The Strange Stability of UCR's Gourmet Ranking

When I arrived at U.C. Riverside in 1997, we were ranked 34th among U.S. Philosophy Ph.D. programs on in the widely-read Philosophical Gourmet Report. Now we're ranked 30th. In the intervening time, we have hovered steadily between the low 20s and the mid 30s.

Here's a full list of tenured faculty from 1997 who are no longer with the department:

(1.) Bernd Magnus (Nietzsche), retired.

Here's a full list of tenured faculty in 2009 who were not tenured members of the department in 1997:

(1.) Maudemarie Clark (Nietzsche), recruited from Colgate.
(2.) Peter Graham (epistemology), hired as Asst Prof from Stanford, later tenured.
(3.) Agnieszka Jaworska (moral psychology), recruited from Stanford.
(4.) Robin Jeshion (philosophy of language), recruited from Yale.
(5.) John Perry (philosophy of language, only part-time at UCR), recruited from Stanford
(6.) Erich Reck (history of analytic philosophy), present as Asst Prof in 1997, later tenured.
(7.) Eric Schwitzgebel (philosophy of psychology), present as Asst Prof in 1997, later tenured.
(8.) Charles Siewert (philosophy of mind), recruited from Miami.
(9.) Mark Wrathall (Continental philosophy), recruited from BYU.

Also in the intervening years we recruited Gary Watson from UC Irvine and lost him to USC. We also tenured then lost two Assistant Professors (Carl Hoefer and Genoveva Marti) and hired three Assistant Professors who have not yet stood for tenure (William Bracken, Coleen Macnamara, and Michael Nelson).

The tenured professors of 1997 (Carl Cranor, John Fischer, David Glidden, Paul Hoffman, Pierre Keller, Andrews Reath, Georgia Warnke, Howie Wettstein, Larry Wright) have continued to be productive. One measure of this is that all but one of them have produced at least one new book from a leading press in the period (if we count Hoffman's forthcoming book and Wright's influential textbook).

I'd hate to think that my impression that the UCR Philosophy Department has strengthed considerably since 1997 is just another of my self-serving delusions. (Not that I know what the other ones are!) The numbers above at least seem to lend some objectivity to my impression.

So what's the explanation of our virtually unchanged ranking? Not conspiracy, of course, nor the ill will of Brian Leiter (who has spoken kindly of us over the years). Some institutions (for example, USC and Yale) have climbed sharply, so it must be possible. Is the issue, perhaps, that in order to pierce the top 25 a department must have at least one full-time super-heavyweight, and no one in the department is perceived that way? Or were we too highly ranked early on? Or have our peer departments improved just as sharply? Or...? I have a feeling there something to learn here about UCR or about the ranking system....

Update, December 15, 2011:
Between 2009 and 2011 we lost about 25% of our senior faculty. We lost Paul Hoffman (death), Robin Jeshion (USC), Charles Siewert (Rice), and Georgia Warnke (UCR Political Science). Maudemarie Clark went from full-time to 2/3 time. We hired one assistant professor, Josef Muller. In 2009 we were ranked #30. Now we're ranked #31. Not that I'm complaining.

The Consciousness Online Conference

has begun, running through the 27th. Online so far:

Barbara Montero, "Russellian Physicalism"
Gualtiero Piccinini, "First-Person Data, Publicity, and Self-Measurement" (I'm one of the commentators on this one).
Katalin Balog, "In Defense of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy"
Matthew Ivanowich, "A Moderate Representationalism"
Clare Batty, "Scents and Sensibilia"
Dave Beisecker, "Zombies and the Phenomenal Concepts Strategy"
Richard Brown, "Turning the Tables on Dualism"
Derek Ball, "The New New Mysterianism"
Justin Sytsma, "Folk Psychology and Phenomenal Consciousness"
David Rosenthal, "Consciousness and Its Function"

I'm not sure yet what I think of the video format. Reading seems more efficient. But maybe video adds some sort of subtle dimension.

Will You Perceive the Event That Kills You?

from 3quarksdaily. (HT: Josh Rust)

(I think it's going to matter whether the trauma directly involves the perceptual areas of the brain.)

Is Philosophy All in Our Heads?

In a 1998 essay, Alvin Goldman and Joel Pust distinguish between two approaches to philosophy, which they call the mentalist and the extra-mentalist. According to the mentalist, when we do the typical philosophical armchair-reflection thing -- when we think about, for example, whether XYZ on Twin Earth (which behaves like water but has a different chemical formula) is water or not, or when we think about whether a dude who doesn't realize he's in Fake Barn Country knows that the real barn he's looking at is a barn -- we are finding out something not about the world outside of us, but rather about our minds. We are finding out about our concepts. According to the extra-mentalist, in contrast, philosophical thought experiments aim to reveal something about the world beyond our minds -- something about the real nature of water and knowledge, perhaps, or about what is and isn't possible. Goldman and Pust endorse mentalism.

Mentalism has the following great advantage over extra-mentalism: Mentalism makes it clear how it's possible for philosophers to learn something from their armchairs. What they are learning is about their own minds. They're exploring their concepts. It's much less clear how reflecting in an armchair can deliver what the extra-mentalist wants, valuable information about the world beyond our minds. But there are two equally great disadvantages to the mentalist conception of philosophy. First, it trivializes the subject matter. Where we thought we were learning about the world -- about the nature of language, of knowledge, of the fundamental constituents of reality, of the morally good -- it turns out that we're only learning about our concepts of language, of knowledge, of the fundamental constituents of reality, of the morally good. A very different sort of thing. How disappointing!

The second disadvantage of the mentalist conception is this: It turns philosophy into a methodologically dubious species of psychology. If what we're really interested in is our concepts, is sitting in an armchair thinking about Twin Earth really the best way to go about it? Well, that's one way. But empirical psychology offers us a whole stable of other ways, including polling people about puzzle cases, studying reaction times, asking people to list features in terms of typicality, etc. Armchair reflection about weird possibilities, by people who generally have some theoretical skin in the game, does perhaps have something important to contribute to the study of human concepts, but at most it is one part of a larger enterprise that is probably best left in the hands of psychologists.

So I think we must have an "extra-mentalist" conception of philosophy. Philosophers are trying to learn, not just about what concepts our human minds happen to be stuck with, but about reality as it exists beyond our minds -- and within our minds, possibly beyond our conceptions. But then that forces us back to the question of how reflecting in an armchair about strange scenarios, which is a large proportion of what mainstream "analytic" philosophers do, puts us in touch with that reality. My thought is: It doesn't. Well, let me temper that just a bit. Armchair reflection gives us a preliminary take; it helps us develop and discover the consequences of the views that we have inherited or acquired through everyday experience. In those domains where such inherited, everyday views are well-founded (e.g., the behavior of middle-sized dry goods under moderate force, mundane social interactions), our armchair judgments are likely also to be well-founded. The further we get from the ordinary, however, the less we should expect such armchair reflections to be of value. And unfortunately, most philosophical thought experiments are far from the ordinary.

Recoloring the Dreamworld

I'm hard at work these days on my second book, tentatively titled Perplexities of Consciousness. Chapter One, "Recoloring the Dreamworld", draws from these three earlier essays, integrating, updating, and adding new reflections. I've posted it here.

The chapter treats the rise and fall of the view, widespread in the U.S. circa 1950, that dreams are primarily a black and white phenomenon. I argue that it's likely that dreams themselves did not change over the course of the 20th century, but rather that what changed was only people's opinions about their dreams. The view that dreams are black and white was most likely due to an overanalogizing of dreams to the black and white film media dominant at the time. It's also possible, I suggest, that the contemporary view that dreams are in color -- as opposed to leaving unspecified the color of most of the objects represented -- is also due to overanalogizing to film media.

Corrections and objections welcomed, of course, either here or by email. (Unalloyed praise is of course also welcomed, though less useful!)

Anxiety, Neurosis, Noctural Female Orgasm, and Sabbatical

In rereading some of the old literature on black and white dreaming I came across this:

Perhaps the most striking finding in the present study, however, is that of the high incidence of nocturnal orgasms reported by female neurotics (47 per cent) as opposed to the incidence reported by female controls (8 per cent) (Tapia, Werboff, and Winokur 1958, p. 122).

In clarifying what they mean by "noctural orgasms" Tapia et al. say "A positive response was counted when a subject reported experiencing 'wet dreams', climaxes, or orgasms in his [sic] sleep or dreams" (p. 121). By "neurotic" of course they mean... well, who knows?

Eight vs. 47? Six times higher? Presumably it's not as fun to be a waking "neurotic" as a waking non-neurotic, but it sounds like in sleep the situation is reversed! Or are neurotic women just more likely to report nocturnal orgasms? Well, why would that be?

