (17) Schneewind, J. B., 1998. The Invention of Autonomy
192. (17) Tarski, Alfred, 1935, The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages
192. (17) van Inwagen, Peter, 1983. An Essay on Free Will
192. (17) Von Neumann, John and Oskar Morgenstern, 1944, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior
221. (16) Adams, Robert Merrihew, 1994, Leibniz
221. (16) Armstrong, D. M., 1978, Universals and Scientific Realism
221. (16) Axelrod, Robert and William D. Hamilton, 1981, The Evolution of Cooperation
221. (16) Butler, Judith, 1993. Bodies That Matter
221. (16) Churchland, Paul M., 1981, Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes
221. (16) Clark, Andy and David J. Chalmers, 1998, The Extended Mind
221. (16) Dummett, Michael, 1991, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics
221. (16) Fine, Kit, 2001, The Question of Realism
221. (16) Frankfurt, Harry, 1988. The Importance of What We Care About
221. (16) Frege, Gottlob, 1918/1956, The Thought: A Logical Inquiry
221. (16) Geach, Peter, 1962, Reference and Generality
221. (16) Gödel, Kurt, 1944, Russell's Mathematical Logic
221. (16) Hare, R. M., 1963. Freedom and Reason
221. (16) Horgan, Terence and John Tienson, 2002, The Intentionality of Phenomenology and the Phenomenology of Intentionality
221. (16) Irwin, Terence. H., 2008, The Development of Ethics
221. (16) Joyce, James M., 1999, The Foundations of Causal Decision Theory
221. (16) Kane, Robert, 1996, The Significance of Free Will
221. (16) Lipton, Peter, 1971 [2003], Inference to the Best Explanation
221. (16) Lloyd, Genevieve, 1984, The Man of Reason
221. (16) McMahan, Jeff, 2002, The Ethics of Killing
221. (16) Mellor, D.H., 1981, Real Time
221. (16) Perry, John, 1979, The Problem of the Essential Indexical
221. (16) Popper, Karl, 1962. Conjectures and refutations
221. (16) Raz, J., 1990. Practical reason and norms
221. (16) Russell, Bertrand, 1927, The Analysis of Matter
221. (16) Sandel, Michael J., 1982. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice
221. (16) Scheffler, Samuel, 1982, The Rejection of Consequentialism
221. (16) Stalnaker, Robert, 1978, Assertion
221. (16) Stevenson, Charles L., 1944, Ethics and Language
221. (16) Swinburne, Richard, 1977, The Coherence of Theism
221. (16) Tye, Michael, 2000, Consciousness, Color, and Content
221. (16) Williams, Bernard, 1981, Moral Luck
221. (16) Williams, George C., 1966, Adaptation and Natural Selection

Writing Short Fiction: Suggestions for Academics

I've published fifteen short, philosophically-themed science fiction stories in pro and semi-pro magazines, including in some of the most prestigious venues. Recently, a colleague asked my advice for academics interested in publishing short fiction. I figured I'd oblige with a blog post.

Write and Discard

You're a beginner. You're a beginner with a head start, because you can already write decent academic prose. But still, you're a beginner. Don't expect your first few efforts to be a publishable stories. So don't work on them too hard; don't get too invested in them; don't devote months to them and then abandon the whole enterprise when they aren't published.

Instead, write quickly. Write part of a story as a sketch. Write a whole draft, give it to someone who will provide honest feedback, and learn from that feedback. Then move on to a different story.

Most short fiction writers have large "trunks" of unpublished stories: early efforts, creative experiments, stories that didn't quite work out, stories they couldn't publish.

Writing is a process of discovery. In the course of writing, as the story takes shape, you find out how good the idea really was.

You'll find your voice better, and you'll cook up more interesting ideas, if you write lots and fast than if you belabor and belabor the same few pages.

Cherish and Protect Your Joy in Writing

If the thought of writing and discarding discourages you, ask yourself: Do you want to write? Or do you want, instead, to be someone who has written? If it's mainly the latter, then your approach might be too instrumental. You'll find it difficult to practice and to cultivate the traits that will set you apart.

