Introspective Attention as Perception with a Twist

Tomorrow I'm off to the Pacific APA in San Francisco. Thursday 4-6 I'm commenting on Wayne Wu's "Introspection as Attention and Action". This post is adapted from those comments.

(Also Wed 6 pm I'm presenting my paper "A Pragmatic Approach to the Metaphysics of Belief" and Sat 6-9 I'm critic in an author-meets-critics on Jay Garfield's Engaging Buddhism. Feel free to stop by!)

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

What does introspective attention to one's perceptual experiences amount to? As I look at my desk, I can attend to or think about my ongoing sensory experiences, reaching judgments about their quality or character. For example, I'm visually experiencing a brownish, slightly complicated oblong shape in my visual periphery (which I know to be my hat). I'm having auditory experience of my coffee-maker spitting and bubbling as it brews the pot. What exactly am I doing, in the process of reaching these judgments?

One thing that I'm not doing, according to Wayne Wu, is launching a new process, distinct from the perceptual processes of seeing the hat and hearing the coffee-maker, which turns an "attentional spotlight" upon those perceptual processes. Introspective attention, Wu argues -- and I agree -- is a matter of applying phenomenal concepts in the course of ordinary perceiving, with the goal of arriving at a judgment about your perceptual experience -- doing so in a way that isn't radically different from the way in which, according to your goals, you can aim to categorize the things you perceive along any of several different dimensions.

I hope the following is a Wu-friendly way of developing the idea. Suppose you're looking at a coffee mug. You can do so with any of a variety of perceptual goals in mind. You can look at it with the aim of noticing details about its color -- its precise shade and how consistent or variable its color is across its face. You can look at it with the aim of noticing details of its shape. You can look at it with the aim of thinking about how it could effectively be used as a weapon. You can look at it with a critical aesthetic eye. Each of these aims is a way of attending differently to the mug, resulting in judgments that employ different conceptual categories.

You can also look at the mug with an introspective aim, or rather with one of several introspective aims. You can look at the mug with the aim of reaching conclusions about what your visual experience is as you look at the mug rather than with the aim of reaching conclusions about the physical mug itself. You might be interested in noticing your experience of the mug's color, possibly distinct from mug's real color. According to Wu, this is not a process radically different from ordinary acts of perception. Introspection your visual experience of the color or shape of the mug is not a two-stage process that consists of first perceiving the mug and then second of introspecting the experiences that arise in the course of that perceptual act.

The approach Wu and I favor is especially attractive in thinking about what the early introspective psychologists E.B. Titchener and E.G. Boring called "R-error" or "stimulus error". Imagine that you're lying on your stomach and an experimenter is gently poking the bare skin of your back with either one or two toothpicks. You might have one of two different tasks. An objective task would be to guess whether you are being poked by only one toothpick or instead by both toothpicks at once. You answer with either "one" or "two". It's easy to tell that you're being poked by two if the toothpicks are several centimeters apart, but once they are brought close enough together, the task becomes difficult. Two toothpicks placed within a centimeter of each other on your back are likely to feel like only a single toothpick. The objective task would be to guess how many toothpicks you are being poked with in reality.

An introspective task might be very similar but with a crucial difference: You are asked to report whether you have tactile experience of two separate regions of pressure or only one region. Again you might answer "one" or "two". This is of course not the same as the objective task. You're reporting not on facts about the toothpicks but rather on facts about your experience of the toothpicks. The objective task and the introspective task have different truth conditions. For example if two toothpicks are pressed to your back only 6 millimeters apart and you say "one" you've given the wrong answer if your task is objective but quite possibly the right answer if your task is introspective.

[Edwin G. Boring in 1961]

Here's the thing that Titchener and Boring noticed, which they repeatedly warn against in their discussions of introspective methodology: People very easily slide back and forth between the introspective task and the objective task. It's not entirely natural to keep them distinct in your mind over the course of a long series of stimuli. You might be assigned the introspective task, for example, and start saying "one", "one", "two", "one", "two", "two", "two" -- at first your intentions are clearly introspective, but then by the thirtieth trial you have slipped into the more familiar objective way of responding and you're just guessing how many toothpicks there actually are, rather than reporting introspectively. If you've slipped from the introspective to the objective mode of reporting, you've committed what Titchener and Boring call stimulus error.

For Wu's and my view, the crucial point is this: It's very easy to shift unintentionally between the two ways of deploying your perceptual faculties. In fact I'm inclined to think -- I don't know if Wu would agree with me about this -- that for substantial stretches of the experiment your intentions might be vague enough that there's no determinate fact about the content of your utterances. Is your "one" really a report about your experience or a report about the world outside? It might be kind of muddy, kind of in-between. You're just rolling along not very thoughtful of the distinction. What distinguishes the introspective judgment from the perceptual judgment in this case is a kind of minor thing about your background intentions in making your report.

Introspection of perceptual experience is perception with a twist, with an aim slightly different from the usual aim of reporting on the outside world. That's the idea. It's not a distinct cognitive process that begins after the perceptual act ends, ontologically distinct from the perceptual act and taking the perceptual act as its target.

When you know that your experience might be misleading, the difference can matter to your reporting. For example, if you know that you're pretty bad at detecting two toothpicks when they're close together and you have reason to think that lots of the trials will have toothpicks close together, and if your focus is on objective reporting, you might say: "Well, 50-50% -- might be one, might be two for all I know". For introspective reporting, in contrast, you might say something like "Sure feels like one, though I know you might well actually be touching me with two".

In visual experience, noticing blurriness is similar. Take off your glasses or cross your eyes. You know enough about the world to know that your coffee mug hasn't become objectively vague-edged and blurry. So you attribute the blurriness to your experience. This is a matter of seeing the world and reaching judgments about your experience in the process. You reach an experiential judgment rather than or in addition to an objective judgment just because of certain background facts about your cognition. Imagine someone so naive and benighted as to think that maybe actual real-world coffee mugs do in fact become vague bordered and blurry edged when she takes off her glasses. It seems conceivable that we could so bizarrely structure someone's environment that she actually came to adulthood thinking this. That person might then not know whether to apply blurriness to the outward object or to her experience of the object. It's a similar perceptual act of looking at the mug, but given different background concepts and assumptions in one case she reaches an introspective attribution while in the other case she reaches an objective attribution.

[image source]

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

Related:

"Introspection, What?" (2012), in D. Smithies and D. Stoljar, eds., Introspection and Consciousness (Oxford). My own positive account of the nature of introspection.

"Introspection". My Stanford Encyclopedia review article on theories of introspection.

"The Problem of Known Illusion and the Resemblance of Experience to Reality" (2014), Philosophy of Science 81, 954-960. Puzzlement and possible metaphysical juice, arising from reflections on the weird relation between objective and introspective reporting.

My Workday as a Philosophy Professor

[cross-posted from The Philosophers' Cocoon, "Real Philosophy Jobs Part 3"]

How hard does the typical tenured professor work, and on what? Good information is hard to come by. I will describe my own workload and typical workday, as one data point.

I am a full professor of philosophy, with a six-digit salary and tenure at UC Riverside, whose philosophy PhD program is ranked 28th in the US by the Philosophical Gourmet. Our normal teaching load is four 10-week courses (plus final exams) spread over three “quarters” (hence 1-2-1), plus independent supervision of graduate students.

Unlike most of my colleagues, I try to work regular workdays – about 8:00 to 5:30 Monday to Friday, with evenings and weekends reserved for home life (below, I’ll add some caveats to that). I also try to have relatively normal holidays: the official US holidays, a couple weeks for family vacation during the summer, about a week over winter break, and a smattering of other days off.

My typical day:

Email:

Email is a major part of the job. After arriving at the office around 8:00, I’ll usually spend my first hour reading and answering email. I’ll also check and answer email through the rest of the day. The distinction between “answering email” and “doing tasks that were precipitated by receiving an email” is vague, but I’d estimate that I spend about two hours a day reading and answering emails. Last week I received 359 email messages, almost none of which were junk mail from corporations. (I use a separate email account for that.) Approximately one half were group emails that I could skim or ignore. The other half I had to actually read. About half of those, I replied to. I of course also send emails that are not simply replies. Last week, I sent 107 email messages. That’s an average of 36 substantive incoming and 21 outgoing messages per weekday. If I spend one minute per message, that’s already an hour a day right there. Of course some messages require less time, others substantially more.