Winokur, Guze, and Pfeiffer (1959) extend the Tapia et al. results to include "psychotic" women too (perhaps a better-defined group than neurotic), reporting nocturnal orgasm rates of 42% in that group, 46% in neurotics, and 6% in psychologically healthy women. Henton (1976) also reports a positive relationship between high levels of reported anxiety and high levels of reported "sexual excitement during sleep" (though, um, unless I'm reading things very wrong, the numbers on his key table seem to run the other direction; this is what I get for reading crappy journals). Finally (the last report on this topic I can find) Wells (1986) finds anxiety to be predictive of reported nocturnal orgasm in a complex multiple regression taking into account "age, marital status, race, religious affiliation, religiosity, liberal or conservative political views, and hometown population" (p. 428) and 71 other variables including even views about the normality of noctural orgasm, sexual satifaction, and frequency of awakening with non-orgasmic sexual excitement. (I'm not sure I'd have wanted to "control" for those last variables in determining influence on orgasm, since they seem likely to cohere with rather than to confound the factor under study, but what the heck -- even so, Wells got her result.)

This is what you get when you let professors take sabbatical. It turns out they have nothing better to do all day than chase down weird literature on female orgasm.

(I'm not entirely without excuse: Lisa Lloyd was my dissertation chair, and I thought it might make a good footnote.)

The Legend of the Leaning Behaviorist

I've heard this story orally a couple of times. I wonder if any of you know whether it's actually true. Let's call it the "The Legend of the Leaning Behaviorist".

Once upon a time, long ago and far away -- actually, circa 1960 at a prominent U.S. university -- there lived a behavioral psychologist, an expert in the shaping of animal behavior by means of reward and punishment. One semester, when he was teaching a large lecture course, his students tried an experiment on him. Without letting him know, they decided that when he was lecturing on the left of side of the room, they would smile and nod a bit more often than usual. Conversely, when was on the right, they would knit their brows and look away. Soon, all the lectures were delivered from the left. The students then altered their strategy. Whenever he moved to the left, they would smile and nod; whenever he moved to the right, they would knit their brows. The result was that he drifted ever more leftward, until by the end of the term, he was lecturing while leaning against the left wall. On the last day of class, one of the students asked him why he was lecturing from over there, and he said, "Oh, I don't know. It's close to the ashtray."

The Dust Hypothesis

Consider the following argument:

(1.) It doesn't matter what your mind is made of, as long as the functional relationships between your mental states and the inputs and outputs are right. A conscious person could be made of carbon-based molecules with an organic brain, or of silicon chips in a robot body, or of suitably complex magnetic iron structures. If a being dependably acts like a sophisticated, conscious, intelligent being, it is a sophisticated, conscious, intelligent being. (Searle would disagree with this, but it is the majority view in philosophy of mind and standard in fictional portrayals of android and alien intelligences.) Let's call each temporal slice of such a being a "cognitive state".

(2.) The cognitive states (or temporal slices) of people can be temporally or spatially distributed. If a being of the sort in (1) exists for only one second out of every ten, it is still a conscious, intelligent being, just one with temporal gaps in it -- gaps the being itself may not notice. Likewise, if the being is partly instantiated in Paris and partly in Rio, with the two parts in constant communication, reacting in a co-ordinated way to produce the right sort of behavior, that also does not deprive it of consciousness and intelligence. (Something like this is suggested by Dennett.)

(3.) Furthermore, the objective temporal order of cognitive states is irrelevant. If input 1 ("How are you?") is followed by cognitive states 2, 3, and 4, then by output 5 ("Better, now that you've stopped kicking me!"), it shouldn't matter if as measured by the objective time of the outside world, state 3 comes before state 2, as long as in terms of subjective time and cognitive sequence state 2 comes first. (Dennett, again, is useful here. It's a little tricky to figure out what subjective time and cognitive sequence are independent of objective temporal order; but the conclusion of the argument can be weakened to dispense with this premise if necessary.)

(4.) Also, actual connection to the outside world is irrelevant. You could still have the intelligence and consciousness you now in fact have if your cognitive states were instantiated in a brain in a vat. (Here we may be departing from Dennett; but even if, as Dennett's student Noe and others have argued, some environmental connections are essential to mindedness, we can probably still run the argument I'm interested in. We just turn it into brain-and-relevant-bit-of-the-environment in a vat. We could also dispense with certain "externally defined" mental states and still have an interesting version of the conclusion if necessary.)

(5.) If all this is true, it appears to invite the following conclusion: As long as somewhere in the universe, in some temporal order there exists a functional equivalent of each of your cognitive states, no matter where, in what material, or how grossly distributed over time and space, then there is a mental duplicate of you in existence.

(6.) Then, finally: In all the spatial and temporal vastness of the universe, each of your cognitive states will be instantiated somewhere other than your own brain, in vastly different times and locations.

(7.) So, there is a mental duplicate of you spread out across space and time.

(8.) And this generalizes: There are many, many such people; the universe (at least the complex bits of it) is permeated with them; they include many possible alternative versions of you; etc.

Call this the Dust Hypothesis, after science fiction writer Greg Egan's similar Dust Hypothesis in his book Permutation City.

Assuming the conclusion is absurd, the question is where to put on the brakes. My own inclination is either (1), following Searle, or (5), or (6). On 6: Perhaps the functional relationships necessary for sophisticated, conscious thought are so complex that even in the vast universe they would not be instantiated except in coherent, brain-like packages. But maybe that underestimates the vastness and complexity of the universe?

On (5): Perhaps actual causation between cognitive states is necessary to mentality and consciousness, not just the instantiation of those states with the right counterfactual and dispositional relationships. But I worry. Couldn't there be a mental being causally truncated on one end (brought suddenly into being by freak quantum accident, like Swampman), or on the other (destroyed suddenly by lightning), or both (thus existing for only a moment)? Or what if you have an idea due to stroke or quantum accident (and then maybe the idea vanishes for similar reasons)? Or suppose that you are destroyed and merely by chance a duplicate of you is simultaneously created elsewhere -- wouldn't there be a stream of mentality that transitioned from one to the other? (Could you tell? Would it matter deeply to you whether the duplicate came about by chance or design?) Then generalize. It's a complex issue, but for reasons like those, I'm inclined to think that the actual instantiation of dispositional and functional structures, even if they're not actually causally connected, is enough for interesting and subjectively continuous mentality (even if some externally defined states like genuine [as opposed to apparent] memory require actual causation). But then if we grant (1) and (6) and the others, we seem to be back to the Dust Hypothesis.

Open Courseware in Philosophy

A reader just forwarded me this list of Top 100 Open Courseware links in Theology and Philosophy, including syllabae and the professors' lecture notes or overheads. The philosophy sections are dominated by MIT.

Introspection: A Draft Entry for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

... is now up here. It is, I'm afraid, monstrously long (85 double-spaced manuscript pages, about 21,000 words). Hopefully it's well enough organized that people can locate the section most relevant to their interests and read it in isolation. I saved for the end of the entry my own material on our poor knowledge of our own stream of conscious experience.

There are always trade-offs between accuracy, comprehensiveness, readability, and length, and I'm not sure I consistently found the right balance. Feedback welcome!

NEH Summer Seminar on Experimental Philosophy

Ron Mallon and Shaun Nichols are putting together an NEH summer seminar on Experimental Philosophy. NEH summer seminars are seminars for faculty across the country to learn about or deepen their knowledge of a particular topic in the humanities. I participated in one in 1999 (Robert Gordon 's on folk psychology), and it was great fun. It was almost like going to college again. Those of us who chose to live in the dormrooms did frosh-like things like sneak in liquor late at night and gossip over breakfast.

Here's their blurb:

Experimental Philosophy is a new movement that uses experiments to address traditional philosophical questions. Although the movement is only a few years old, it has attracted prolific practitioners as well as ardent critics. (For more about Experimental Philosophy, see the recent article in the New York Times or the ongoing discussion at the Experimental Philosophy Blog.)

This summer, the NEH is sponsoring an Institute on Experimental Philosophy. The Institute will bring in over a dozen distinguished guest faculty, who will present their latest research across a wide range of issues and perspectives. The Institute will also provide participants with the opportunity to learn experimental methods that are used in Experimental Philosophy.

The Institute will take place in Salt Lake City from June 22-July 17 2009. Eligible participants must have a teaching position at a U.S. college or university. The deadline for application is March 2. More information about the Institute, as well as application materials, are available here.

Joshua Knobe and Alison Gopnik Debating Children's and Scientific Thinking

... on bloggingheads.tv. Two of my favorite scholars!

Josh says that ordinary reasoning about mental states is unlike scientific reasoning because our reasoning about mental states is influenced by our moral judgments (as his work suggests) while scientific reasoning is not so influenced. Alison, in contrast, is a leading proponent of the view that scientific reasoning and ordinary reasoning have much in common, especially in children. Josh plays the role of interviewer and lets Alison do most of the talking.

