Metaphysical Skepticism a la Kriegel

I'm totally biased. I admit it. But I love this new paper by Uriah Kriegel.

Taking the metaphysical question of the ontology of objects as his test case, Kriegel argues that metaphysical disputes often fail to admit of resolution. They fail to admit of resolution, Kriegel argues, not because such disputes lack substance or are merely terminological, but for the more interestingly skeptical reason that although there may be a fact of the matter which metaphysical position is correct, we have no good means of discovering that fact. I have argued for a similarly skeptical position about the "mind-body problem", that is, the question of the relationship between mind and matter. (Hence my pro-Kriegel bias.) But Kriegel develops his argument in some respects more systematically.

Consider a set of four fundamental particles joined together in a tetrahedron. How many objects are there really? A conservative ontological view might say that really there are just four objects and no more: the four fundamental particles "arranged tetrahedronwise". A liberal ontological view might say that really there are fifteen objects: each of the four particles, plus each of the six possible pairings of the particles, plus each of the four possible triplets, plus the whole tetrahedron. An intermediate ("common sense"?) view might hold that the individual particles are each real objects, and so is the tetrahedron, but not the pairs and triplets, for a total of five objects.

Now who is right? Kriegel envisions three possible approaches to determining where the truth lies: empirical testing, appeal to "intuition", and appeal to theoretical virtues like simplicity and parsimony. However, none of these approaches seems promising.

Contra empirical testing: There is, it seems, no empirical fact on which the conservative and liberal would disagree. It's not like we could bombard the tetrahedron with radiation of some sort and the conservative would predict one thing, the liberal another.

Contra appeal to intuition: "Intuition" is a problematic concept in metaphilosophy. But maybe it means something like common sense or coherence with pre-theoretical opinion. Intuition in this sense might favor the five-object answer (the four particles plus the whole), but that's not entirely clear. However, Kriegel argues, hewing to intuition means doing only what P.F. Strawson calls "descriptive metaphysics" -- metaphysics that aims merely to reveal the structure of reality implicit in people's (possibly misguided) conceptual schemes. If we're aiming to discover real metaphysical truths, and not merely what's already implicit in ordinary opinion, we are doing instead what Kriegel and Strawson call "revisionary metaphysics"; and although descriptive metaphysics is beholden to intuition, revisionary metaphysics is not.

Contra appeal to theoretical virtue: Theoretical virtues like simplicity and parsimony might be pragmatic or aesthetic virtues but, Kriegel argues, there seems to be no reason to regard them as truth-conducive in metaphysics. Is there reason to think that the world is simple, and thus that a simple metaphysical theory is more likely to be true than a complex one? Is there reason to think the world contains few entities, and thus that a parsimonious metaphysical theory that posits fewer entities than its rivals is more likely to be true? Kriegel suggests not.

As I said, I love this paper and I'm sympathetic with its conclusion. But I'm a philosopher, so I can't possibly agree entirely with another philosopher working in the same area. That's just not in our nature! So let me issue two complaints.

First: I'm not sure object ontology is the best test case for Kriegel's view. Maybe there's a real fact of the matter whether there are four, five, or fifteen objects in our tetrahedron, but it's not obviously so. It seems like a good case for reinterpretation as a terminological dispute, if any case is. If Kriegel wants to make a general case for metaphysical skepticism, he might do better to choose a dispute that's less tempting to dismiss as terminological, such as the dispute about whether there are immaterial substances or properties. (In fairness, I happen to know he is working on this now.)

Second: It seems to me that Kriegel commits to more strongly negative opinions about the epistemic value of intuition and theoretical virtue than is necessary or plausible. It sounds, in places, like Kriegel is committing to saying that there's no epistemic value, for metaphysics, in harmony with pre-theoretical intuition or in theoretical virtues like simplicity. These are strong claims! We can admit, more plausibly I think, that intuitiveness, simplicity, explanatory power, etc., have some epistemic value while still holding that the kinds of positions that philosophers regard as real metaphysical contenders tend not to admit of decisive resolution by appeal to such factors. Real metaphysical contenders will conflict with some intuitions and harmonize with others, and they will tend to have different competing sets of theoretical virtues and vices, engendering debates it's difficult to see any hope of resolving with our current tools and capacities.

Consider this: It seems very unlikely that the metaphysical truth is that there are exactly fourteen objects in our tetrahedron, to wit, all of the combinations admitted by the liberal view except for one of the four triplet combinations. Such a view seems arbitrary, asymmetric, unsimple, and intuitively bizarre, compared to the more standard options. If you agree, then you should accept, contra a strong reading of Kriegel's argument, that those sorts of theoretical considerations can take us some distance, epistemically. It's just that they aren't likely to take us all the way.