Here’s a Monday morning sample, which includes Friday evening through 10:00 a.m. Monday: a few emails discussing dinner plans after a talk at the APA; two submitted blog comments which I approved (including one where I followed a link to an interesting article that I’d already read); an email from a potential coauthor about an op-ed piece we’re considering writing together; A-V information about an upcoming talk; three emails in a four-way philosophical discussion about Asian philosophy and oneness; an undergraduate request for me to write a letter of recommendation, which I replied to with substantial advice; a reminder about some written interview questions that I got last week and haven’t yet managed to answer; a question from another philosopher about my data collection methods from a recent paper; an email trying to coordinate a meeting with a colleague at the coming APA; two requests to referee articles for journals (one accepted, one declined); three emails of thanks for reference letters I wrote last week; an email confirming that my request for $10,000 to organize a mini-conference has been approved, precipitating a message to my collaborator about next steps; a link to a recently published article citing one of my articles, interesting enough that I read the abstract, downloaded, and quickly skimmed for possible later reading; two emails from my wife with info about getting my son organized for applying to colleges next year; a couple emails about arranging the hotels for my trip to Hong Kong in May; an email from a speaker I’ve invited to talk at UCR next year who is unsure whether he’ll be able to fit it into his schedule; and two emails concerning getting the overhead lights in my office fixed. That gives you the flavor, I think!

Classroom teaching:

Most of my undergraduate classes are already prepped from previous years. I’ll spend about 60-90 minutes refreshing myself on the material and reviewing and tweaking my overheads. (If it’s material I haven’t taught before, it takes several hours.) Then I’ll spend 50 minutes on a lecture stage in front of hundreds of students (for a lower-division class), 80 minutes in lecture-and-informal discussion with about 30 students (for an upper-division class), or three hours in focused discussion with about 8 students (for a grad seminar).

Teaching the giant lecture classes is stressful, but also a thrill when it goes well. When I switched from the ordinary “Introduction to Philosophy” material to material that more students cared about, with real emotional resonance – lynching, the Holocaust, sex and death, the role of cognition and emotion in moral development, starvation amid wealth – I found my passion for the lower division teaching. One time, the two hundred students were so still in the lecture hall that the motion sensors decided the classroom was empty and the lights turned themselves off. Whoa. When I can bring that intensity to students on topics like these, that feels meaningful and worthwhile.

In upper-division courses and grad seminars, I rely on more from the students. Classes become a mix of semi-structured mini-lectures, freewheeling tangents, and informal debate among students. UCR students are strong enough that their discussions are reliably interesting as long as I can do two things: (a.) draw out the best in students’ sometimes half-baked ideas, and (b.) succeed in expanding the conversation away from just the most assertive talkers.

Research:

On days when I’m not teaching, probably about half of my time is research. On teaching days, research is sometimes squeezed out altogether. Research is mostly reading and writing, but I also (unusually for a philosopher) also do some experimental work and data analysis.

Reading. I don’t read many books cover to cover. I read a mix of happenstance material and targeted material. The happenstance will be recent articles from journal tables of contents, articles or books or book chapters that people have mentioned or emailed to me as possibly of interest (including their own work), work that cites my own, and other work that catches my eye for whatever reason. The targeted material will be current or classic or historical work that is relevant to an article or blog post that I am currently writing or thinking about. For example, for my recent paper on rationalization with Jon Ellis, I read through bunches of relevant psychological literature, some fun classic work from the history of psychology, a whole bunch of Habermas (which I ended up only barely citing but seemed worth knowing anyway), relevant work by philosophers on rationalization and on self-knowledge, and various tangentially related material.

Writing: Blog. I have an active blog, The Splintered Mind, where I try to post at least once a week, usually about 500-1000 words with a fresh idea about something I’ve been working on recently. Typically this takes me a few hours, plus maybe another hour replying to comments on the blog or on social media sites where I’ve linked to the blog. I find it good discipline to get my ideas out there in some sort of comprehensible shape on a regular basis, and to get some feedback about them. I usually try not to spend more than five hours blogging per week.

Writing: Articles. I am always bursting with writing ideas – far more stuff than I can actually write up. (The blog is a good vent for ideas that won’t make it into articles.) A first draft will normally take me about an hour a page. Most of my non-empirical articles go through one to five top-to-bottom rewrites from beginning to end, plus multiple smaller-scale revisions and rereadings. For me, a typical full-length published article reflects about 100-200 hours of writing and revising. I try to write always for two audiences simultaneously: the fast skimming reader who just wants the big picture and the careful nitpicking reader who is looking to critique me on details. I care about prose style. I care about trying to draw the reader in, about revealing the importance of the issues, about being fun and accessible rather than dry and technical, to the extent that’s compatible with rigorously covering the issues. I love the craft of writing.

Writing: Other. I’ve also recently started writing science fiction and op-eds. Because why not? These can, of course, take a lot of time, and it’s a challenge to acquire the relevant skills. (I rather enjoy the challenge.) It helps that I’ve recently been getting grant money for teaching release, so that I don’t have to compromise my other research to do these things.

One of the things I love about this job, especially now that I’m tenured, is the enormous freedom I have to read and write whatever I feel like reading and writing, at whatever pace and schedule I feel like doing so. Especially during the summer, my office is a playground for my mind. Of course, it’s not always like that – when I commit to particular writing projects with deadlines and/or co-authors, I have to prioritize them on a schedule I might not prefer, and there are the frequent scheduled demands of teaching and meetings that can feel like they get in the way of my passionate desire to think and read and write, and of course there’s always the stack of email which if I ignore for even one day becomes quite daunting by the next.

Other Stuff:

Meetings. During the term, I probably average about 1-2 hours in meetings per day. This includes university committee meetings, faculty meetings, departmental talks and receptions, graduate student oral exams, open-door office hours, and one-on-one meetings in person or by phone or Skype with students, collaborators, and colleagues.

Grading. Grading undergraduate exams and essays is a pretty tough slog, and probably my least favorite part of the job – though those occasional “A” papers are like lights in the mist. When I’m teaching upper-division without TAs, this will be several hours a week several weeks of the term. Evaluating graduate student essays and dissertations is not as grueling, but is still quite a bit of work – in combination amounting to hundreds of comments over hundreds of pages.

Miscellaneous Tasks. These typically come via email – things I can’t just respond to with a quick email in reply. They include: writing letters of recommendation; writing referee reports on articles submitted to journals; organizing events; organizing travel and financial matters (including applying for and managing grants); dealing with students with special issues; keeping up to some extent with what’s going on in the philosophical corners of social media and the popular press; evaluating research proposals as part of a committee or review board or as an outside evaluator; planning new courses or course material; evaluating graduate admissions applications if I’m on the admissions committee or job applications if I’m on a hiring committee; evaluating the promotion and merit files of my colleagues; completing well-intentioned administrative forms; and other such – I’m sure I’ve forgotten some.

Although I don’t conceptualize this “other stuff” as research, most of it does expose me, in one way or another, to work going on in the field.

I’ll take about 15 minutes for lunch (walk to the student cafeteria then walk back, often eating en route) and maybe another 30 minutes over the day for non-philosophy stuff like internet news, humor items, non-philosophy social media, and family-related things.

When I’m Not in the Office:

Morning walks. I walk an hour every morning – often my favorite part of the day. I’ll let my mind drift. Maybe a third of the time I’m drifting off into philosophical thoughts, things I’d like to write or revise, blog post ideas, project plans, etc. Sometimes I’ll listen to a podcast or a text-to-speech article (philosophy, science fiction, or otherwise), or I’ll look a bit at social media. When I’ve slept well and in a good mood, I’m just bursting with enthusiasm and fun ideas – sometimes ideas that seem a bit too silly in my more sober moods later.

Evenings and weekends. Evenings and weekends, I prioritize family. I’ll check social media a bit, sometimes reading or commenting on philosophical things, but always in a light way – never in a concentrated-this-feels-like-work way. I won’t check email, except maybe to scan headers if I think there might be something urgent. I always read before going to sleep – about half an hour, often something related to philosophy but which doesn’t feel workish, such as a popular book of history or psychology or some speculative science fiction.

Travel. I have a deal with my family: four out-of-town trips per year, one of which is overseas. The overseas trip will usually be about two weeks, and I’ll try to string together a bunch of talks at different places, in quick succession. The other three will normally be 2-4 nights, and I’ll try to string together two or three talks in nearby places if it can be arranged.

So How Much Do I Work and on What?

If we figure that the travel approximately cancels out the arbitrary days I take off, that leaves me with about 49 weeks per year, at about (9:30 minus 0:45) x 5 = 43.75 hours per week, plus some hard-to-count off-the-clock stuff like light reading at night and philosophical thinking during my morning walks. Maybe about 40% my work time is reading and writing with research ends in mind, about 25% of it teaching related, and 35% everything else.