Near the end, Alison touches briefly on what I think is the key flaw on Josh's argument, the unwarranted assumption that scientific reasoning is not much influenced by moral judgments. In my view -- and I think this is now the majority view in philosophy of science -- scientific thinking is, and should be, thoroughly permeated with emotion and morality. The old model of the impartial, objective scientific observer cannot be sustained. So there's no reason Josh's findings about the effects of moral judgments on ordinary reasoning have to stand in conflict with Alison's view of the continuity of scientific and everyday reasoning.

The Gender Migration of Names

Noticing my son's playmates and classmates, the following thought occurs to me: Didn't Sidney used to be a man's name? And August? And Loren?

Being an empirically-minded philosopher (and one with a little time away from classes), I had to check. I went to the U.S. Social Security Administration's baby names site and I looked up the 1000 most popular boy and girl baby names for 1900 and for 2000. August, to my surprise, didn't rate among the top 1000 girls' names (though I know two young Augusts, both girls), but Sidney and Loren both made the gender switch. In 1900, Sidney was #108 among boy names and #777 among girls. By 2000, the ratio had flipped to #594 for boys and #264 for girls. Same with Sydney: In 1900 #730 among boys, unranked among girls; in 2000, unranked among boys and a startling #23 among girls. Loren/Lauren pulled the same trick: In 1900, #342 and #943 for boys, unranked for girls; in 2000, #704 and #11 for girls, unranked for boys.

In other words, Loren/Lauren and Sidney/Sydney went from being modestly popular boys' names to being leading girls' names. But does it ever go the other way around? Do girls' names ever become boys' names? I wouldn't think so: Calling a girl "Joe" (or "Jo") or "Jack" ("Jaq") is cute; calling a boy "Anna" or "Mary" doesn't have quite the same effect. In fact, it might be perceived as something like a lifetime curse.

So I ran a few analyses. In the SSA lists, I found 26 names that switched from masculine in 1900 to feminine in 2000 and 4 that went the other way. (That's p < .0001 on the binomial test, by the way, if you want the statistics.) Here they are:

Male to Female:
(apologies for the small reproduction: click to enlarge)As is evident from this list, 5 of the top 25 girls' names in 2000 (Madison, Taylor, Lauren, Sydney, Morgan) were boys' names in 1900! The gender migration of girls' names to boys' names looks very different.These seem to be aberrations, not a trend. Two appear to be due to an increasing acceptability of "-ie" and not just "-y" as a proper spelling of the long-e suffix for male names. The other two are due to the precipitous decline of "Jean" and "Joan" as girls' names, coupled presumably with the retention of those names as foreign equivalents of the durably and internationally popular boys' name "John". None ranks among the top 500 boys' names.

I can't resist concluding with the thought that if trends continue, someday every Tom, Dick, and Harry will be a girl.

Andrew Sullivan on "Why I Blog"

here. Insights on the nature and advantages of the medium. Much, but not all, applies to academic blogs.

From my first post in April 2006 through our adoption of Kate in March 2008, I posted relentlessly Mon-Wed-Fri. Now it's more like once a week. I suspect that not only the one-year-old child but also the new ipod have cut into my blogging: Many blogging ideas used to come during morning walks, which are now sometimes filled with Frank Sinatra, Al Stewart, or This American Life instead. I haven't decided if this is a good thing or bad.

Oh, and Happy (recent or continuing) Whatever! (Global Orgasm Day, for example.)

Zhuangzi: Big and Useless -- and Not So Good at Catching Rats

[Cross-posted at Manyul Im's Chinese Philosophy Blog]

Okay, I've written about this before; but, to my enduring amazement, not everyone agrees with me. The orthodox interpretation of Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) puts skillful activity near the center of Zhuangzi's value system. (The orthodoxy here includes Graham, Ivanhoe, Roth, and many others, including Velleman in a recent article I objected to in another connection.)

Here is one reason to be suspicious of this orthdoxy: Examples of skillful activity are rare in the Inner Chapters, the authentic core of Zhuangzi's book. And the one place in the Inner Chapters where Zhuangzi does indisputably praise skillful activity is in an oddly truncated chapter, with a title and message ("caring for life") suggestive of the early, immature Zhuangzi (if one follows Graham in seeing Zhuangzi as originally a Yangist). Even the term "wu wei", often stressed in skill-based interpretations as indicating a kind of spontaneous responsiveness, only appears three times in the Inner Chapters, and never in a way that indisputably means anything other than literally "doing nothing".

Zhuangzi writes:

Maybe you've never seen a wildcat or a weasel. It crouches down and hides, watching for something to come along. It leaps and races east and west, not hesitating to go high or low -- untill it falls into the trap and dies in the net. Then again there's the yak, big as a cloud covering the sky. It certainly knows how to be big, though it doesn't know how to catch rats (Watson trans., Complete, p. 35).

On the one hand, we have the skill of the weasel, which Zhuangzi does not seem to be urging us to imitate; and on the other hand we have the yak who knows how to... how to do what? How to be big! It has no useful skills -- it cannot carve oxen, guide a boat, or carve a wheel -- and in this respect, Zhuangzi says it is like the "big and useless" trees that repeatedly occur in the text, earning Zhuangzi's praise. Zhuangzi continues:

Now you have this big tree and you're distressed because it's useless. Why don't you plant it in Not-Even-Anything Village, or the field of Broad-and-Boundless, relax and do nothing by its side, or lie down for a free and easy sleep under it? (ibid.)

That is the core of Zhuangzi, I submit -- not the skillful activity of craftsmen, but lazy, lounging bigness!

Where else does Zhuangzi talk about skill in the Inner Chapters? He describes the skill of a famous lute player, a music master, and Huizi the logician as "close to perfection", yet he calls the lute-playing "injury" and he says these three "ended in the foolishness of 'hard' and 'white' [i.e., meaningless logical distinctions]" (p. 41-42). Also: "When men get together to pit their strength in games of skill, they start off in a light and friendly mood, but usually end up in a dark and angry one, and if they go on too long they start resorting to various underhanded tricks" (p. 60-61). He repeatedly praises amputees and "cripples" who appear to have no special skills. Although he praises abilities such as floating on the wind (p. 32) and entering water without getting wet (p. 77), these appear to be magical powers rather than perfections of skill, along the lines of having "skin like ice or snow" and being impervious to heat (p. 33); and its unclear the extent to which he seriously believes in such abilities.

How did the orthodox view arise, then? I suspect it's mostly due to overemphasizing the dubious Outer and Mixed Chapters and conflating Zhuangzi's view with that of the more famous "Daoist" Laozi (Lao Tzu). Since this happened early in the interpretive tradition, it has the additional force of inertia.

Keith Frankish Replies to Dominic Murphy on Mind and Supermind

... new in the Underblog.

Do Chinese Philosophers Think Tilted Coins Look Elliptical?

[Cross posted at Manyul Im's Chinese Philosophy Blog]

In my 2006 essay "Do Things Look Flat?", I examine some of the cultural history of the opinion that visual appearances involve what I call "projective distortions" -- the opinion, that is, that tilted coins look elliptical, rows of streetlights look like they shrink into the distance, etc. I conjecture that our inclination to say such things is due to overanalogizing visual experience to flat, projective media like paintings and photographs. In support of this conjecture, I contrast the contemporary and early modern periods (in the West) with ancient Greece and introspective psychology circa 1900. In the first two cultures, one finds both a tendency to compare visual experience to pictures and a tendency to describe visual experience as projectively distorted. In the latter two cultures, one finds little of either, despite plenty of talk about visual appearances in general.

I didn't do a systematic search of classical Chinese philosophy, which I love but which has less epistemology of perception, but I did find one relevant passage:

If you look down on a herd of cows from the top of a hill, they will look no bigger than sheep, and yet no one hoping to find sheep is likely to run down the hill after them. It is simply that the distance obscures their actual size. If you look up at a forest from the foot of a hill, the biggest trees appear no taller than chopsticks, and yet no one hoping to find chopsticks is likely to go picking among them. It is simply that the height obscures their actual dimensions (Xunzi ch. 21; Basic Writings, Watson trans., p. 134)

Though I can recall no ancient Chinese comparisons of visual experience and painting, both Xunzi and Zhuangzi compare the mind to a pan of water which can reflect things accurately or inaccurately, an analogy that seems related (Xunzi ibid. p. 131, ch. 25, Knoblock trans. 1999, p. 799; Zhuangzi, Watson trans., Complete Works, p. 97). In medieval China, which I know much less about, I noticed Wang Yangming saying such a comparison was commonplace (Instructions for Practical Living, Chan trans., p. 45).

So my question is, for those of you who know more Chinese philosophy than I, are there other passages I should be looking at -- either on perspectival shape or size distortion or on analogies for visual experience? I'm revising the essay for a book chapter and I'd like to expand my discussion to China if I can find enough material. Any help would be much appreciated!

(I also wouldn't mind more help on Greek passages, too, if anyone has the inclination. Some of the more obvious passages are Plato's discussion of painters in the Republic and Sophist, Aristotle's discussion of sensory experience as like impressions in wax, Sextus's lists of sensory distortions in experience and his discussions of wax impressions, Epicurus's discussions of the transmission of images, discussions of the sun as looking "one foot wide", and Euclid's and Ptolemy's optics.)