Writing fiction should be a joy, for three main reasons:

First, if it's a joy, then if you discard many of your efforts, well, at least you enjoyed yourself!

Second, if you write joyfully, your writing will carry your distinctive voice and style. We are more distinct and memorable in our joys than in our forced labors.

Third, joy is intrinsically good, and the instrumental value of your writing fiction is at this point (let's be honest with ourselves) probably dubious. So whatever joy you derive is the most secure ground of value here.

Writing joyfully doesn't mean that you need to wait to write until inspiration strikes. I accept the standard "butt-in-chair" writing advice: Planting yourself in a seat before a blank page for an hour or three at regular intervals can do wonders. So yes, you might need to needle yourself a bit to get rolling. But then, when the words start to flow, follow your joy.

Writing joyfully doesn't mean writing only for yourself. It doesn't mean not valuing publication. Just don't let instrumentality poison your process.

[from my author page at Clarkesworld]

Write for the 10%

I don't care for mariachi music. The world contains, I'm sure, many great mariachi bands -- but however great they are, I won't enjoy them. Your writing is mariachi music.

Most of your friends won't like your writing enough to want to read it. (Maybe they'll politely read one story and say something encouraging.) Forget them. Don't try to please them. Ignore advice from the majority of people. Instead, find the mariachi lovers -- the people who like the particular, narrow type of thing that you are doing -- and notice their reactions. Otherwise, you'll be like a mariachi band taking musical advice from a country-music fan.

Far, far better to write something that 10% of readers will love than something that 70% of readers will think is okay.

The worst is to read some writing guide, or take some writing course, then follow the advice to the letter, trying to write some generic "good" story according to a formula. How depressing. You might as well set ChatGPT on the job. Be weird. Have fun by being different, expressing your quirky self.

Expect Rejection; Where to Submit; Critiques

Expect many rejections. Leading fiction magazines have rejection rates far worse than leading academic journals, often well over 99%.

Notice where short stories you like have been published. Potentially more helpfully, notice other venues -- maybe less prestigious -- where authors you like have also recently published.

You might be interested in my annual ranking of the most prestigious science fiction and fantasy magazines -- a good list for starting to think about venues in that genre. I also highly recommend the Submission Grinder.

If you're interested in exchanging critiques with amateur aspiring writers, Critters Writers Workshop is a good resource. Once you've made your first "pro" sale (at the SFWA qualifying rate or at least $100 cumulatively), Codex Writers Forum is invaluable for community, critique-trading, news, and information.

The Emotional Rollercoaster of Fiction Writing

Writing academic prose is hard. Sometimes I think my stuff is great. Sometimes I grumpily cut and discard, feel disappointed with my work, restart. It varies considerably with mood. (And actually I think the mood fluctuations can be helpful.)

In writing fiction, the ups and downs are -- for me and most others, I think -- substantially more intense. Take heed.

This, plus the rejection, makes cultivating the joy both harder and more important. It can be easy to feel like everything you do is mediocre and you've wasted your time. Avoiding instrumentality is the most reliable cure. To repeat myself: Try to love the writing at least as much as the having written.

Also, look, even if it's bad, there's a lot to be said for the value of bad art, enjoyed by one or a few. I plan to write a post on this topic, but in the meantime, consider my daughter's art car and The Vengefull Kurtain Rods.

The Rhythm of Stories and Articles:
initial hook → engagement of interest → developing trust → satisfying resolution

You're already familiar with the intellectual arc of an academic article. Your title is your initial hook. Your introduction builds up interest. By several hundred words in, your reader should feel they are in competent, trustworthy hands, headed along the path of a worthwhile argument or exploration. By the end, the reader should feel that you've presented a satisfying overall package.

For a short story, you need to transpose that knowledge into a different key.

Initial hook: The initial hook of a story is the title and the first few sentences. You can't yet emotionally engage the reader, but you normally (1.) convey something about the style, tone, and topic of the story, (2.) give the reader a little something to be curious about.