But all this task-and-hour-counting omits something essential: the extent to which my work has shaped my sense of who I am and what I value. I could not simply cut it away. As my children will attest, I am a philosopher even in my light-hearted play with them. I have become what my work has made me.

"Crash Spaces" for Ancestral Ways of Meaning-Making

R. Scott Bakker's story "Crash Space", which I solicited for a special issue of Midwest Studies in Philosophy last year, is stuck in my head.

Without giving away too much of Bakker's story, here's the guiding thought: A world in which you have almost complete voluntary control over your emotions is a world in which your emotions won't effectively do their job in regulating your behavior. It's crucial to the operation of an emotion like guilt or ecstatically forgetful bliss that it be at least partly outside your direct control. Otherwise, why not just turn off the guilt and amp up bliss and go wild?

In fact, once you even start to dampen down your moral emotions or long-term thinking, that might create a situation in which you'll then dampen those emotions farther -- since there will be less guilt, shame, etc., to prevent you from continuing to downregulate. It's easy to see how a vicious cycle could start and be hard to escape. If you could, in a moment of recklessness, say to yourself "let's crank up the carpe diem and forget tomorrow!" and then (through emotion-regulating technology) actually do that, then it might be hard to find your way back to moderation. A bit of normal short-term thinking might lead you to temporarily dampen your concern for the future, but once concern for the future is dampened your new short-term-thinking self might naturally be inclined to say, "what the heck, let's dampen it even more!"

In a postscript to his story, Bakker defines a crash space as "a problem solving domain where our tools seem to fit the description, but cannot seem to get the job done" (p. 203). Bakker argues, plausibly, that the cognitive and emotional structures that give meaning to our lives and constrain us ethically can be expected to work only in a limited range of environments -- roughly, environments similar in their basic structure to those in our evolutionary and cultural history. Break far enough away, and our ancestrally familiar approaches will cease to function effectively.

For a very different set of cases in the same vein, consider utility monster and fission-fusion monster cases that might well become possible if we can someday create human-like consciousness in computers or robots. (Utility monsters are capable of vastly superhuman amounts of pleasure. Fission-fusion monsters are individuals who can merge and subdivide at will.) The human notion of individual rights, for example, only makes sense in a context in which targets of moral concern are individuals who remain discrete from each other for long periods of time -- who don't merge and divide and blend into each other. Break this assumption, and much of our ordinary moral thinking seems to break along with it. (See also Briggs and Nolan 2015.) What becomes of "one person, one vote", for example, when people can divide into a million individuals the day before the election and then merge back together again -- or not -- the day after, or when you have a huge entity with many semi-independent subparts?

Part of the potential philosophical power of science fiction, I think, is in imagining possible crash spaces for our ancestral, historical, or socially familiar ways of finding personal and moral meaning in the world. Pushing imaginatively against existing boundaries, we can begin to see possible risks in the future. But discovering our crash spaces is also of intrinsic philosophical interest, potentially revealing previously unnoticed implicit background assumptions behind our ordinary patterns of evaluation.

Some other interesting science fiction on the hazards of external self-control of emotions include Larry Niven's pleasure-center-simulating tasps and ecstasy plugs (turn on and forget even to eat!), and Greg Egan's exoselves in Permutation City and Diaspora (shell programs that regulate one's personality and preferences).

One flip side of Bakker's "Crash Space" is Egan's short story "Reasons to Be Cheerful", about the challenge of choosing a new set of desires and preferences from scratch, in a self-conscious, hyper-rational way.

[image source]

Changes in the Race and Gender of U.S. Philosophy Faculty, 1988-2004

Historical data on the percentage of women and minorities in philosophy in the U.S. are hard to find. It's clear that the numbers have increased since the 1970s, but it's possible that some of the trends have flattened since the 1990s. Without good historical data, it's hard to evaluate this possible flattening.

So I put in a request to the National Center for Education Statistics, and they generated estimates of the percentage of women and the percentage of non-Hispanic white people in philosophy vs. other disciplines based on governmental surveys conducted from 1988, 1993, 1999, and 2004. These data concern only full-time faculty in 4-year institutions.

With their permission, I've made these NCES estimates available here (XLSX format).

The 1988 and 1993 are aggregate data for philosophy, religion, and theology (which appear not to have been coded separately in the NCES survey raw data). However, I believe that these aggregated data can serve as reasonable estimates for philosophy in those two years, as I'll explain in point (4) below.

Gender data:

1988: philosophy*: 91% male (vs. 75% for all fields).

1993: philosophy*: 88% male (vs. 70% for all fields).

1999: philosophy: 80% male (vs. 67% for all fields).

2004: philosophy: 86% male (vs. 64% for all fields).

Race/ethnicity data:

1988: philosophy*: 93% white non-Hispanic (vs. 89% for all fields).

1993: philosophy*: 95% white non-Hispanic (vs. 86% for all fields).

1999: philosophy: 91% white non-Hispanic (vs. 84% for all fields).

2004: philosophy: 89% white non-Hispanic (vs. 80% for all fields).

Notes/observations:

(1.) Unsurprisingly to anyone familiar with the demographics of philosophy in the U.S., philosophy was very white and very male throughout the period -- more so than academia as a whole. The trends have been toward increasing diversity, but only slowly.

(2.) The fluctuations suggest statistical error of at least a few percent. On the second page of the worksheet, you can also see the calculated standard errors from the NCES, generally about 1-4%. The dip from 88% to 80% back up to 86% in particular seems unlikely to reflect real demographic change. Turnover in full-time positions is slow; the field doesn't change that fast.

(3.) For comparison, the U.S. Survey of Earned Doctorates from the 1990s shows 73% of U.S. philosophy PhDs going to men and 91% going to non-Hispanic whites (the latter number excludes temporary residents and decline-to-state). So PhD recipients during the period had a bit more gender and ethnic diversity than faculty as a whole, consistent with a slow trend toward diversification.

(4.) As mentioned, the 1988 and 1993 numbers are actually numbers from "philosophy, religion, and theology". I nonetheless believe that these are also decent estimates for philosophy alone. My reasoning is this: (a.) In the chart linked to above, we can see that philosophy and religion are treated separately and together in 1999 and 2004. The aggregate estimate is always somewhat closer to philosophy than to religion, suggesting that there are somewhat fewer faculty in religion -- which also fits with recent data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates (e.g., in 2009 423 doctorates were awarded in philosophy and 323 in religion). (b.) The race and gender percentages for religion and philosophy in 1999 and 2004 aren't hugely different, though religion tends to be a little closer to parity than philosophy in both respects (which also fits with recent SED data, which finds religion to be almost as race and gender-skewed as philosophy). For example, averaging 1999 and 2004, philosophy has 83.2% men to religion's 81.0%, and 90.0% white non-Hispanic to religion's 84.6%. So, combined with point a, the percentages for philosophy alone are likely to be similar to the percentages for philosophy and religion together, perhaps philosophy alone a bit more white and male. Of course, because of the nature of this estimate, as well as the fluctuations noted in (2) above, we should keep in mind that these are rough estimates, probably good only plus or minus a few percentage points.

New Paper in Draft: Rationalization in Moral and Philosophical Thought

... coauthored with Jonathan Ellis.

Abstract:

Rationalization, in our intended sense of the term, occurs when a person favors a particular conclusion as a result of some factor (such as self-interest) that is of little justificatory epistemic relevance, if that factor then biases the person’s subsequent search for, and assessment of, potential justifications for the conclusion. Empirical evidence suggests that rationalization is common in ordinary people’s moral and philosophical thought. We argue that it is likely that the moral and philosophical thought of philosophers and moral psychologists is also pervaded by rationalization. Moreover, although rationalization has some benefits, overall it would be epistemically better if the moral and philosophical reasoning of both ordinary people and professional academics were not as heavily influenced by rationalization as it likely is. We discuss the significance of our arguments for cognitive management and epistemic responsibility.

Full paper here.

Thoughts and comments welcome, as always -- either in the comments field of this post or by email to me or Jon.

Like the Oscars, #PhilosophySoWhite

... a new piece in the L.A. Times by Myisha Cherry and me.

Academic philosophy in the United States has a diversity problem.

No other discipline of comparable size in the humanities is as gender-skewed as philosophy. Women still receive only about 28% of philosophy PhDs in the United States, and are still only about 20% of full professors of philosophy — numbers that have hardly budged since the 1990s. And among U.S. citizens and permanent residents receiving philosophy PhDs in this country, 86% are non-Hispanic white. The only comparably-sized disciplines that are more white are the ones that explicitly focus on the European tradition, such as English literature.