Being Thirsty and Thinking You're Thirsty

Here's a passage from David Velleman's recent essay, "The Way of the Wanton" that caught my attention (earning a rare four hm's in the margin, plus a question mark and exclamation point):

Attentively reflecting on one's thirst entails standing back from it, for several reasons. First, the content of one's reflective thoughts is not especially expressive of the motive on which one is reflecting: "I am thirsty" is not an especially thirsty thought, not necessarily the the thought of someone thinking thirstily. Second, attentive reflection is itself an activity -- a mental activity -- and, as such, it requires a motive, which, of course, is not thirst. Reflecting on one's thirst is, therefore, a distraction from acting on one's thirst, and in that respect is even a distraction from being thirsty. Most importantly, though, consciousness just seems to open a gulf between subject and object, even when its object is the subject himself. Consciousness seems to have the structure of vision, requiring its object to stand across from the viewer -- to occupy the position of the Gegenstand (p. 181, emphasis in original).

Let's go one point at a time.

Does reflecting on thirst entail "standing back" from it? It's not clear what this metaphor means, though Velleman's subsquent three reasons help clarify. But before we get to those reasons, let's just wallow in the metaphor a bit: Standing back from one's thirst. I don't want to be too unsympathetic here. The metaphor is inviting in a way. But I at least don't feel I have the kind of rigorous understanding I'd want of this idea, as a philosopher.

On to the reasons:

(1.) Per Velleman: "I am thirsty" is not an especially thirsty thought, not necessarily the thought of something thinking thirstily.

Walking across campus, I see a water fountain. The sentence "Damn, I'm thirsty!" springs to mind as I head for a drink. Is this not a thirsty thought? It seems reflective of thirst; it probably reinforces the thirst and helps push along the thirst-quenching behavior -- so it's thirsty enough, I'd say. Is it not a thought, then -- or at least not a thought in the self-reflective sense Velleman evidently has in mind here? Maybe, for example, it's simply expressive and not introspective, an outburst like "ow!" when you stub your toe, but as it were an inner outburst? (Is that too oxymoronic?)

So let's try it more introspectively. As it happens, I've been introspecting my thirst quite a bit in writing this post, and despite having had a drink just a few minutes ago I find myself almost desperately thirsty....

Okay, I'm back. (Yes, I dashed off to the fountain.)

All right, I just don't get this point. Or I do get it and it just seems plain wrong.

(2.) Per Velleman: Attentive reflection is a mental activity that requires a motive, which is of course not thirst. It's a distraction both from acting on one's thirst and from being thirsty.

Does mental activity require a motive? If an image of a Jim wearing a duck-hat comes to mind unbidden as I talk to Jim, need there be a motive? (Or is that not "mental activity"?) And even if there is a motive for reflecting on one's thirst, why can't that motive sometimes be thirst itself? For example, reflecting on my thirst might be a means to achieving drink -- for example, it might help ensure that I order something to drink at the restaurant. And as such, it needn't be a distraction from acting on one's thirst; it might be part of so acting. And finally, is it a distraction from being thirsty? Well, not in my experience! Darn, I'm getting thirsty again! I can imagine a kind of contemplative attention to one's thirst (as to one's pain) that in a certain way renders that thirst (or pain) less compelling. Maybe something like that is achieved in certain sorts of meditation. But that doesn't seem to me the standard case.

(3.) Per Velleman: Consciousness opens a gulf between subject and object, requiring its object to stand across from the viewer.

Huh? There's nothing wrong with metaphor per se, but they're hard to work with when you don't see eye to eye. Velleman develops the metaphor a bit in the next paragraph: As a subject of thirst, thirst is not in one's "field of view" -- rather things like water-fountains are. In self-reflection, one's thirst is in the field of view. Now this seems to me mainly a way of saying that one is not thinking about one's thirst in the first case and one is thinking about it in the second. (Is there more to it than that? If so, tell me.) But then that brings us back to the issue in (2): Is there a competition, as Velleman seems to believe, between feeling thirst and acting thirsty, on the one hand, and thinking about one's thirst on the other hand? Or do the two normally complement and co-operate?

Can we venture an empirical prediction here? If I suggest to subjects that think about whether they are thirsty, then set them free, will they be more or less likely to stop by the fountain on their way out than subjects I invite to think about something else? I'm pretty sure which way this one will turn out. Now I suspect this test wouldn't be fair to Velleman for some reason. (Maybe the suggestion will also affect thirst itself and not just reflection on it?) So if one of you is sympathetic to him, maybe you can help me out....

By the way, did I mention that this is a delightful and engaging article?

New Studies on Black and White vs. Colored Dreaming

In the mid-20th century, people generally thought most of their dreams were black and white; no longer. The key appears to be different levels of group exposure to black and white media. Two key questions are:

(1.) Does black and white media exposure lead people to really dream in black and white or does it lead people to erroneously report that they do?

(2.) Do people who report dreaming in color really dream in color or are the colors of most of the objects in the dreamworld unspecified? (If you have trouble conceiving of the latter, think about novels, which leave the colors of most of their objects unspecified.)

Two recent studies (Schredl et al. 2008; Murzyn 2008) cast a bit more light on these questions. Both researchers asked general questions about people's dreams and also had people answer questions about their dreams in "dream diaries" immediately upon waking in the morning.

First, both studies confirm that college-age respondents these days rarely report black-and-white dreams, either when asked about their dreams in general or when completing dream diaries. Murzyn finds that older respondents (aged about 55-75 years) more commonly report black and white dreams, but even in this group the rates of reported black and white dreams (22%) don't approach the levels of 50 or 60 years ago.

On issue 1: Both Schredl and Murzyn find that people with better overall dream recall report more colored and less black and white dreaming. Schredl also finds that people with better recall of color in (waking) visual displays report more color in dreams. On the face of it, this might suggest that reports of black and white dreams come from less credible reporters; but it could just be that the kind of people who dream in black and white are the kind of people who dream less often and less vividly and are less interested in color memory tasks; or black and white dreams may generally be less detailed. Also, it's possible that the experimenters' different measures corrupt each other: People who describe themselves as having frequent colored dreams may find themselves more motivated to report richly detailed colored dreams and to try harder on color recall tasks (as if to conform to their earlier self-portrayal) than do those reporting black and white dreaming.

On issue 2: Both studies find that respondents generally claim to dream in color or a mix of color and black and white, rather than claiming to dream neither in color nor in black and white. In Murzyn's questionnaire, only one of sixty respondents claimed to dream neither in color nor black and white (which matches my own findings in 2003). In their dream diaries, Murzyn's participants described only 2% of their dreams as neither colored nor black and white. In Shredl's dream diaries, participants listed objects central to their dreams and stated if those objects were colored. By this measure, 83% of dream objects were colored (vs. 3% black and white, 15% don't recall). Therefore, if it's true that most dream objects are neither colored nor black and white, respondents themselves must not realize this, even about their own immediately past dreams. This may seem unlikely, but given the apparent inaccuracy of introspection even about current conscious experience I consider it a definite possibility.

Against Grant Applications

Psychologists -- and some philosophers -- spend a huge amount of time seeking grant money; I'm sure so also for many of the other sciences. I've become increasingly convinced that this is not the best way for leading researchers to be employing their time and talents. What if granting agencies simply selected (through a rotating committee of experts) a large number of established researchers and simply gave them research money without their having to ask, tracking only that it has been used for legitimate research purposes? There would still have to be ample room of course for unselected researchers to submit applications to obtain research funds and for researchers (selected or not) to submit applications for unusually large disbursements for especially worthy and expensive projects.

Wouldn't that give a lot of people more time simply to do their work?

Update, Nov. 21:
Driving home after posting this yesterday, I found myself anticipating comments asserting that such a policy would increase the gap between the academic haves and have-nots. I think that's a legitimate concern, but one that could be addressed by having the granting committee be especially energetic about looking for merit in junior researchers and outside the top schools.

Consciousness Without Attention?

Do we have conscious sensory experience of objects we don't attend to? On a rich view, we have virtually constant sensory experience in every sensory modality (for example, all day long, a peripheral experience of the feeling of our feet in our shoes). On a thin view, conscious experience is limited to one or a few things or regions in attention at any given time. This rich-thin dispute is substantive, not merely terminological, and ordinary folks (as well as psychologists and philosophers) seem to split about 50-50 on it (with some moderates). I worry that the issue may be scientifically irresolvable.

However, some leading researchers in consciousness studies (Block 2007; and [more qualifiedly] Koch & Tsuchiya 2007) have recently put forward an argument against the thin view that runs as follows. When one's visual attention is consumed with a demanding task and stimuli are presented in the periphery, one can still report some features of those stimuli, such as their "gist" (e.g., animal vs. vehicle). Similarly, when one is presented with a Sperling-like display -- a very brief presentation of three rows of alphanumeric characters -- one has a sense of visually experiencing the whole display despite the fact that one can only attend to (and report) some incomplete portion of it. Therefore, conscious experience outruns attention.