On 1: If it's a humorous space comedy, that should be evident right away. Same if it's an emotionally dark story of witchcraft. Of course you can't convey everything immediately and shouldn't overburden those sentences. But readers judge by their first nibble. If the first nibble doesn't match the overall meal, then readers who like that nibble might not like the whole story, and those who would have liked the whole story might not get past the first nibble.

On 2: Although you can't really emotionally engage readers in the first paragraph, you can draw them along by piquing their curiosity. This could be a bit of action you've dropped them in the middle of or an unusual social or physical event that has begun to unfold. Or it could be a more intellectual curiosity: an intriguing term, idea, event, or action they don't quite understand.

Engaging interest: The title might be great, but if the introduction isn't promising, you'll give up on reading an academic article. Same with a story. By about the end of the first page, the reader should move from initial curiosity to engaged interest.

In fiction-writing circles, you'll often hear advice to start the story in the middle. This isn't really necessary, though there's nothing wrong with it. Beginners often make the mistake of opening with not-especially-interesting background or scene-setting. Starting in the middle is one way to avoid this error -- and if it's slightly confusing as a result, that can actually serve as a bit of a curiosity hook.

The first page of your story serves some of the same purposes as an academic introduction. It's not of course an overview, but it is a promise. The reader should think, "Interesting, let's see where this goes."

Developing trust: By about page three or four of an academic article, the reader should feel that they are in good hands. It should be clear how the author is building toward the essential moves. Otherwise, you won't trust the author enough to give them more of your valuable reading time.

Analogously, in a short story by about page three or four the reader must feel emotionally invested or intellectually intrigued. They should trust your storytelling. They should feel the arc building. They should care about what happens next, due to engaging characters or fascinating ideas. If and only if they care by page three or four will they read to the end.

Reach a satisfying conclusion: Of course! Every scene, every thread, should come together by the end -- ideally, but not necessarily, with some development or revelation, not out of the blue but neither entirely expected, that suddenly shows the beginning and middle in a new light. Unless, of course, you don't want to.

A Dilemma for Nonlocal Theories of Consciousness

Call a theory of consciousness nonlocal if two entities that are molecule-for-molecule perfectly similar in their physical structure could nonetheless differ in their conscious experiences. My thought today is: Nonlocal theories of consciousness face an unattractive dilemma between (a.) allowing for physically implausible means of knowledge or (b.) allowing for the in-principle introspective inaccessibility of consciousness.

Clarifications:

Of course everyone agrees that entities with different causal histories and environments will tend to differ in their physical structure. Nonlocality requires the more unusual (and, to many, unintuitive) view that two entities could differ in their conscious experiences even if their local physical structure were somehow exactly the same.

I intend the "could" in "could nonetheless differ" to reflect natural or nomic possibility, that is, consistency with the laws of nature, rather than conceptual or metaphysical possibility. So a view, for example, that holds that consciousness-lacking "zombie" twins of us are metaphysically but not nomically possible still counts as a local theory if molecule-for-molecule locally identical twins would be nomically guaranteed to have the same conscious experiences.

"Local" needn't mean "in the brain". Theories on which conscious experience depends on states of the body or nearby environment still count as local in the intended sense. I won't try to draw a principled line between local and nonlocal, but nonlocal theories of the sort I have in mind make consciousness depend on events far away or deep in the past.

For sake of this argument, I'm assuming the falsity of certain types of dualist and non-naturalist views. If consciousness depends on an immaterial substance not located in space, today's arguments don't apply.

Examples of nonlocal theories:

David Lewis's view in "Mad Pain and Martian Pain". Lewis holds that whether a brain state is experienced as pain depends on the causal/functional role that that type of brain state plays in an "appropriate population" (such as your species). This is a nonlocal theory because what role a brain state type plays in a population depends on what is going on with other members of that population who, presumably, can be far away from you or exist in the past.