Black people are especially difficult to find in academic philosophy. Black people or African Americans constitute 13% of the U.S. population, 7% of PhD recipients across all fields, 2% of PhD recipients in philosophy, and less than 0.5% of authors in the most prominent philosophy journals.

One of the main causes of homogeneity in philosophy, we believe, is subjectivity and bias in the evaluation of philosophical quality.

continued here

Some thoughts occasioned by the discussion I've seen of this piece since it went live last night:

(1.) Shelley Tremain pointed out that we don't mention the underrepresentation of disabled people in philosophy (some stats and discussion in her piece here). As Tremain has emphasized, discussions of diversity tend to focus on race and gender to the exclusion of other dimensions of diversity, and I think we fell too much into that standard mode of thinking. I would conjecture that the same "seeming smart" phenomenon disadvantages people with visible disabilities that are stereotypically culturally associated with low power and low academic skill, and that this might explain the underrepresentation of such people in the profession, regardless of actual skill levels.

(2.) I think one way to begin to address the issue (in addition to direct action to increase diversity) is to shift the culture of philosophy a bit more toward valuing plain-spoken philosophy, with minimal apparatus, which discusses issues that non-philosophers find interesting. I think this might have at least two positive effects: First it would make philosophy more attractive to people from a wide range of perspectives; and second it would improve our ability to evaluate quality, reducing the role of dazzling incomprehensible showmanship in the discipline. (This isn't to deny a role for highly technical philosophy, such as technical formal logic and detailed examination of the texts of historical figures. I would just advocate some shift in emphasis.)

(3.) Myisha and I didn't have a chance to discuss how these things play out in other disciplines. I am not expert in other disciplines (except psychology to some extent), but I do have some data-supported conjectures. The entire story will be complex and multi-factorial. Some things to note: Mathematics, the physical sciences, and engineering are approximately as gender-skewed as philosophy. They are somewhat less race-skewed. (I don't know of class and disability data for these disciplines.) I suspect that this skew arises from a somewhat different confluence of factors (including associations of math and gender going back into childhood), though I think there's probably also substantial overlap since "seeming smart" is, I suspect, very important throughout academia, and the math-gender relationship also penetrates philosophy to some extent (especially philosophy of math and physics).

(4.) Another interesting disciplinary comparison is literature. Literature, I think, shares with philosophy a very high level of subjectivity and cultural variability in quality assessment. It is much less gender-skewed. The race skew story is complicated by the fact that many literature programs focus explicitly on the European tradition (e.g., English, French). Again, I don't know of disability data and economic-privilege data. I see at least two important differences between literature and philosophy: One is that cultural associations with beauty and artistic creativity are not as white-male-centric as are cultural associations with intelligence (think of the stereotypes of the beautiful woman and the creative black jazz musician) and assessments of beauty and creativity may play a proportionately larger role in literature than in philosophy. The other is that literature as a set of academic disciplines in our culture has made more effort to explicitly diversify its canon than has philosophy, and diversifying the canon might tend to lead toward the diversification of the professors teaching that canon, via a few different mechanisms.

(5.) Our brief discussion of this study didn't make the final cutdown for the op-ed, but we think it's important and supports our hypothesis. On Rate My Professors, undergraduate students are more likely to use the word "brilliant" to describe philosophy instructors -- especially male philosophy instructors -- than instructors in any of the other nine fields examined. These data fit both the gender skew in perceptions of "seeming smart" and our conjecture that seeming smart is a skill even more central to philosophy than other academic disciplines.

(6.) Four interesting, related papers on seeming smart in philosophy:
* Liam Kofi Bright "Against Candidate Quality";
* Katrina Hutchison "Sages and Cranks: The Difficulty of Identifying First-Rate Philosophers;
* Jennifer Saul "Implicit Bias, Stereotype Threat, and Women in Philosophy";
* Dan Sperber "The Guru Effect".

From God to Skepticism

Maybe God created the world. But what kind of god?

It seems reasonable to have doubts about God's moral character. Some religions claim that if God exists, he/she/it is morally perfect. Other religions, especially polytheistic religions, make no such claims. Even the Old Testament, if read at face value, does not appear to portray a morally perfect God.

And of course there's the "problem of evil": The fact that the world is -- or appears to be -- full of needless suffering and wickedness that one might hope a morally good God would work to prevent. God could, it seems, have given Hitler a heart attack. God could, it seems, prevent people from dying young of painful diseases. One possible explanation for God's failure to prevent evil and suffering is that evil and suffering really don't bother God so much. Maybe God even enjoys watching us suffer. That would be one reason to create a world -- as a kind of LiveLeak voyeurism on human misery.

Similarly, it seems reasonable to have doubts about the extent of God's power. Maybe God really wanted to stop the Holocaust, but just couldn't get there in time, or was constrained by non-interference regulations enforced by the Council of Worldbuilders, or was so busy stopping other bad things that this one slipped through the net. Maybe God would have liked to create human teeth sufficiently robust that they did not decay, but had to compromise given the resources at hand.

Here's one way gods might work: by creating simulated worlds inside their computers, populated by conscious AIs who experience those simulated worlds as real. (Imagine the computer game "The Sims", but with conscious people inside.) I've argued that any manager of such a world would literally be a god to the beings inside that world. But of course those sorts of gods might be highly limited in their abilities. Maybe we too are in a Sim. (Personally, this strikes me as a more plausible version of theism than orthodox Catholic theology.) There's no guarantee that if some god launched our world, that god is all-powerful.

So maybe God (if there is a god) is all-powerful and morally perfect, and maybe not. I think it's reasonable to have an open mind about that question. But now radically skeptical doubts seem to arise.

An imperfect god might, for example, create millions of brief universes, one after the next, as trial runs -- beta versions, or quick practice sketches. An imperfect God might require multiple attempts to get things right. If so, then maybe we're in one of the betas or sketches, without much past or future, rather than in the final product.

An imperfect god, once it/she/he has the knack of things, might just create favorite moments, or interesting moments, in multiple copies -- might create you, or your city, or your planet with a fake past, then suddenly introduce a change of laws, or a disaster, or a highly unlikely stroke of good fortune, just to see what happens. Why not? If you're going to create a world, you might as well play around with it.

An imperfect god might create a universe as a project that runs for a while, but which will be shut down the moment God gets bored or receives a passing grade from the other gods or fails to pay the utility bill.

It was crucial to Descartes' famous (and famously unsuccessful) argument against skepticism that he establish that God is perfect and, specifically, not a deceiver. Descartes was right to emphasize this for his anti-skeptical aims. If you admit that God might have created the world but then don't put substantial constraints on God's behavior, then you are imagining a being with the power and motive to create worlds who really kind of might do anything -- and who (if we use human psychology as our best-guess model) seems reasonably likely to do something other than create a boring, stable, predictable, one-shot universe of the sort we normally think we inhabit.

***************************************

Related:

Reinstalling Eden (with R. Scott Bakker; Nature 503: 562, Nov. 28, 2013)

Our Possible Imminent Divinity (Jan. 2, 2014)

What Kelp Remembers (Weird Tales, Apr. 14, 2014)

Out of the Jar (Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Jan/Feb 2015)

1% Skepticism (Nous, forthcoming)

[image source]

Genuine Philosophical Dialogues

There's a possible format for written philosophy that, despite great potential, is almost non-existent. I'll call it genuine philosophical dialogue.

Here's how I imagine it.

It's a dialogue between two (maybe three or four) philosophers who respect each other as equals and who are fully committed to the process. Not, for example, Socrates and some passersby. Not a sage answering questions from his students. Not Berkeley's Philonous or Hume's Philo speaking for the author against manufactured opponents.

The philosophers enter the dialogue with a substantial disagreement. The philosophers aim to actually learn from each other -- exposing themselves the possibility of changing their minds or at least figuring out what common ground they share, aiming to find the root sources of their disagreement.

There are many conversational turns. Not just essay, objection, reply. At least 25 conversational turns. Time enough to go somewhere, shift, make progress, get past the well-rehearsed objection and response, interrupt each other for clarifications, then push back against the attempted clarifications, then push back against the pushback, then return to the main thread....

Both philosophers' positions are genuinely their own -- something they are invested in and expert about -- real, sophisticated philosophical positions, worth taking seriously. Not a novice's first impressions. Not a straw man. Not a cartoon.

The participants aim to present their real reasons for thinking what they do -- not the lawyerly or debate-team approach of reaching for any argument that might seem convincing. The participants expose to critique not only their positions but their best understanding of their own underlying reasoning and motivations.