I believe this argument fails. In both cases, it's plausible to suppose that there may be diffuse attention to the entire display, the entire (say) computer screen, albeit with focal attention on only one part of it. Such examples may establish that consciousness outruns focal attention narrowly defined, but they do not establish that consciousness outruns some broader span of diffuse attention. When attending to a visual display on a computer screen one may not even diffusedly attend to the picture on the wall behind the computer or the pressure of the seat against one's back. The question is, are these consciously experienced when absorbed in the experimental tasks? The Block/Koch argument shines no light whatsoever on that issue.

[Update November 19: Ned Block emailed me to say that he thinks I'm oversimplifying his view. I did simplify the argument somewhat, and for brevity and convenience I used the Sperling example, which he mainly deploys for another (closely related) purpose, rather than using his own preferred example. But whether the above is an objectionable oversimplification is a further question. I emailed Ned back hoping for clarification on some key points but have not yet received a reply.]

[Update November 20: Ned Block has emailed me with a fuller reply (full text, with his permission, here). He explains that in his view consciousness only probably outruns attention and that "the evidence points toward" that fact; and he thinks this is better suggested by "inattentional blindness" type cases (where people don't report seeing even fairly large objects or property changes when their attention is primarily occupied in some distractor task) than in what I called "Sperling-like" displays (by which I meant complex displays shown too briefly to allow full report but with report enabled by a cue to some portion of the display either during the display or very shortly thereafter). He also points out that Koch & Tsuchiya, like he, say that "it is difficult to make absolutely sure that there is no attention devoted to a certain stimulus". Finally, he says that to the extent he makes a case that consciousness outruns attention, it is a "holistic" case based on a variety of evidence and theoretical considerations, not a single type of experiment.

When I originally wrote the post, I was less interested in the details of Block interpretation than in a certain form of argument which I have heard several times orally (including during a well-attended talk by a very eminent researcher), the argument taking the form described in the post; and Block and Koch & Tsuchiya are the most eminent people I've found recently saying things along those lines in print; but it's true that I should have more carefully stated their qualifications and hesistations.]

Mad Belief?

David Lewis famously endorsed the possibility of "mad pain" in his article "Mad Pain and Martian Pain":

There might be a strange main who sometimes feels pain, just as we do, but whose pain differs greatly from ours in its causes and effects. Our pain is typically caused by cuts, burns, pressure, and the like; his is caused by moderate exercise on an empty stomach. Our pain is generally distracting; his turns his mind to mathematics, facilitating concentration on that but distracting him from anything else. Intense pain has no tendency whatever to cause him to groan or writhe, but does cause him to cross his legs and snap his fingers. He is not in the least motivated to prevent pain or get rid of it. In short, he feels pain but his pain does not at all occupy the typical causal role of pain.

Mad pain in this sense seems to me conceivable. My question is: Could there be a parallel case for belief? Let's try to imagine such a case.

Daiyu, say, is a woman who believes that most pearls are white. However, this belief was not caused in the normal way. It was not caused by having seen white pearls nor by hearing testimony to the effect that most pearls are white or inferring that pearls are white from some other facts about pearls or whiteness. It was caused, say, by having looked for 4 seconds at the sun setting over the Pacific Ocean. And, for her, this is just the kind of event that would cause that belief: It's not the case that she would ever form that belief by any of the normal means such as those described above; rather the kinds of things that cause that belief in her in all "nearby possible worlds", or across the relevant range of counterfactual circumstances, are perception of setting-sun events of a certain sort, and maybe also eating a certain sort of salad. Furthermore, Daiyu's belief that most pearls are white has atypical effects. It does not cause her to say anything like "most pearls are white" (which she'd deny; she is actually disposed to say "most pearls are black") or to think to herself in inner speech "most pearls are white". She would feel surprise were she to see a white pearl. If a friend were to say she was looking for white jewelry to go with a dress, Daiyu would not be at all inclined to recommend a pearl necklace. She is not at all disposed to infer from her belief that most pearls are white that there is a type of precious object used in jewelry that is both round and white.

Now I'm inclined to think that this case is incoherent. If Daiyu in fact has that sort of causal/functional structure, it's not correct to say that she really does believe that most pearls are white. In this respect, belief is different from pain. If you agree with me about this, that would seem to rule out a certain class of views about belief, namely, those views that characterize belief in terms of a mental state (maybe a brain state) of the sort that, in humans, typically has certain sorts of causes and typically has certain sorts of effects but which may, in some particular individuals, be not at all apt to have been brought about those causes and be not at all apt to have those effects. It's hard to know exactly how to read "representationalists" about belief (like Fodor, Dretske, Millikan) on this point, but a certain way of reading the representationalist view would imply no incoherence in the idea of mad belief: If an individual possesses an internal representation of the right sort, held in such a way that if everything were functioning normally it would have the normal effects, that person believes -- even if everything is not functioning normally.

Compare: having a heart. Hearts might be defined in terms of their normal functional role (to pump blood), but a being can still have a heart even if that heart fails utterly to fill that normal functional role (in which case the being will presumably either not be viable or have its life sustained somehow without a functioning heart). I'm a type functionalist about hearts: To have a heart is to have the type of organ that normally fills the causal role of hearts even if in one's own case the organ does not fill that causal role. Lewis is a type functionalist about pain. But if the Daiyu case is incoherent, we should not be type functionalists about belief. Closer to the truth, I suspect, would be token functionalism: To believe is to be in a state that actually, for you, plays the functional/causal role characteristic of belief. I'm not sure how readily representationalists about belief, especially those who think of mental representations as biological types or real in-the-head entities, can take token functionalism on board. Perhaps they are committed to the possibility of mad belief.

Can Inferences Sometimes Lead to Knowledge Even if Their Premises Are False?

It seems a little strange to think so, and the philosophers I've asked about this in the last few days tend to say no. But here are three possible examples:

Inferential Ascent:

Consider the following rule: If P is true, then conclude that I believe that P is true. Of course, it's not generally true that for all P I believe that P. (Sadly, I'm not omniscient. Or happily?) However, if I apply this rule in my thinking, I will almost always be right, since employing the rule will require judging, in fact, that P is true. And if I judge that P is true, normally it is also true that I believe that P is true. So if by employing the rule I generate the belief or judgment that I believe that P is true, that belief or judgment is generally correct. The rule is, in a way, self-fulfilling. (Gareth Evans, Fred Dretske, Richard Moran, and Alex Byrne have all advocated rules something like this.)

And of course the conclusion "I believe that P is true" (the conclusion I now believe, having applied the rule) will itself generally be true even if P is false. I'm inclined to think it's usually knowledge.

One question is: Is this really inference? Well, it looks a bit like inference. It seems to play a psychological role like that of inference. What else would it be?

Instrumentalism in Science:

It's a common view in science and in philosophy of science that some scientific theories may not be strictly speaking true (or even approximately true) and yet can be used as "calculating devices" or the like to arrive at truths. For example, on Bas Van Fraassen's view, we shouldn't believe that unobservably small entities like atoms exist, and yet we can use the equations and models of atomic physics to predict events that happen among the things we can observe (such as tracks in a cloud chamber or clicks in a Geiger counter). Let's further suppose that atoms do not in fact exist. Would this be a case of scientific inference in which false premises (about atoms) generate conclusions (about Geiger counters) that count as knowledge?

Perhaps the relevant premise is not "atoms behave [suchly]" but "a model in which atoms are posited as fictions that behave [suchly] generates true claims about observables". But this seems to me needlessly complex and perhaps not accurate to psychological reality for all scientists who'd I'd be inclined to say derive knowledge about observables using atomic models even if some of the crucial statements in those models are false.

Tautologous Conclusions:

In standard two-valued logic, I can derive "P or Q" from P. What if Q, in some particular case, is just "not P"? Perhaps, then, I can derive (and know) "P or not P" from P, even if P is false?

What's the problem here? Why do philosophers seem to be reluctant to say we can sometimes gain knowledge through inference from false premises?

The Odor of Evil

My nominee for best use of fart spray in 2008:

Simone Schnall and co-authors (including the always interesting Jonathan Haidt) set up a table on the Stanford campus, asking passing Stanford students to complete a questionnaire on the immorality or not of marrying one's first cousin, having consensual sex with a first cousin, driving rather than walking 1 1/2 miles to work, and releasing a documentary over the objections of immigrants who didn't realize they were being interviewed on film. All respondents completed the questionnaire while standing near a trashbucket. For one group, the bucket was clean and empty; for another it was lightly doused with fart spray so that a mild odor emanated from it; for a third group, the bucket was liberally sprayed and emitted a strong stench. Participants in the odiferous conditions rated all four actions morally worse than in the fart-absent condition.