Oh That Darn Rationality, There It Goes Making Me Greedy Again!

Or something like that?

In a series of studies, David G. Rand and collaborators found that participants in behavioral economics games tended to act more selfishly when they reached decisions more slowly. In one study, participants were paid 40 cents and then given the opportunity to contribute some of that money into a common pool with three other participants. Contributed money would be doubled and then split evenly among the group members. The longer participants took to reach a decision, they less they chose to contribute on average. Other studies were similar, some in physical laboratories, some conducted on the internet, some with half the participants forced into hurried decisions and the other half forced to delay a bit, some using prisoner's dilemma games or altruistic punishment games instead of public goods games. In all cases, participants who chose quickly shared more.

I find the results interesting and suggestive. It's a fun study. (And that's good.) But I'm also struck by how high the authors aim in their introduction and conclusion. They seek to address the question: "are we intuitively self-interested, and is it only through reflection that we reject our selfish impulses and force ourselves to cooperate? Or are we intuitively cooperative, with reflection upon the logic of self-interest causing us to rein in our cooperative urges and instead act selfishly?" (p. 427). Ten experiments later, we have what the authors seem to regard as pretty compelling general evidence in favor of intuition over rationality as the ground of cooperation. The authors' concluding sentence is ambitious: "Exploring the implications of our findings, both for scientific understanding and public policy, is an important direction for future study: although the cold logic of self-interest is seductive, our first impulse is to cooperate" (p. 429).

Now it might seem a minor point, but here's one thing that bothers me about most of these types of behavioral economics games on self-interest and cooperation: It's only cooperation with other participants that is considered to be cooperation. What about a participant's potential concern for the financial welfare of the experimenter? If a participant makes the "cooperative" choice in the common goods game, tossing her money into the pool to be doubled and then split back among the four participants, what she has really done is paid to transfer money from the pockets of the experimenter into the pockets of the other participants. Is it clear that that's really the more cooperative choice? Or is she just taking from Peter to give to Paul? Has Paul done something to be more deserving?

Maybe all that matters is that most people would (presumably) judge it more cooperative for participants to milk all they can from the experimenters in this way, regardless of whether in some sense that is a more objectively cooperative choice? Or maybe it's objectively more cooperative because the experimenters have communicated to participants, through their experimental design, that they are unconcerned about such sums of money? Or maybe participants know or think they know that the experimenters have plenty of funding, and consequently (?) they are advancing social justice when they pay to transfer money from the experimenters to other participants? Or...?

These quibbles feed a larger and perhaps more obvious point. There's a particular psychology of participating in an experiment, and there's a particular psychology of playing a small-stakes economic game with money, explicitly conceptualized as such. And it is a leap -- a huge leap, really -- from such laboratory results, as elegant and well-controlled as they might be, to the messy world outside the laboratory with large stakes, usually non-monetary, and not conceptualized as a game.

Consider an ordinary German sent to Poland and instructed to kill Jewish children in 1942. Or consider someone tempted to cheat on her spouse. Consider me sitting on the couch while my wife does the dishes, or a student tempted to copy another's answers, or someone using a hurtful slur to be funny. It's by no means clear that Rand's study should be thought to cast much light at all on cases such as these.

Is our first impulse cooperative, and does reflection makes us selfish? Or is explicit reflection, as many philosophers have historically thought, the best and most secure path to moral improvement? It's a fascinating question. We should resist, I think, being satisfied too quickly with a simple answer based on laboratory studies, even as a first approximation.

CFP: Consciousness and Experiential Psychology

The Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society will be meeting in Bristol, September 6-8. They have issued a call for submissions "particularly, but not exclusively" on the topics of non-verbal expression, affective or emotional responses, and subjectivity and imagination.

Details here. I will be one of four keynote speakers.

About a week later (September 12-13), also in Bristol, the Experimental Philosophy Group UK is planning to hold their annual workshop. I'll be keynoting there too. For details on that one, contact Bryony Pierce (bryonypierce at domain: btinternet.com, and/or experimentalphilosophyuk at domain: gmail.com) or check their website for updates.

Make it a two-fer!