Each philosopher takes responsibility for revising the whole dialogue, including the words of the other. This is one advantage of written format over live dialogue. If A and B agree that some thread was a false start, they can cut it away. If B sees a striking presupposition in what A says, B can point that out and then either trim it away in favor of more agreeable shared language if both agree that the presupposition is inessential, or bring the presupposition more explicitly forward if it looks like the disagreement might partly turn upon it. If A thinks B's point could be more clearly made in a different way, A could revise B's words and see if B agrees. The aim of these mutual revisions would be twofold: (1) for each to aid the other in presenting each position in its best light; (2) to avoid wasting the reader's time with distractions and confusions.

********************************************

Russ Hurlburt and I, in our 2007 book, aimed to have a dialogue of this type, as we did also in some subsequent exchanges (though Hurlburt's academic affiliation is psychology, not philosophy). I am unaware of other examples of philosophical dialogues that meet all of the above criteria, though surely such dialogues must exist. Examples welcomed!

Genuine philosophical dialogues of this sort would, I think, tend to decrease misunderstanding, strawmanning, distraction into side issues that aren't the heart of the matter, boxing each other into unrepresentative and unflattering "isms", talking past each other, the general use (intentional or not) of unhelpful rhetorical moves, and excessive reliance on idiosyncratic jargon.

What if Kant and Hume had tried to build one of these dialogues together? It's almost unimaginable that they would try (even bracketing their language differences), but fascinating to contemplate what might have arisen, could they have pulled it off. Or consider 21st-century philosophers who prominently disagree -- it could be fascinating to see what common ground they would find, and where they would finally locate the heart of their disagreement after an extended exchange of this sort.

[image source]

Phenomenal Consciousness, Conceptualized as Innocently as I Can Manage

I've been reading Keith Frankish recently. For example, this. Frankish appears to deny the reality of phenomenal consciousness, a.k.a. "qualia" or "what-it's-like-ness".

"Phenomenal consciousness" does sound like a bit of a suspicious concept. The terminology is technical and recent, for one thing. That invites the idea that phenomenal consciousness is a new concept invented by philosophers, and culturally specific. And that in turn invites the idea that in talking about it, we're talking about some odd sort of theoretical concoction, not a foundationally important aspect of human life.

Furthermore, philosophers wax oddly mysterious when they talk about it. Sometimes they say that it can't be defined, only gestured at or expressed via synonyms. Ned Block, borrowing a phrase about jazz from Louis Armstrong, tells us ("only half in jest"): "If you got to ask, you ain't never gonna get to know" (1978/1983, p. 241).

Despite all this air of mystery, I think the idea of phenomenal consciousness is simple and obvious, once you stop to think about it -- and probably would be so across cultures (though I'll admit that's speculative).

You have sensory experiences. Of course you do. Maybe you have the experience of seeing a computer screen. Maybe you have the experience of hearing someone making noise down the hall. Maybe you have the experience of the taste of coffee lingering in your mouth. Consider some vivid and obvious ones.

You have imagery experiences too. Imagine your house, as viewed from the street, if you can. Or think of the melody of Beethoven's Fifth ("da da da DA, da da da DA"). Or say this very sentence silently to yourself in inner speech.

You've had emotional experience also, I'm sure -- panics of fear, thrills of joy, the quiet pleasure of mellow contentment.

This isn't necessarily an exhaustive list of types of experience, but I think this is enough to give you the idea. There's something that sensory experiences, imagery experiences, and emotional experiences have in common. They're experiences. Dream experiences have this too (even though in some sense you're not "conscious"). At the same time, there are other things going on inside of you that you don't in the same way experience -- immune system response, for example, or the processes by which your fingernails grow. There are also other facts about your mind which you don't normally experience, such as your propensity to say "blue" when asked your favorite color (and let's assume that you aren't being asked right now), or your general, not-currently-relevant preference for vanilla over chocolate. Sensory, imagery, and emotional experiences have something obvious in common, which makes them different from all these other things. The term "phenomenally conscious" refers to that obvious feature they have in common. When you try to describe these experiences to someone else, there are facts about what those experiences are, facts that you are trying to get right -- facts that you might feel like you are struggling to put into words.

Neologism is helpful here not, I think, because the concept is new or strange but rather because folk usage is messy. "Experience" can mean that you've acquired some skills or undergone some events in the past, as in the phrase "I have some teaching experience". The words "consciousness" and "awareness" invite trouble if we hear too much of an epistemic dimension in them: To say that one is conscious of something or aware of something seems to imply that you know something about it, but we might not want to build any suggestions of transitive knowledge into our concept of consciousness. Personally, I like the phrases "conscious experience" and "stream of experience". I think those phrases convey the idea well enough. But for extra clarity, among those philosophers who like to make fine distinctions, the phrase "phenomenal consciousness" also serves.

Frankish suggests, in his 2012 article linked above (I'm not sure he's still committed to this), that demonstrative definitions of phenomenal consciousness by means of example -- that is, definitions of the sort I've just tried -- must fail because philosophers have different accounts of the underlying nature of such things (for example, some philosophers think we are directly aware of properties of our experiences, while others think that at least in sensory experience we are instead directly aware only of the properties of outward objects); but as Frankish acknowledges, disagreement about the fundamental nature of things is compatible with referring to them in common -- as for example ancient people and modern astronomers were both able to refer to "stars". Pushing farther, Frankish endorses Gareth Evans's view that identification of spatio-temporal particulars requires being able to track them in egocentric space; but that's quite a dubious commitment to take on board, especially in this context.

Frankish suggests -- and also Jay Garfield, in his recent book on Buddhist philosophy -- that the modern philosophical concept of phenomenal consciousness imports dubious notions, such as ineffability or infallible knowability or immateriality, which make it fail as a concept. But I don't see how a bare demonstrative account of the sort I've given, in terms of positive and negative examples, involves any such dubious philosophical commitments. Of course, one could define "qualia" or "phenomenal properties" in a way that commits to such matters, and sometimes philosophers do so, but my own aim is to avoid such commitments, keeping open as much as possible, while still pointing at the obvious thing that all conscious experiences have in common that makes us want to classify them together as "conscious experiences".

There are, I think, two main issues that I do not keep open. One is that there is some obvious common feature of most or all of the intended positive examples have (the various sensory experiences, imagery experiences, and emotional experiences) and which the negative examples lack, which we can take to be the target of the phrase "phenomenal consciousness". The other is that there are facts about what these experiences are, which in our introspective reports we are trying to get at. These assumptions are not entirely philosophically innocent; but I hope they are plausible enough. I can't make do with fewer.

There is one further thing that I will commit to here, of some philosophical significance. It's kind of the flip side of openness. If I have succeeded in conceiving of phenomenal consciousness with a high degree of metaphysical innocence, then there ought to be nothing built into the notion of phenomenal consciousness that rules out various wild metaphysical views such as idealism (the view that only mental things exist, and not anything material) or even radical solipsism (the view that the only thing that exists in the universe is my own mind). And indeed, I do think that there's nothing incoherent in the supposition that there might only be phenomenal consciousness and nothing else. Some philosophers -- maybe Frankish and Garfield among them? -- would like to rule out idealism from square one, would like to say that the very idea of mentality already presupposes the idea of something beyond the mental, so that idealism, and maybe also less radical views like dualism, are conceptually incoherent. If my minimalist conception of phenomenal consciousness is correct, however, there is no such easy path to the rejection of those metaphysical positions.

[image source]

New Essay in Draft: Women in Philosophy: Quantitative Analyses of Specialization, Prevalence, Visibility, and Generational Change

co-authored with Carolyn Dicey Jennings.

This article brings together lots of data that Carolyn and I have been gathering and posting about over the past several years, here and on New APPS. Considered jointly, these data tell a very interesting story about the continuing gender disparity in the discipline.

Here's the abstract:

We present several quantitative analyses of the prevalence and visibility of women in moral, political, and social philosophy, compared to other areas of philosophy, and how the situation has changed over time. Measures include faculty lists from the Philosophical Gourmet Report, PhD job placement data from the Academic Placement Data and Analysis project, the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates, conference programs of the American Philosophical Association, authorship in elite philosophy journals, citation in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and extended discussion in abstracts from the Philosopher’s Index. Our data strongly support three conclusions: (1) Gender disparity remains large in mainstream Anglophone philosophy; (2) ethics, construed broadly to include social and political philosophy, is closer to gender parity than are other fields in philosophy; and (3) women’s involvement in philosophy has increased since the 1970s. However, by most measures, women’s involvement and visibility in mainstream Anglophone philosophy has increased only slowly; and by some measures there has been virtually no gain since the 1990s. We find mixed evidence on the question of whether gender disparity is even more pronounced at the highest level of visibility or prestige than at more moderate levels of visibility or prestige.