In other research, Haidt has found that people hypnotically induced to experience disgust are also more inclined to reach negative moral judgments then when they're not experiencing hypnotically-induced disgust; Schnall et al. found that people were more morally condemnatory when completing questionnaires in a disgustingly dirty office than in a clean one, after vividly recalling a disgusting event than after not being instructed to do so, and after watching a disgusting movie scene as opposed to a neutral or sad scene. In the last three of these experiments, they found the difference in moral judgment only among people who, in a post-test, described themselves as being highly aware of bodily states such as hunger and bodily tension. (As an aside, I'm generally mistrustful of the accuracy of people's reports about their typical daily steam of conscious experience, and I wonder if responses on the post-test might be influenced by the strength of either their reaction to the previously presented moral scenarios or their reaction to the disgusting stimulus.)

Moral condemnation and visceral disgust may be more closely related, then, than you think -- or at least than most philosophers seem inclined to think. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is open to dispute. In these scenarios, it seems like a bad thing, since people are being swayed in their judgments by irrelevant factors. Whether it's generally a bad thing, I suppose, will depend on whether there's generally a good relationship between the things that evoke visceral disgust and those worth morally condemning. (Unusual sexual practices? Poor hygiene? Illness? Reflecting on these sorts of cases leads me to suspect that the connection between visceral and moral disgust is overall more misleading than helpful.)

There's a practical moral to all this, too: When you're trying to get people to judge you lightly for all the crap you've done, don't fart!

A New Blog: Cognition and Culture...

here! (Pictures of the Dalai Lama included.)

I've finally recovered (mostly) from jet lag and am settling into Canberra, Australia, where I'll be for 2 1/2 more weeks. New posts coming soon!

New Version of the Moral Sense Test, Especially Designed for Philosophers

Fiery Cushman at Harvard and I are running a new version of the "Moral Sense Test", which asks respondents to make moral judgments about hypothetical scenarios. We're especially hoping to recruit people with philosophy degrees for this test so that we can compare philosophers' and non-philosophers' responses. So while I would encourage all readers of this blog to take the test (your answers, though completely anonymous, will be treasured!), I would especially appreciate it if people with graduate degrees in philosophy would take the time to complete it.

The test should take about 15-20 minutes, and people who have taken earlier versions of the Moral Sense Test have often reported it interesting to think about the kinds of moral dilemmas posed in the test.

Here's the link to the test.

(By the way, I'm off to Australia on Wednesday, and I doubt I'll have time to post to the blog between now and when I recover from my jet lag. But if you notice any problems with the test, do please email me so I can correct it immediately!)

[Update, October 14: Discussion of the test is warmly welcomed either by email or in the comments section of this post. However, if you are planning to take the test, please do so before reading the comments on this post.]

[Update, October 15: By the way, people should feel free to retake the test if they want. Just make sure you answer "yes" to the question of whether you've taken the Moral Sense Test before!]

The Crisis in Chinese Philosophy

The American Philosophical Association's Newsletter on Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophies has recently posted a discussion of the crisis in Chinese philosophy -- the perceived crisis being the fact that no highly-ranked North American philosophy department has a specialist in Chinese philosophy. I recommend the entire newsletter to those interested in the state of graduate education in Chinese philosophy -- perhaps starting with Bryan Van Norden's article.

My own take is that the situation is very serious for those hoping to receive graduate training in the area in the near future, but that the crisis is likely to be temporary, given what seems to me the generally increasing quality of work in that field, combined with the gradually increasing ethnic integration of North America.

Update, 5:05 p.m.: Manyul Im has opened a thread on the topic on his Chinese philosophy blog. No comments there yet, but I expect that's where the most informed discussion will be.

Applying to Graduate School in Philosophy

Yes, it's that time! Last year, I wrote a series of long posts on applying to Ph.D. programs in philosophy, based on my experience on admission committees at U.C. Riverside (and also to a lesser extent on my experience as an applicant and graduate student in the 1990s). Since people appear to have found it useful, I uploaded the whole series to the Underblog. There are also links to the original posts, where comments are welcome.

I have received a number of emails from people asking about their particular situations, and while I like to be helpful and I try to respond to all emails, I would encourage potential emailers to read through the posts and the comments to see if I've already addressed your type of situation. If you are in a type of situation that I have not addressed, though, I'd be happy to receive an email -- or even better hear about it in a comment, where my reply might also be useful to others.

I reiterate that these posts represent my own perspective only. Some of the things I say may be inaccurate or unrepresentative of general opinion. (And if so, I'd appreciate hearing from others who have served on admissions committees or who have recent relevant admissions experiences.) What I say is certainly not UCR policy. I won't even be on the admissions committee this year.

A few notes:

(1.) I know very little about M.A. programs, including admissions criteria, graduation rates, placement success, expectations within the programs, etc. I suspect that there's enormous diversity in these dimensions among programs.

(2.) Many students have emailed me or posted comments on applying to grad schools one, a few, or many years after graduation. I advise students to read through the comments section of Part II. There's also some further discussion in Part IV.

(3.) Another big issue is the student with the imperfect GPA or unusual institutional background. There's more discussion of this in the comments sections of several of the Parts.

(4. [update, 2:07 p.m.]) You might also want to check out the comments section on Brian Leiter's blog on the difference between U.S. and U.K. statements of purpose.

Geekend 2008

A brief hiatus: I'm off to Geekend!

In the spirit of the occasion, I offer y'all some nerdcore:

What Is Philosophy?

How is philosophy different from the other academic disciplines? What makes it worth funding as an academic department? Here, I'll check my email for a minute while you think about your answer....

We could go sociological: We could say that philosophy is whatever it is that people who call themselves "philosophers" do. Or we could say that it is whatever it is that fits best into an integrated tradition arising from the canonical works of canonical figures like Plato and Kant. While neat in a way, this sort of sociological definition seems to me at best a fallback, if no more substantive definition succeeds -- and it strains to accommodate ancient Chinese and Indian philosophers and the possibility of philosophy on other planets or in the distant future when all memory of us has been lost.

Method or content seems the better hope. But is there a distinctively philosophical method or a set of distinctly philosophical topics?

Philosophy cannot, I think, be defined methodologically as an a priori discipline distinguished from the sciences by its focus on truths discoverable from an armchair and immune to empirical refutation. There are, in my view, no such truths. (I know that's contentious.) Speaking more moderately, it doesn't seem that philosophy is limited to such truths. Philosophers of science take stands on the nature of spacetime and natural selection, stands presumably empirically grounded and open to empirical refutation. Atheists and religious philosophers appeal to the appearance, or not, of benevolent design. Philosophers of mind connect their views with those in empirical psychology. Is there then some other method constitutive of philosophy? What could it be? Philosophy seems, if anything, methodologically pluralistic (especially with the rise of experimental philosophy).

A topical characterization of philosophy is more inviting: Philosophers consider such questions as the fundamental nature of reality, the nature of mind and knowledge and reason, general questions about moral right and wrong. But physicists and psychologists and religious leaders also consider these questions. Are they being philosophers when they do so? And what about the possibility of new philosophical questions? Also, a laundry list of questions is not very theoretically appealing. What we want to know is what those sorts of questions have in common that makes them philosophical.

Here's my view: To practice philosophy is to articulate argumentatively broad features of one's worldview, or -- derivatively -- to reflect on subsidiary points crucial to disputes about worldview, with an eye to how they feed into those disputes.

On this view, the empirical is no threat to philosophy. In fact, it would be nuts to develop a broad worldview without one's eyes open to the world. And although the empirical is deeply relevant to philosophy, no set of experiments could ever replace philosophy because no set of experiments could ever settle the most general questions of worldview (including, for example, the extent to which we should allow our beliefs to be governed by the results of scientific experiments). No science or set of sciences could aim at the broad vision of philosophy without thereby becoming philosophy -- becoming either bad philosophy (simplistic naturalized epistemology or cosmology, with substantial philosophical commitments simply assumed without argument and masked behind a web of scientific technicalities) or good, subtle, empirically-informed philosophy, philosophy recognizable to philosophers as philosophy.

This view of philosophy also, I think, properly highlights its importance and its centrality in academia.

I have been accused of aiming to destroy philosophy -- especially metaphysics and ethics -- replacing it with something empirical. However, philosophy is indestructible. People will always argumentatively articulate broad features of worldview. And I myself, even in my most empirical inquiries, aim to do nothing else.

Update, Oct. 2: Joachim Horvath points out in the comments section that important aspects of our worldview include the evolution of human beings from earlier primates and the falsity of geocentrism. But should exploring such questions count as philosophy? My own view is that their being empirical questions doesn't make them unphilosophical, and I would count Darwin and Huxley, Copernicus and Galileo, as doing philosophy when they put forward and defend such broad theses about the position of human beings in the universe. Likewise now, when we know so little about consciousness, the empirical study of basic facts about consciousness -- facts basic enough to count as central to a broad worldview -- should count as philosophy. Of course, later biologists, astronomers, and maybe consciousness scientists who get into narrower questions not involving broad features of our worldview are no longer doing philosophy on my conception. Thus, on my view, doing biology, or astronomy, or psychology can be way of doing philosophy. Perhaps in this respect my view of philosophy diverges more from the mainstream than may be evident on its face from the original post.