Views on which conscious experience depends on functions or representations that nonlocally depend on evolutionary or learning history. Fred Dretske's view in Naturalizing the Mind is an example. Your heart has a function of circulating blood, due to its evolutionary history. If by freak quantum chance a molecule-for-molecule locally identical heart-looking-thing were to congeal in a swamp, it would not have that evolutionary history and it would not have that same function. Similarly for mental states, including conscious experiences, on Dretske's view: If a freak molecule-for-molecule duplicate of you were to randomly congeal ("Swampman"), the states of its brain-like-subpart would lack functions and/or representational content, and on views of this sort it would either have no conscious experiences or conscious experiences very different from your own.

The Dilemma, Illustrated with a Simplistic Version of Lewis's View

Consider a crude version of Lewis's theory: You are in Brain State X. Whether Brain State X is experienced at painful depends on whether Brain State X plays the causal/functional role of pain for the majority of the currently existing members of your species. Suppose that Brain State X does indeed play the causal/functional role of pain for 90% of the currently existing members of your species. For that majority, it is caused by tissue stress, tissue damage, etc., and it tends to cause avoidance, protective tending, and statements like "that hurts!". However, for 10% of the species, Brain State X plays the causal role of a tickle: It is caused by gentle, unpredictable touching of the armpits and tends to cause withdrawal, laughter, and statements like "that tickles!". On Lewis's theory, this minority will be experiencing pain, but in a "mad" way -- caused by gentle, unpredictable touching and causing tickle-like reactions.

Now suppose a tragic accident kills almost all of that 90% majority while sparing the 10% minority. Brain State X now plays the causal role of pain only for you and a few others. For the majority of currently existing members of your species, Brain State X plays the causal role of a tickle. On this implementation of Lewis's theory, your experience of Brain State X will change from the experience of pain, caused in the normal way and with the normal effects, to the experience of a tickle, but caused in a "mad" way with "mad" effects.

If this seems bizarre, well, yes it is! With no internal / local change in you, your experience has changed. And furthermore, it has changed in a peculiar way -- into a tickle that plays exactly the causal role of pain (caused in the same way as pain and causing the same reactions). However, as I have argued elsewhere (e.g., here and here), every philosophical theory of consciousness will have bizarre implications, so bizarreness alone is no defeater.

If I can tell that my pain has turned into a tickle, then physically implausible forms of communication become possible. Suppose almost all of the 90% of normals, pre-accident, live on an island on the other side of the globe. I am worried that a bomb might be dropped which would kill them all. So I pinch myself, creating a state of pain: Brain State X. As soon as the bomb is dropped, Brain State X becomes a tickle, and I know they are dead, even though no signal has been sent from that far-away island. If the far-away island is on a planet around a distant star, the signal might even constitute an instance of faster-than-light communication.

But maybe I can't tell that my pain has turned into a tickle. If the causal role of Brain State X remains exactly the same, and if our knowledge of our own conscious states is an ordinary causal process, then maybe this is the more natural way to interpret this implementation of Lewis's view. I will still say and judge that I am in pain, despite the fact that my experience is actually just a tickle. This is a bit odd, but introspection is fallible and perhaps even sometimes massively and systematically mistaken. Still, my ignorance is remarkably deep and intractable: There is no way, even in principle, that I could know my own experience by attending just to what's going on locally in my own mind. I can only know by checking to see that the distant population still exists. Self-knowledge becomes in principle a non-local matter of knowing what is going on with other people. After all, if there was any way of knowing, locally, about the change in my experience, that would put us back on the first horn of the dilemma, allowing physically implausible forms of communication.

(For a similar argument, see Boghossian's objection to self-knowledge of externally determined thought contents. The externalists' containment/inheritance reply might work for Boghossian's specific objection, but it seems more strained for this case, especially when the difference might be between Experience X and no experience at all.)

The Dilemma, for Evolutionary Types

Alternatively, consider a view on which Brain State X gives rise to Experience Y because of its evolutionary history. Now of course that particular instance of Brain State X, and you as a particular person, did not exist in the evolutionary past. What existed in the past, and was subject to selection pressures, were brain states like X, and people like you.