A Memory from Grad School

Circa 1994: Josh Dever would be sitting on a couch in the philosophy graduate student lounge at U.C. Berkeley. I would propose to him a definition of "dessert" (e.g.: "a sweet food eaten after the main meal is complete"). He would shoot it down (e.g.: "but then it would be a priori that you couldn't eat dessert first!"). Later he would propose a definition to me, which I would shoot down. Over time, the definitions became ever more baroque. Other graduate students participated too.

Eventually Josh decided that he would define a dessert as anything served on a dessert plate. Asked what is a dessert plate is, he would say it was intuitively obvious. Presented with an objection ("So you couldn't eat Oreos right out of the bag for dessert?") he would simply state that he was willing to "bite the bullet" and accept a certain amount of revision of our pre-theoretical opinions.

At the time it seemed like cheating. In retrospect, I think Josh saw right to the core.

Being the World's Foremost Expert on X Takes Time

According to the LA Times, governor Jerry Brown wants to see "more teaching and less research" in the University of California.

I could see the state of California making that choice. Maybe we U.C. professors teach too few undergraduate courses for our state's needs. (I teach on average one undergraduate course per term. I also advise students individually, supervise dissertations, and teach graduate seminars.) But here's a thought. If it is valuable to have some public universities in which the undergraduate teaching and graduate supervision is done by the foremost experts in the world on the topics in question, then you have to allow professors considerable research time to attain and sustain that world-beating expertise. Being among the world's foremost experts on childhood leukemia, or on the neuroscience of visual illusion, or on the history of early modern political philosophy, is not something one can squeeze in on the side, with a few hours a week.

In my experience, it takes about 15 hours a week to run an undergraduate course (longer if it's your first time teaching the course): three hours of lecture, plus lecture prep time, plus office hours, plus reviewing the assigned readings and freshening up on relevant connected literature, plus grading and test design, plus email exchanges with students and course management. And let's suppose that a typical professor works about 50 hours a week. If Professor X at University of California teaches two undergraduate lecture courses per term, that leaves 20 hours a week for research and everything else (including graduate student instruction and administrative tasks like writing recommendation letters, serving on hiring committees, applying for grants, refereeing for journals, keeping one's equipment up to date...). If Professor Y at University of Somewhere Else teaches one undergraduate lecture course per term, that leaves 35 hours a week for research and everything else. How is Professor X going to keep up with Professor Y? Over time, if teaching load is substantially increased, the top experts will disproportionately be at the University of Somewhere Else, not the University of California.

Of course some people manage brilliantly productive research careers alongside heavy undergraduate teaching loads. I mean them no disrespect. On the contrary, I find them amazing! My point above concerns only what we should expect on average.

Blind Photographers

Yes, that's right. Some of the world's leading blind photographers! Here at UCR. What is it like to point your camera, print, and present it, all without seeing? What is your method of selection? What is your relation to your art?

 

photo by Ralph Baker, from http://www.cmp.ucr.edu/exhibitions/sightunseen/

The Moral Behavior of Ethicists and the Rationalist Delusion

A new essay with Joshua Rust.

In the first part, we summarize our empirical research on the moral behavior of ethics professors.

In the second part, we consider five possible explanations of our finding that ethics professors behave, on average, no better than do other professors.

Explanation 1: Philosophical moral reflection has no material impact on real-world moral behavior. Jonathan Haidt has called the view that explicit moral reflection does have a substantial effect on one's behavior "the rationalist delusion".

Explanation 2: Philosophical moral reflection influences real world moral behavior, but only in very limited domains of professional focus. Those domains are sufficiently narrow and limited that existing behavioral measures can't unequivocally detect them. Also, possibly, any improvement in such narrow domains might be cancelled out, in terms of overall moral behavior, by psychological factors like moral licensing or ego depletion.

Explanation 3: Philosophical moral reflection might lead one to behave more morally permissibly but no morally better. The idea here is that philosophical moral reflection might lead one to avoid morally impermissible behavior while also reducing the likelihood of doing any more than is strictly morally required. Contrast the sometimes-sinner sometimes-saint with the person who never goes beyond the call of duty but also never does anything really wrong.

Explanation 4: Philosophical moral reflection might compensate for deficient moral intuitions. Maybe, from early childhood or adolescence, some people tend to lack strongly motivating moral emotions. And maybe some of those people are also drawn to intellectual styles of moral reflection. Without that moral reflection, they would behave morally worse than the average person, but moral reflection helps them behave better than they otherwise would. If enough ethicists are like this, then philosophical moral reflection might have an important positive effect on the moral behavior of those who engage in it, but looking at ethicists as a group, that effect might be masked if it's compensating for lower rates of moral behavior arising from emotional gut intuitions.