Is Everything that Breaks Breakable?

Well, see, I was working up this neat little post on the subjective location of visual imagery. Do some people experience visual imagery as located inside their heads, while others experience it as located in front of their foreheads and still others experience it as in no location at all? But it turns out I've already written that post. Maybe this time I'd have found a bit more to say, but I'm afraid I stole my own thunder....

Still, something light and quick would be nice before I head over to Talking Points Memo and National Review to resolve my low blood-pressure problem. So how about the following question: Is everything that breaks breakable?

Strangely, this question has been bothering me recently. (See, I really am an analytic philosopher after all!) Now, if "breakable" just means, "under some conditions it would break" then everything that breaks is breakable. But then everything solid is breakable (and maybe some things that aren't solid, too, such as machines made entirely of liquid). That seems to rob the word of its use. So maybe "breakable" means something weaker, like "under less-than-highly-unusual conditions it would break". Of course, then when those highly unusual conditions occur (someone takes a chainsaw to my garbage cans, an earthquake rends the giant granite rock) something that wasn't breakable broke. Hm!

Why do I care? Well, other than the fact that I haven't entirely shucked my inner nerdy metaphysician, the following arguably parallel case lies near my interests: If believing that P is being disposed to judge that P, does an actual occurrence of judging P imply belief that P? (Readers who've visited recently will note the connection between this question and Tuesday's post.)

If this seems to be just a matter of deciding how to use words, well that's what all metaphysics is (I contentiously aver), so this fits right in!

In-Between Believing: The Implicit Racist

Many Caucasians in academia sincerely profess that all races are of equal intelligence. Juliet, let's suppose, is one such person, a Jewish-American philosophy professor. She has, perhaps, studied the matter more than most: She has criticially examined the literature on racial differences in intelligence, and she finds the case for racial equality compelling. She is prepared to argue coherently, authentically, and vehemently for equality of intelligence, and she has argued the point repeatedly in the past. Her egalitarianism in this matter coheres with her overarching "liberal" stance, according to which the sexes too possess equal intelligence, and racial and sexual discrimination are odious.

And yet -- I'm sure you see this coming -- Juliet is systematically racist in her spontaneous reactions, judgments, and unguarded behavior. When she gazes out on class the first day of each term, she can't help but think that some students look brighter than others -- and to her, the black students never look bright. When a black student makes an insightful comment or submits an excellent essay, she feels more surprise than she would were a white or Asian student to do so, even though her black students make insightful comments and submit excellent essays at the same rate as the others; and, worse, her bias affects her grading and the way she guides class discussion. When Juliet is on the hiring committee for a new office manager, it won't seem to her that the black applicants are the most intellectually capable, even if they are; or if she does become convinced, it will have taken more evidence than if the applicant had been white. When she converses with a janitor or cashier, she expects less wit if the person is black. Juliet may be perfectly aware of these facts about herself; she may aspire to reform; she may not be self-deceived in any way.

So here's the question: Does Juliet believe that the races are intellectually equal? Considering similar cases, Aaron Zimmerman and Tamar Gendler have said yes: Our beliefs are what in us is responsive to evidence, what is under rational control; and for Juliet, that's her egalitarian avowals. Her other responses are merely habitual or uncontrolled responses. But this seems to me to draw too sharp a line between the rational and the irrational or merely habitual. Our habits and gut responses are inextricably intertwined with our reason, perhaps often themselves a form of reasoning. Furthermore, imagine two black students in Juliet's class. One says to the other, in full knowledge of Juliet's sincere statements about equality, "and yet, she doesn't really believe that the black people are as smart as white people". Is that student so far wrong? Aren't our beliefs as much about how we live as about what we say?

Does Juliet have contradictory beliefs on the issue (as Brie Gertler seems to suggest about a similar case)? Does she believe both that the races are intellectually equal and that they're not? It's hard for me to know what to make of such an attribution. We might say that part of her believes one thing and part believes another, but there are serious problems with taking such a division literally. (Like: How do the different parts communicate? How much duplication is there in the attitudes held by the different parts and in the neural systems underlying those attitudes?)

Should we simply say that Juliet does not believe that the races are intellectually equal? That doesn't seem to do justice to her sincerity in arguing otherwise.

I recommend we treat this as an "in-between" case of believing. It's not quite right to say that Juliet believes that the races are intellectually equal; but neither is it quite right to deny her that belief. Her dispositions are splintered -- she has, we might say, a splintered mind -- and our attribution must be nuanced. Just as it's not quite right either to say that someone is or is not courageous simpliciter if he's courageous on Wednesdays and not on Tuesdays, it's not quite right to simply ascribe or deny belief when someone's actions and reactions are divided as Juliet's are.

Zimmerman tells me I'm whimsically throwing overboard classical two-valued logic -- the view, standard in logic, that all meaningful propositions are either true or false -- but I say if two-valued logic cannot handle vague cases (and I think it can't, not really), so much the worse for two-valued logic!

Six Ways to Know Your Mind

Philosophers often provide accounts of self-knowledge as though we knew our own minds either entirely or predominantly in just one way (Jesse Prinz is a good exception to the rule, though). But let me count the ways (saving the fun ones for the end).

(1.) Self-observation. Here's an old joke: Q.: How do behaviorists greet each other? A.: "You're fine. How am I?" Writers in the behaviorist tradition stressed the importance of observing your behavior to assess your own mental condition. Gilbert Ryle reportedly said, how do I know what I think until I hear what I have to say? Or: I find myself asking the server for the apple pie; I conclude that I must prefer the apple to the cherry. Every philosopher thinks we can do this, of course. Psychologists such as Bem and Nisbett have stressed (counterintuitively) the centrality of this mode of self-knowledge. I think they're right that it's too easily underrated. [Update: Let me fold all "third-person" methods, such as being told about yourself by someone else or applying a textbook theory, into this category, even though, as Pete Mandik points out in the comments, they're not strictly "self-observation".]

(2.) Introspection. We cast our mental eye inward, as it were, and discern our mental goings-on. This "inner eye" metaphor has been much maligned, and obviously there are differences between external perception and introspection -- but at least for some mental states (I think, especially, conscious states), some quasi-sensory introspective mechanism plausibly plays a role, if we treat the analogy to perception with a light touch: We detect in ourselves, relatively directly and non-inferentially, some pre-existing mental state.

(3.) Self-expression. Wittgenstein suggested that we might learn to say "I'm in pain!" as a replacement for crying -- and just as we don't need to do any introspection or behavioral observation to wince or cry when we burn ourselves in the kitchen, so also we might ejaculate "that hurts!" without any prior introspection or behavioral observation. Or a young child might demand: "I want ice cream!" She's not introspecting first, presumably, and detecting a pre-existing desire for ice cream. Nor is she watching her behavior. Yet she is right: She does want ice cream.

(4.) Self-fulfillment. The thought that I am thinking is necessarily true whenever it occurs. So is the thought that I am thinking of a pink elephant, assuming that attributing myself that thought is enough for me to qualify as thinking of a pink elephant. Again, no detection or observation required. I can make this stuff up on the fly and still be right about it. For some reason, Descartes thought this was important. My own view is that it's about as important as the fact that whenever you say, in semaphore, that you are holding two flags, you're right. (Well, okay, let me moderate that a little: For some mental states it may be an interesting fact that the self-ascription implies the existence of the state -- for example if it's not possible to believe that you believe that P without also thereby at least half-believing that P.)

(5.) Simple derivation. I adopt the following inference rule: If P is true, conclude that I believe that P. This rule works surprisingly well (as Alex Byrne has pointed out). Dodgier but still useable as a rule of thumb: From X would be good, conclude that I want X all else being equal.

(6.) Self-shaping. A romantic novice is out on his first date. He blurts out, simply because it sounds good, "I'm the type of guy who buys women flowers". At the same time, perhaps just as he is finishing up that claim, he successfully resolves from then on to be the kind of guy who buys women flowers. No detection, no observation, no self-expression of a previously existing state, no simple self-fulfillment, no derivational rule. His self-ascription is true because he makes it true as he says it. Victoria McGeer and Richard Moran have developed versions of this view, but neither quite as starkly as this example suggests. But I suspect that much of what we say about ourselves (both publicly and in private) is bluster that we find ourselves committed to living up to. This self-shaping model works pretty well for imagery reports too.

Six ways. That's it. Am I missing any? (By the way, so-called "transparency" views, the object of much recent philosophical attention, can be wedded to any combination of 3-6, and are not by themselves positive accounts of self-knowledge.)