We thus end up with a version of the same population problem that troubles the Lewis account. If what matters is the selection history of your species, then whether you are experiencing Y or experiencing Z or experiencing nothing, will depend on facts about the membership of your species that might have no physical connection to you -- members who were not your direct ancestors, who maybe migrated to a remote island without further contact. If you have any way to tell whether you are experiencing Y, Z, or nothing, you can now in principle know something about how they fared, despite no ordinary means of information transfer. If you have no way to tell whether you are experiencing Y, Z, or nothing, you are awkwardly ignorant about your own experience.

The dilemma can't be avoided by insisting that the only relevant members of the evolutionary past are your direct ancestors. This is clearest if we allow cases where the relevant difference is between whether you currently experience Y or nothing (where the latter is possible if the state doesn't have the right kind of evolutionary history, e.g., is a spandrel or due to an unselected recent mutation). If whether you experience Y or nothing depends on whether the majority of your ancestors had Feature F in the past, we can construct alternative scenarios in which 60% of your ancestors had Feature F and in which only 40% of your ancestors had Feature F, but the genetic result for you is the same. Now again, you can either mysteriously know something about the past with no ordinary means of information transfer or you are in principle ignorant about whether you are having that experience.

Other ways of attempting to concretize the role of evolutionary history generate the same dilemma. The dilemma is inherent in the nonlocality itself. To the extent your current experience depends on facts about you that don't depend on your current physical structure, either you seemingly can't know whether you are having Experience Y, or you can know nonlocal facts by means other than ordinary physical Markov processes.

[Whitefield Green Man by Paul Sivell]

The Dilemma, for Swamp Cases

Let's tweak the Swampman case: You walk into a swamp. Lightning strikes. You black out and fall on your face. By freak quantum chance a swamp duplicate of you is formed. You wake fifteen minutes later, face down in the mud, side-by-side with a duplicate. Are you the one who walked in, or are you the duplicate?

If an evolutionary history is necessary for consciousness, and if you can tell you are conscious, then you know you aren't the duplicate. But can you tell you're conscious? If so, it wouldn't seem to be by any ordinary, locally causal process, since those processes are the same in you and the duplicate. If not, then introspection has failed you catastrophically. So we see the same dilemma again: either a source of knowledge that fits poorly with naturalistic understandings of how knowledge works, or a radical failure of self-knowledge.

Or consider partial swamp-cases. You and your twin stroll into the swamp. Lightning strikes, you both collapse, to one of you the following happens: One part of their brain is destroyed by the lightning, but by freak quantum accident 15 seconds later molecules congeal with exactly the same structure as the destroyed part. Suppose the visual areas are destroyed. Then you both wake up. On the natural reading of an evolutionary account, although both you and your twin are conscious and able to use meaningful language (unlike in evolutionary interpretations of the original Swampman case), one of you has no visual experiences at all. Again, either you can know which you are by some method at odds with our usual understanding of how knowledge works, or you can't know and are radically in-principle ignorant about whether you have visual experience.

Of course all such swamp-cases are far-fetched! But on current scientific understandings, they are nomically possible. And they are just the sort of pure-form thought experiment needed to illustrate the commitments of nonlocal theories of consciousness. That is, it's a distilled test case, designed to cleanly separate the relevant features -- a case in which entities are locally identical but differ in history and thus, according to history-based nonlocal theories, also differ in conscious experience. (If there were no such possible cases, then consciousness would supervene locally and history would contribute only causally and not constitutively to conscious experience.)

The Dilemma, in General

Nonlocal theories of consciousness allow in principle for local twins with different experiences. If the local twins' self-knowledge tracks these differences in experience, it must be by some means other than normal causal traces. So either there's a strange form of knowing at variance with our ordinary physical accounts of how knowledge works, or the differences in experience are in principle unknowable.

---------------------------------

Related:

"The Tyrant's Headache", Sci Phi Journal, issue #3 (2015), 78-83.

The Weirdness of the World, Chapter 2, Princeton University Press.

"David Lewis, Anaesthesia by Genocide, and a Materialistic Trilemma" (Oct 13, 2011).