Full paper here.

As always, comments, corrections, and objections welcome, either on this post or to my email address.

Pragmatic Metaphysics

I'm working again on the nature of belief. Increasingly, I find myself drawn to be explicit about my pragmatist approach to the metaphysics of attitudes.

Sometimes the world divides into neat types -- neat enough that you can more or less just point your science at it and straightforwardly sort the As from the Bs. Sometimes instead the world is fuzzy-bordered, full of intermediate cases and cases where plausible criteria conflict. When the world is the latter way, we face antecedently unclear cases. Antecedently unclear cases are, or can be, decision points. Do you want to classify this thing as an A or a B? Would there be some advantage in thinking of the category of "A" so that it sweeps in that case? Or is it better to think of "A" in a way that excludes that case or leaves it intermediate? Such decisions can reflect, often do at least implicitly reflect, our interests and values. Such decisions can also shape, often do at least implicitly shape, future outcomes and values, influencing both how we think about that particular type of case and how we think about As in general.

Pragmatic metaphysics is metaphysics done with these thoughts explicitly in mind. For instance: There are lots of ways of thinking about what a person is. Usually, the cases are antecedently clear: You are a person, I am a person, this coffee mug is not a person. But some interesting cases are intermediate or break in different directions depending on what criteria are emphasized: a fetus, a human without much cortex, a hypothetical conscious robot, a hypothetical enhanced chimpanzee. There is no settled fact about what exactly the boundaries of personhood are. We can choose to think of personhood in a way that includes or excludes such cases or leaves them intermediate -- and in doing so we both express and buttress certain values, for example, about what sorts of being deserve the highest level of moral consideration.

The human mind is a complex and fuzzy-bordered thing, right at the center of our values. Because it is complex and fuzzy-bordered, there will be lots of antecedently unclear cases. Because it is central to our values, how we classify such cases matters. Does being happy require feeling happy? Is compassion that doesn't privilege its object as irreplaceably special still love? Our classification decisions here aren't compelled by the phenomena. Instead, we can decide. What range of phenomena deserve such important labels as "happiness" and "love"? We might think of metaphysical battles over the definitions of those terms as political battles between philosophers with different visions and priorities, for control of our common disciplinary language.

At the center of my interest in belief are a set of antecedently unclear cases in which one intellectually assents to a proposition (e.g., "death is not bad", "women are just as intelligent as men") but fails to act and react generally as though that proposition is true (e.g., quakes with fear on the battlefield, treats most women as stupid). The pragmatic metaphysical question is: How should we classify such cases? What values are expressed in saying, about such cases, that we really do or really do not believe what we say we believe? What vision of the world manifests in these different ways of speaking, what projects are supported, what phenomena rendered more and less visible?

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

Related post:

Against Intellectualism About Belief (July 31, 2015)

[Updated] APA Membership Goes from 2.4% to 5.4% Self-Reported Black or African-American in a Single Year?

Update, Feb. 11: After I posted the below, Amy Ferrer at the APA looked into it and discovered that it was a spreadsheet error. The corrected data are here. In the corrected data, the 2014 percentage is 2.4% and 2015 is 2.6%, well within chance variation.

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

I'm looking at this table of demographic statistics from the American Philosophical Association, comparing the number of APA survey respondents self-describing as "Black/African-American", among regular APA members (excluding emeritus, K-12, colleague, international, and student members). In 2014, I see 56 out of 2730 respondents (2.1%; 2.4% if we exclude those in the "prefer not to answer" category) in the "Black/African-American" category. In 2015, it's 146 out of 2874 (5.1%; 5.4% excluding "prefer not to answer").

It's not possible that the percentage of Black philosophers in the U.S. doubled in a single year. Since only about half of the APA membership responded to the survey, it could be a non-response effect (i.e., Black philosophers much more likely to respond in 2015 than in 2014), but if so it's an amazingly huge one. Another possibility is a change in the format of the question or in the willingness of members to describe themselves as belonging to this racial category -- but if so, again it's quite large for an effect of that sort in such a short time frame.

Thoughts?

Cheerfully Suicidal A.I. Slaves

Suppose that we someday create genuinely conscious Artificial Intelligence, with all the intellectual and emotional capacity of human beings. Never mind how we do it -- possibly via computers, possibly via biotech ("uplifted" animals).

Here are two things we humans might want, which appear to conflict:

(1.) We might want them to subordinately serve us and die for us.

(2.) We might want to treat them ethically, as beings who deserve rights equal to the rights of natural human beings.

A possible fix suggests itself: Design the A.I.'s so that they want to serve us and die for us. In other words, make a race of cheerfully suicidal A.I. slaves. This was Asimov's solution with the Three Laws of Robotics -- a solution that slowly falls apart across the arc of his robot stories (finally collapsing in "Bicentennial Man").

What to make of this idea?

Douglas Adams parodies the cheerily suicidal A.I. with an animal uplift case in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe:

A large dairy animal approached Zaphod Beeblebrox's table, a large fat meaty quadruped of the bovine type with large watery eyes, small horns and what might almost have been an ingratiating smile on its lips.

"Good evening," it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches. "I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?" It harrumphed and gurgled a bit, wriggled its hind quarters into a comfortable position and gazed peacefully at them.

Zaphod's naive Earthling companion, Arthur Dent, is predictably shocked and disgusted, and when he suggests a green salad instead, the suggestion is brushed off. Zaphod and the animal argue that it's better to eat an animal that wants to be eaten, and can say so clearly and explicitly, than one that does not want to be eaten. Zaphod orders four rare steaks.

"A very wise choice, sir, if I may say so. Very good," it said. "I'll just nip off and shoot myself."

He turned and gave a friendly wink to Arthur.

"Don't worry, sir," he said. "I'll be very humane."

Adams, I think, nails the peculiarity of the idea. There's something ethically jarring about creating an entity with human-like intelligence and emotion, which will completely subject its own interests to ours, even to the point of suiciding at our whim. This appears to be so even if the being wants to be subjected in that way.

The three major classes of ethical theory -- consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics -- can each be read in a way that delivers this result. The consequentialist can object that the good of a small pleasure for a human does not outweigh the potential of the lifetime of pleasure for an uplifted steer, even if the steer doesn't appreciate that fact. The Kantian deontologist can object that the steer is treating itself as a "mere means" rather than as an agent whose life should not be sacrificed by itself or others to achieve others' goals. The Aristotelian virtue ethicist can say that the steer is cutting its life short rather than flourishing into its full potential of creativity, joy, friendship, and thought.

If we can use Adams' steer as an anchoring point of moral absurdity at one end of the ethical continuum, the question then arises to what extent such reasoning transfers to less obvious intermediate cases, such as Asimov's robots who don't sacrifice themselves as foodstuffs (though presumably they would do so if commanded to, by the Second Law) but who do, in the stories, appear perfectly willing to sacrifice themselves to save human lives.

When a human sacrifices her life to save someone else's it can be, at least sometimes, a morally beautiful thing. But a robot designed that way from the start, to always subordinate its interests to those of humans -- I'm inclined to think that ought to be ruled out, in the general case, by any reasonable egalitarian principle that treats AIs as deserving equal moral status with humans if they have broadly human-like cognitive and emotional capacities. Such a principle would be a natural extension of the types of consequentialist, deontologist, and virtue ethicist reasoning that rules out Adams' steer.

Thus, I think we can't use the "cheerfully suicidal slave" fix to escape the dilemma posed by (1) and (2) above. If we somehow create genuinely conscious, general-intelligence A.I. with a range of emotional capacities like our own, then we must create it morally equal, not subordinate.

[image source]

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

Related article: A Defense of the Rights of Artificial Intelligences (Schwitzgebel & Garza, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 2015).

Rik Peels' Defense of the Reliability of Introspection

In a paper forthcoming in Philosophical Studies (also here), Rik Peels defends, against a variety of scientifically inspired objections, the traditional philosophical view that introspection is a reliable source of knowledge. He focuses especially on arguments I developed in my 2011 book Perplexities of Consciousness.