End of (Philosophical) Innocence

Philosophy is built upon intuitions. (Maybe all knowledge is, at root.) Arguments must start somewhere, with something that seems obvious, with something we're willing to take for granted. In the 20th century, philosophers became methodologically explicit about this. Ethicists explicitly appeal to the intuition that it's not right to secretly kill and dissect one healthy person in order to save five needing organ transplants. Metaphysicians appeal to the intuition that if your molecules were scanned and taken apart and that information used to create a person elsewhere who was molecule-for-molecule identical to you, that person would be you. Philosophical debate often consists of noting the apparent clash between one set of intuitions and a theory grounded in a different set of intuitions. For example, if you won't dissect the one to save the five, does that imply that if a runaway trolley is heading toward five immobilized people, you shouldn't divert it to a side-track containing only one? There are ways to say no to the one and yes to the other, of course, but only by means of principles that conflict with still other intuitions... and we're off into the sort of save-the-intuitions game that analytic philosophers (and I too) enjoy!

Until recently, such intuition-saving disputes have been conducted without any careful empirical reflection on the source and trustworthiness of those intuitions. We have the sense that it would be wrong to dissect the one or that the recreated individual would be you, but where does that intuition come from? Do such intuitions somehow track a set of facts, independent of the individual philosopher's mind, about what is really right, or about what personal identity really consists in? A story needs to be told.

That story will necessarily be an empirical story, a story about the psychology of intuition -- and maybe, too, the sociology and anthropology and history and linguistics of intuition. For example, suppose it turns out that only highly educated English speakers share some particular intuition that is widely cited in analytic philosophy. That should cast some doubt -- doubt that can perhaps be overcome with a further story -- about the merit of that intuition. Or suppose that a certain intuition was to be found only among people for whom having that intuition would excuse them from serious moral culpability for actions performed earlier in their lives. That should should cast defeasible doubt on the intuition.

With the maturing of empirical sciences that can cast light on the sources of our intuitions, we philosophers can no longer justifiably ignore such genetic considerations in evaluating our arguments. We can no longer innocently take our intuitions about philosophical cases as simply given. We must recognize that psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, and linguistics can cast important light on the merits and especially demerits of particular philosophical arguments.

Of course most philosophers know virtually nothing about psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, and linguistics; and most psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and linguists are insufficiently enmeshed in philosophical debates to bring their resources to bear. A huge cross-disciplinary terrain remains almost unspoiled. To me, nothing could be more exciting! (Well, nothing in academia.)

A few have made starts: Paul Bloom, Tony Jack, and Philip Robbins have been discussing the roots of the intuition that mind and body are distinct. Fiery Cushman, Marc Hauser, Joshua Greene, and John Mikhail have been discussing the psychological roots of the moral intuitions in runaway trolley type cases. Reading "intuition" widely to include any views that people find attractive without compelling argument, Shaun Nichols has explored the roots of the intuition that there is no incompatibility between free will and causal determinism. I have examined the culturally-local metaphors behind the sense philosophical phenomenologists and others have that coins look elliptical when seen from an angle. These are barely beginnings.

What Is It Like Not to Notice a Typo?

Most of us (certainly I!) can a dozen times read something we've written without noticing a typo. What, I wonder, is the phenomenology of that?

Suppose I've written a sentence with "that" where "than" should be. Maybe I've been reading Nichols on disgust, and I write "Drinking five glasses of saliva is worse that drinking one." What is it like for me to see that sentence as I read it? Do I see it at all (Hurlburt thinks maybe not)? Supposing I do visually experience the sentence, do I see the "that" as a "than", so that my visual experience, in the appropriate place, is actually "n"-ish rather than "t"-ish? Or is my visual experience really "t"-ish in that spot, though I fail to notice the error? Or is my visual experience somehow indefinite between "n" and "t" (and maybe some other shapes), even though I may be foveating (looking directly) on the "t"?

Suppose I'm also saying the sentence to myself in inner speech as I read it. Parallel questions arise. Do I utter to myself "than", "that", or some more indefinite thing?

Now my own hunch is that I see the "t" (or maybe something more indefinite) but utter the "n". At least it's hard to imagine that I would utter the "that" aloud without noticing the typo. But this is only a hunch, and I'm not a great believer in introspective hunches. Maybe in some future neuroscience, if we can narrow down more precisely the correlations between brain states and conscious experience, we could scan the visual system for a "t"-ish or "n"-ish representation in the right part of the visual system -- but that's a long way off, if ever we'll get there. Could more careful introspection get us the right answer? That's tricky, too -- not noticing something is necessarily an elusive sort of experience. It's hard to believe, though, that something as mundane and nearby as this would be beyond our ken....

Schwitzgeblia

A refreshingly harsh and unsympathetic criticism of my recently published paper, "The Unreliability of Naive Introspection" has been posted over at Brain Pains. It's good once in a while (not too often!) to hear frank opinions from people who think you're full of crap. (You all here at The Splintered Mind are so polite and restrained in your comments -- not that I'm complaining!) I've responded at some length. My hope is that the comments are completely off target, but I confess I'm a biased judge!

Josh Rust and I have also just completed a draft of a new essay, "Do Ethicists and Political Philosophers Vote More Often Than Other Professors?". Regular readers of The Splintered Mind will recognize the theme from these earlier posts.

Thoughts on Conjugal Love

In 2003, two friends asked me to contribute something to their wedding ceremony. Since I’m a philosophy professor, I thought I would take the occasion to reflect a bit on the nature of conjugal love, the distinctive kind of love between a husband and wife. I never pursued these thoughts or sought publication for them, since the philosophy of love is not a research specialty of mine, but recently ceramic artist Jun Kaneko asked to publish them in a forthcoming anthology on Beethoven's Fidelio. Objections and corrections appreciated!

The common view that love is a feeling is, I think, quite misguided. Feelings come and go, while love is steady. Feelings are “passions” in the classic sense of ‘passion’ which shares a root with ‘passive’. They strike us largely unbidden. Love, in contrast, is something actively built. The passions suffered by teenagers and writers of romantic lyrics, felt so painfully, and often so temporarily, are not love – though in some cases they may be a prelude to it.

Rather than a feeling, love is a way of structuring one’s values, goals, and reactions. One characteristic of it is a deep commitment to the good of the other for his or her own sake. (This characterization of love owes quite a bit to Harry Frankfurt.) We all care about the good of other people we meet and know, for their own sake and not just for utilitarian ends, to some extent. Only if the regard is deep, though, only if we so highly value the other’s well-being that we are willing to thoroughly restructure and revise our own goals to accommodate it, and only if this restructuring is so well-rooted that it instantly and automatically informs our reactions to the person and to news that could affect him or her, do we possess real love.

Conjugal love involves all this, certainly. But it is also more than this. In conjugal love, one commits oneself to seeing one’s life always with the other in view. One commits to pursuing one’s major projects, even when alone, always in a kind of implicit conjunction with the other. One’s life becomes a co-authored work.

The love one feels for a young child may in some ways be purer and more unconditional than conjugal love. One expects nothing back from a young child. One needn’t share ideals to enjoy parental love. The child will grow away into his or her own separate life, independent of the parents’ preferences.

Conjugal love, because it involves the collaborative construction of a joint life, can’t be unconditional in that way. If the partners don’t share values and a vision, they can’t steer a mutual course. If one partner develops a separate vision or does not openly and in good faith work with the other toward their joint goals, conjugal love is impossible and is, at best, replaced with some more general type of loving concern.

Nonetheless, to dwell on the conditionality of conjugal love, and to develop a set of contingency plans should it fail, is already to depart from the project of jointly fabricating a life and to begin to develop a set of individual goals and values opposing those of the partner. Conjugal love requires an implacable, automatic commitment to responding to all major life events through the mutual lens of marriage. One cannot embody such a commitment if one harbors persistent thoughts about the contingency of the relationship and serious back-up plans.

There may be an appearance of paradox in the idea that conjugal love requires a lifelong commitment without contingency plans, yet at the same time is conditional in a way parental love is not. But there is no paradox. If one believes that something is permanent, one can make lifelong promises and commitments contingent upon it, because one believes the contingency will never come to pass. This then, is the significance of the marriage ceremony: It is the expression of a mutual unshakeable commitment to build a joint life together, where each partner’s commitment is possible, despite the contingency of conjugal love, because each partner trusts the other’s commitment to be unshakeable.

A deep faith and trust must therefore underlie true conjugal love. That trust is the most sacred and inviolable thing in a marriage, because it is the very foundation of its possibility. Deception and faithlessness destroy conjugal love because, and exactly to the extent that, they undermine the grounds of that trust. For the same reason, honest and open interchange about long-standing goals and attitudes stands at the heart of marriage.

Passion alone can’t ground conjugal trust. Neither can shared entertainments and the pleasure of each other’s company. Both partners must have matured enough that their core values are stable. They must be unselfish enough to lay everything on the table for compromise, apart from those permanent, shared core values. And they must be shorn of the tendency to form secret, individual goals. Only to the degree they approach these ideals are they worthy of the trust that makes conjugal love possible.