Explanation 5: Philosophical moral reflection might have powerful effects on moral behavior, but in both moral and countermoral directions, approximately cancelling out on average. It might have positive effects, for example, if it leads us to discover moral truths on which we then act. But perhaps equally often it becomes toxic rationalization, licensing morally bad behavior that we would otherwise have avoided.

Josh and I decline to choose among these possibilties. There might be some truth in all or most of them. And there are still other possibilities, too. Ethicists might in fact engage in moral reflection relevant to their personal lives no more often than do other professors. Ethicists might find themselves increasingly disillusioned about the value of morality at the same time they improve their knowledge of what morality in fact requires. Ethicists might learn to shield their personal behavior from the influence of their professional reflections, as a kind of self-defense against the apparent unfairness of being held to higher standards because of their choice of profession....

Full essay here. As always thoughts and comments welcome, either by email or attached to this post.

Fame Through Friend-Citation

Alert readers might raise the following objection to my recent post, Fame Through Self-Citation: By the 500th article of our Distinguished Philosopher's career, his reference list will include 499 self-citations. Journal editors might find that somewhat problematic.

If this concern occurred to you, you are just the sort of perceptive and prophetic scholar who is ready for my Advanced Course in Academic Fame! The advanced course requires that you have five Friends. Each Friend agrees to publish five articles per year, in venues of any quality, and each published article will self-cite five times and cite five articles of each other Friend. (In Year One, each Friend will cite the entire Friendly corpus.)

Assuming that the six Friends' publications can be treated serially, ABCDEFABCDEF..., by the end of Year One, Friend A will have 29 + 23 + 17 + 11 + 5 = 85 citations, Friend B will have 80 citations, Friend C 75, Friend D 70, and Friend E 65, and Friend F 60. Friend A will have an h-index of 5 and the others will have indices of 4. By the end of Year Six, the Friends will have 4,935 Friendly citations to distribute among themselves, or 822.5 citations each. If they aim to maximize their h-index, each can arrange to have an h-index of at least 25 by then. (That is, each can have 25 articles that are each cited at least 25 times.) This would give them an h-index exceeding that of the 20 or so characteristic of leading youngish philosophers like Jason Stanley and Keith DeRose. (See Brian Leiter's discussion here.)

By the end Year 20, the Friends will have 100 articles each and 17,535 citations to distribute among those articles. Wisely-enough distributed, this will permit them to achieve h-indices in excess of 50, higher than the indices of such leading philosophers as Ned Block , David Chalmers, and Timothy Williamson. By the end of their 50-year careers, they will have 7,422.5 Friendly citations each, permitting h-indices in the mid-80s, substantially in excess of the h-index of any living philosopher I am aware of.

But this underestimates the possibilities! These Friends will be asked to referee work for the same journals in which they are publishing. They wouldn't be so tacky as to use the sacred trust of their refereeing positions to insist that other authors cite their own work -- but of course they can recommend the important work of their Friends! If each Friend accepts one refereeing assignment per month and successfully recommends publication for half of the articles they referee, contingent upon the authors' citing one article from each of the other five Friends, that will add 180 more citations per year to the pool. Other scholars, seeing the range of authors citing each of the Friends' work, will naturally regard each Friend as a leading contributor to the field, whom they must also therefore cite, creating a snowball effect. Can h-indices of 100 be far away?

(Any resemblance of this strategy to the behavior of actual academics is purely coincidental.)

Fame Through Self-Citation

Let's say you're not picky about quality or venue. It shouldn't be too hard get five publications a year. And let's say that every one of your publications cites every one of your previously published or forthcoming works. In Year One, you will have 0 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10 citations. By Year Two, you will have 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 = 35 more citations, for 45 total. Year Three gives you 60 more citations, for 105 total. Year Four, 85 for 190; Year Five, 110 for 300; Year Six, 135 for 435. You're more than ready for tenure!

In one of his blog posts about Google Scholar, Brian Leiter suggests that an "h-index" of about 20 is characteristic of "leading younger scholars" like Keith DeRose and Jason Stanley. You will have that h-index by the end of your eighth year out -- considerably faster than either DeRose or Stanley! In your 18th year, your h-index will match that of David Chalmers (currently in his 19th year out). By the end of the 50th year of your long and industrious career, you will have 250 publications, 31,125 total citations, and an h-index of 125, vastly exceeding that of any living philosopher I am aware of (e.g., Dan Dennett), and approaching that of Michel Foucault.

Self-citation: the secret of success!