Peels considers arguments for the unreliability of introspection based on: the sometimes large effect of reporting method (e.g., button press vs. verbal report) on the content of introspective judgments; cultural variation in whether dreams are seen as colored; the poor correlation between self-reported visual imagery and performance on cognitive tasks often thought to be facilitated by visual imagery (such as mental rotation or folding tasks); people's ignorance of their capacity for echolocation; and people's ignorance of the lack of detail and precision in the visual field. In each case, Peels presents the skeptic's argument in a couple of pages and then offers a couple of pages of objections.

For example, Peels offers three responses to my observation that self-reports of mental imagery tend not to correlate with behavioral performance on seemingly related cognitive tasks. First, he points out that since people don't have access to other people's imagery, terms like "vivid" might be interpreted quite differently between subjects -- and thus people might be accurate in their own idiolect even if not in an outwardly measurable way. Second, he suggests that the aspects of mental imagery being reported (such as vividness) might not be relevant to the cognitive tasks at hand (like mental rotation), in which case lack of correlation is to be expected. Third, he notes that some studies (a minority) do report positive correlations. While in my discussion of this topic, I have given reasons to be leery of psychological findings that fail to replicate -- such as experimenter bias, "file-drawer" effects, the existence of confounding or intervening variables, and participants' tendency to confirm perceived research hypotheses -- Peels argues that I have presented insufficient positive evidence that such factors are at work in these cases.

The imagery case is, I think, illustrative of the debate in two ways: First, a lot hinges on examination of the empirical details, such as the precise nature of the measures. And second, a lot hinges on judgments of plausibility about which reasonable people might differ. For example, looking at hundreds of studies of visual imagery self-report and cognitive performance, a literature with lots of null results and non-replications, does one think (as I do), "That looks pretty bad for the reality of an underlying effect" or does one think (as Peels seems to), "There probably is an effect in there somewhere that the null studies aren't effectively getting at". This sort of thing is a matter of judgment. (And no, I don't think the typical statistical meta-analysis will yield a straightforward answer that we should take at face value.)

One's sense of plausibility, in such matters, comes close to being something like one's general academic worldview -- about philosophy, about psychology, and about their interaction. Here, I find the introduction and conclusion of Peels' essay interesting.

In the introduction, Peels lists four reasons the question of the reliability of introspection is important:

(a.) Ordinary "common sense" tends to treat introspection as a reliable source of knowledge. To reject its reliability is to challenge common sense.

(b.) There's a philosophical tradition from Descartes to Chalmers of taking introspection (appropriately restricted) as infallible. To reject introspection's reliability means abandoning the infallibilist tradition.

(c.)There's a contrary "scientistic" tradition that emphasizes science as the only secure source of knowledge and regards introspection as non-scientific. To reject introspection's reliability plays into the hands of those who want to privilege the epistemic role of science.

(d.) There's a debate within science about how to treat introspective self-reports.

As these observations make clear, issues about introspection are inextricable from one's general sense of what philosophers and psychologists should be doing. I suspect that it is background differences between Peels and me on these sorts of questions that drive our different senses of plausibility in interpreting the empirical details.

I want to resist the infallibilist tradition in philosophy, and the philosophical tradition that emphasizes "common sense", and other philosophical and metaphilosophical positions that seek to insulate philosophical reasoning from science. This is fundamental to my worldview and my vision of the nature of philosophy. My views on introspection are of a piece with this general worldview -- supporting that worldview, I think, but also supported by it. Other considerations that support such a worldview are (I argue) the incoherence and cultural variability of "common sense" and philosophical fashion, and evolutionary, cultural, and psychological reasons to think that people would likely be much worse reasoners about philosophical issues than they are about mundane, practical affairs.

I would add to Peels' four considerations also a fifth consideration of a somewhat different sort: People usually want to be taken at their word when they say they're not angry, not racist, happy with their life choices. To express doubt is to deny people a certain sort of authority over the story of what is going on in their own minds. An introspection-friendly approach tends to cede people that sort of self-authority; an introspective-skeptical approach denies that self-authority. Again, there are big-picture worldview questions at stake, which both inform one's sense of how to interpret the psychological evidence and are in turn either supported or undercut by some of that same evidence.

Although Peels' essay focuses on the empirical details of a few cases, this larger context both informs and motivates all work on the epistemology of introspection. Are we basically right about ourselves, and is philosophy of mind safe from radical scientific critique? Or is self-knowledge fragile and the armchair a tempting cozy spot to doze away into ignorance?

New Essay in Draft: Is the United States Phenomenally Conscious? Reply to Kammerer

Francois Kammerer has a forthcoming piece in Philosophia responding to my 2015 paper, "If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Phenomenally Conscious". I've drafted a reply to Kammerer.

Abstract:
In Schwitzgebel (2015) I argued that the United States, considered as a concrete entity with people as some or all of its parts, meets all plausible materialistic criteria for consciousness. Kammerer (forthcoming) defends materialism against this seemingly unintuitive conclusion by means of an "anti-nesting principle" according to which group entities cannot be literally phenomenally conscious if they contain phenomenally conscious subparts (such as people) who stand in a certain type of functional relation to the group as a whole. I raise three concerns about Kammerer's view. First, it does not appear to exclude the literal phenomenal consciousness of actually existing groups of people, as one might hope such a principle would do. Second, Kammerer's principle appears to make the literal phenomenal consciousness of a group depend in an unintuitive way on the motivations of individuals within the group. Third, the principle appears to be ad hoc.

Many thanks for reader comments on this earlier post, and especially to Francois Kammerer. Further thoughts, concerns, and comments welcome, either in the comments field below or by email to me.

Publications By Black Authors in Leiter Top 15 Journals 2003-2012

Guest post by Liam Kofi Bright

In 2014 Tina Fernandes Botts, Liam Kofi Bright, Myisha Cherry, Guntur Mallarangeng, and Quayshawn Spencer published the paper “What is the state of blacks in philosophy?” This paper produced a count of the number of “US BIPs”. This term was defined as follows: “a black person with a Ph.D. in philosophy from a U.S. philosophy program, a Ph.D. student in a U.S. philosophy program, or a non-retired employee of a U.S. philosophy program who is employed in an academic capacity (e.g., postdoc, adjunct professor, tenure track professor, etc.)” In that paper we concluded that as of May 2013 there were 141 US BIPs, and arguments were given (236) for taking this to be an accurate count. Note that this figure led the authors of What is the state of blacks in Philosophy? to estimate that 1.32 percent of the philosophy profession in the US are BIPs. This coheres well with the finding in a previous post on this blog that “[t]he percentage of non-Hispanic Black or African American U.S. PhD recipients [has been] hovering around 1.4% to 2.2%” since the 1970s.

A previous post on this blog examined the rate at which women were publishing in leading philosophy journals. In that work gender was coded by first name and familiarity; since it is even more difficult to code race by means of first name than it is for gender, extending this mode of analysis to the examination of racial publication patterns in philosophy would not be possible. However, as a consequence of the aforementioned work, the authors of What is the state of blacks in philosophy? have a database of US BIPs which there is some reason to trust. One of the authors of What is the state of blacks in philosophy? (also the author of this post), Liam Kofi Bright, has therefore produced a study of the publication patterns of US BIPs in leading philosophy journals.

Method

The publication records of 15 journals were used for this study: Philosophical Review, Journal of Philosophy, Nous, Mind, Philosophy and Phenomenological Review, Ethics, Philosophical Studies, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophers' Imprint, Analysis, Philosopher's Quarterly, Philosophy & Public Affairs, Philosophy of Science, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, and Synthese. These journals were chosen since they were the top 15 of a journal survey ran on Leiter Reports in 2013. Noisy a signal though it may be, the results of this survey give some indication as to what were then perceived to be high prestige journals in philosophy. Publication records were sought for the years 2003-2012, that is to say the decade leading up to the point at which the US BIP database was compiled.

For each person on the database of US BIPs I ran a search on Excel to see if their last name appeared in the author list of the journal in question. Even granting the approximate completeness of the 2012 US BIP database, three obvious weaknesses of this search method ought to be acknowledged. First, if a US BIP was active in the years up to 2012 but had dropped out of the labour force sometime before 2013, they would likely not appear in the US BIP database and so would be missed by this search method. Second, if authors have changed their last name (say, due to marriage or divorce) in the time between publishing during 2003-2012 and the compilation of the 2013 database, their old publications under their previous name would likely be missed by this search method. In one case where I was aware that this may be an issue special effort was made to search alternate names. However, I cannot rule out the possibility that this occurred in other cases I was not aware of. Third, it is possible that there are non US BIPs publishing in these journals during this time period – these people would not be apparent given this search method.

To partially address the third problem, an attempt was made to estimate the proportion of US philosophers in the total population of authors. I did this taking a random sample of 200 authors from the total population of authors for all 15 journals in the time period under study. I google searched each of these authors to see if they either got their PhDs from a US philosophy department, or were employed by a US philosophy department during the period under study when their article was published. This brings the definition of US philosopher used here into line with the definition of US BIP. For the most part I was easily able to identify whether or not they met this definition of a US philosopher, and where I had difficulty (because there was no easy way of ascertaining their PhD granting school or employment history) I leaned towards not counting the person as a US philosopher. (I was uncertain in 23 of the 200 cases.) This method thus likely undercounts US philosophers.

From applying this procedure I took 123/200, or 61.5%, as the proportion of US philosophers. Thus, if US BIPs are publishing in these journals at about the same rate as are US philosophers as a whole, they should have published approximately 1% of the total articles.

Results

There are not many publications by US BIPs journals during this period. In total there were 30 publications by US BIPs for all journals during this period. By contrast, there were 10659 publications overall during this period. This means that publications by US BIPs were 0.28% of the publications during this period. Of the 30 publications, 15 were research articles as opposed to book reviews. There were 7638 research articles overall in this period, meaning that research articles by US BIPs were 0.19% of the research articles published. Assuming that 61.5% of the population were US philosophers, this would make black philosophers 0.46% of the US philosopher authors. Likewise US BIPs would be 0.32% of US authors of research publications.

In line with the findings of What is the State of Blacks in Philosophy? I found that the publications of US BIPs were clustered around certain topic matters. In the 2014 article we found that the top 5 most common AOS among US BIPs were (1) Africana, (2) Race, (3) Social and Political, (4) Ethics, and (5) Continental philosophy. I hand coded the topic matters of the 15 research articles on the basis of their titles and abstracts. Almost two thirds (9 of them) concerned at least one of: philosophy of race, political philosophy, or ethics. One journal, Ethics, accounts for almost half of the US BIP publications (13 of them). Note that in the 2014 article we coded people’s AOS by self-identification on their CV or webpage rather than looking at their publications, so this is not circular. None the less, any bias towards certain AOS’ that was involved in producing the initial database of US BIPs may have been reproduced in this count.

Not many US BIPs published research articles in this period. The 15 journal articles were produced by 11 US black philosophers, 9 of whom were men and 2 of whom were women. For some perspective, Timothy Williamson published 15 research articles in the journals under study during this time period.

Conclusion

Unless there has been a sea change in the years since 2012, US BIPs are not publishing much in journals which are considered high prestige in philosophy. Given the limitations of the method of analysis and the sort of data available, no firm conclusions about the causes of the low publication rate of US BIPs in these journals may presently be reached.

Percentages of U.S. Doctorates in Philosophy Given to Women and to Minorities, 1973-2014

The Survey of Earned Doctorates is a questionnaire distributed by the U.S. National Science Foundation to doctorate recipients at all accredited U.S. universities, which draws response rates over 90% in most years. The survey includes data on gender and ethnicity/race. Data for 2009-2014 are readily available online here. At my request, the NSF sent me gender and ethnicity/race data for philosophy going back to 1973.

With the NSF's permission, here are the raw data. Philosophy response rates averaged 92% per year, and were over 85% in all years but two.

(Note: "Ethics" started being collected as a separate doctoral subfield in 2012. For gender analysis, I have merged the 83 recipients in that category with the 1442 "philosophy" doctoral recipients during the same period. Given the small numbers, much of the race/ethnicity data were suppressed, so for race/ethnicity analysis I have excluded the "ethics" recipients. The numbers are not sufficiently different from "philosophy" to make a material analytic difference in a pool of over a thousand (54/83 [65%] male; among U.S. citizens and permanent residents, 52/68 [76%] non-Hispanic White).)

Data on Women:

Almost all respondents reported gender as male or female, with only 25/14495 respondents (0.2%) declining to self-classify gender. The total number of respondents increased from an average of 354/year in available data from the 1970s to an average of 484/year for available data in the 2010s. The chart below shows the percentage of women by year, along with both a linear regression line (green) and the best fitting quadratic curve (red).

I tried a quadratic fit to test the hypothesis that the rate at which women are entering philosophy has flattened out in the 21st century, after an increase in the 20th (see for example, these data on publication rates in elite journals and this observation by Linda Alcoff).

The quadratic curve does indeed fit much better than the linear, with a difference of 11.0 in the AICc scores (which penalize models with more parameters): The AICc relative likelihood of the quadratic vs. the linear is .996 to .004. In other words, the visually apparent flattening is highly unlikely to be chance variation in a linear trend. (I use the quadratic only to test for flattening, not to extrapolate beyond the measurement years.)

Another way to see the flattening is to aggregate by decade. In the 1970s, 17% of the SED philosophy respondents were women. In the 1980s it was 22%. In the 1990s it was 27%. In the 2000s it was also 27%. So far in the 2010s it has been 28%.

Conclusion: Since the 1990s, the percentage of women receiving Ph.D.'s in philosophy in the United States has been virtually unchanged at about 27-28%.

Data on Ethnicity and Race:

For the analysis of ethnicity and race, I excluded the "ethics" data, which had too many suppressed cells, and I excluded respondents who did not report being a U.S. citizen or permanent resident, since race and ethnicity data were not available for those respondents. There were three ethnicity categories: "Hispanic or Latino", "Not Hispanic or Latino", and "Ethnicity not reported". Within "Not Hispanic or Latino", data were subdivided into "American Indian or Alaska Native", "Asian or Other Pacific Islander", "Black or African American", "White", "Two or more races", and "Race not reported".

As expected, the large majority of respondents reporting both ethnicity and race were non-Hispanic White. Here are the numbers, with a linear regression. I also tried a quadratic curve, since I'd done it for the gender data, but it lay literally right on top of the linear regression line (with differences < .01%), so the simpler linear model is preferred.

As is evident from the chart, although a large majority of respondents are still non-Hispanic White, the percentage has been decreasing since the 1970s, and (in contrast to the gender data) there is no apparent flattening of the trend.

The numbers in all other categories are small, and are better seen in a decade-by-decade aggregation. These numbers include only U.S. citizens and permanent residents, but I have re-included respondents not reporting ethnicity or race. They are arranged from highest number to lowest.

Ethnicity not reported:

1970s: 201/2294 (8.8%)
1980s: 66/2098 (3.1%)
1990s: 58/2635 (2.2%)
2000s: 77/3069 (2.5%)
2010s: 40/1820 (2.2%)

Hispanic or Latino (any race):

1970s: 21/2294 (0.9%)
1980s: 39/2098 (1.9%)
1990s: 80/2635 (3.0%)
2000s: 112/3069 (3.6%)
2010s: 115/1820 (6.3%)

Asian or Other Pacific Islander:

1970s: 28/2294 (1.2%)
1980s: 35/2098 (1.7%)
1990s: 81/2635 (3.1%)
2000s: 94/3069 (3.1%)
2010s: 58/1820 (3.2%)

Black or African American:

1970s: 31/2294 (1.4%)
1980s: 39/2098 (1.9%)
1990s: 46/2635 (1.7%)
2000s: 66/3069 (2.2%)
2010s: 34/1820 (1.9%)

Two or more races:

1970s: 13/2294 (0.6%)
1980s: 1/2098 (0.0%)
1990s: 8/2635 (0.3%)
2000s: 38/3069 (1.2%)
2010s: 42/1820 (1.3%)

Non-Hispanic race not reported:

1970s: 0/1914 (0.0%)
1980s: 10/2098 (0.5%)
1990s: 17/2635 (0.6%)
2000s: 34/3069 (1.1%)
2010s: 15/1820 (0.8%)

American Indian or Alaska Native:

1970s: 4/2294 (0.2%)
1980s: 4/2098 (0.2%)
1990s: 15/2635 (0.6%)
2000s: 8/3069 (0.3%)
2010s: 1/1820 (0.1%)

Most notable, of course, are the low percentages generally.

Also notable is the increase from 1-2% Hispanic or Latino in the 1970s-1980s to 6.3% in the 2010s. This is still, however, well below the approximately 17% of the U.S. population that is Hispanic. It is also matched by a sharp decline in "Ethnicity not reported", raising the possibility that it is in part a reporting effect.

The percentage of non-Hispanic Black or African American U.S. PhD recipients does not appear to have increased much if at all since the 1970s, hovering around 1.4% to 2.2%, compared to 13% of the U.S. population.

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

HT Carolyn Dicey Jennings for her input. We are collaborating on a paper together on some of these topics. Comments, corrections, and new analyses welcome.