Update, Jan. 12: See also my Advanced Course in Academic Fame: Fame Through Friend-Citation.

The Emotional Psychology of Lynching

Today, for my big lower-division class on Evil (enrollment 300), I'm teaching about Southern U.S. racial lynching in the early 20th century. My treatment centers on lynching photography, especially photos that include perpetrators and bystanders, which were often proudly circulated as postcards.

Here's one photo, from James Allen et al. (2000) Without Sanctuary:

Here are a couple spectator details from the above photo:

Looking at the first spectator detail, I'm struck by the thought that this guy probably thought that the lynching festivities made for an entertaining date with the girls.

Here's the accompanying text from Allen et al.:

The following account is drawn from James Cameron's book, A Time of Terror: Thousands of Indianans carrying picks, bats, ax handles, crowbars, torches, and firearms attacked the Grant County Courthouse, determined to "get those goddamn Niggers." A barrage of rocks shattered the jailhouse windows, sending dozens of frantic inmates in search of cover. A sixteen-year-old boy, James Cameron, one of the three intended victims, paralyzed by fear and incomprehension, recognized familiar faces in the crowd -- schoolmates, and customers whose lawns he had mowed and whose shoes he had polished -- as they tried to break down the jailhouse door with sledgehammers. Many police officers milled outside with the crowd, joking. Inside, fifty guards with guns waited downstairs.

The door was ripped from the wall, and a mob of fifty men beat Thomas Shipp senseless and dragged him into the street. The waiting crowd "came to life." It seemed to Cameron that "all of those ten to fifteen thousand people were trying to hit him all at once." The dead Shipp was dragged with a rope up to the window bars of the second victim, Abram Smith. For twenty minutes, citizens pushed and shoved for a closer look at the "dead nigger." By the time Abe Smith was hauled out he was equally mutilated. "Those who were not close enough to hit him threw rocks and bricks. Somebody rammed a crowbar through his chest several times in great satisfaction." Smith was dead by the time the mob dragged him "like a horse" to the courthouse square and hung him from a tree. The lynchers posed for photos under the limb that held the bodies of the two dead men.

Then the mob headed back from James Cameron and "mauled him all the way to the courthouse square," shoving and kicking him to the tree, where the lynchers put a hanging rope around his neck.

Cameron credited an unidentified woman's voice with silencing the mob (Cameron, a devout Roman Catholic, believes that it was the voice of the Virgin Mary) and opening a path for his retreat to the county jail....

The girls are holding cloth souvenirs from the corpses. The studio photographer who made this postcard printed thousands of copies over the next ten days, selling for fifty cents apiece.

According to Cameron's later account, Shipp and Smith were probably guilty of murdering a white man and raping a white woman. He insists that he himself had fled the scene before either of those crimes occurred. According to historical records, in only about one-third of racial lynching cases were the victims even accused of a grievous crime such as rape or murder. In about one-third of cases, they were accused of non-grievous crime, such as theft. In about one-third of cases, the victims were accused of no real crime at all, only of being "uppity", or of having consensual sexual relations with a white woman, or the victim was a friend or family member of another lynching victim.

On Trusting Your Sense of Fun

Maybe, like me, you're a philosophy dork. Maybe, like me, when you were thirteen, you said to your friends, "Is there really a world behind that closed door? Or does the outside world only pop into existence when I open the door?", and they said, "Dude, you're weird! Let's go play basketball." Maybe, like me, when you were in high school you read science fiction and wondered whether an entirely alien moral code might be as legitimate as our own, and this prevented you from taking your World History teacher entirely seriously.

If you are a deep-down philosophy dork, then you might have a certain underappreciated asset: a philosophically-tuned sense of what's fun. You should trust that sense of fun.

It's fun -- at least I find it fun -- to think about whether there's some way to prove that the external world exists. It's fun to see whether ethics books are any less likely to be stolen than other philosophy books. (They're actually more likely to be stolen, it turns out.) It's fun to think about why people used to say they dreamed in black and white, to think about how weirdly self-ignorant people often are, to think about what sorts of bizarre aliens might be conscious, to think about whether babies know that things continue exist outside of their perceptual fields. At every turn in my career, I have faced choices about whether to pursue what seems to me to be boring, respectable, philosophically mainstream, and at first glance the better career choice, or whether instead to follow my sense of fun. Rarely have I regretted it in the long term when I have chosen fun.

I see three main reasons a philosophy dork should trust her sense of fun:

(1.) If you truly are a philosophy dork in the sense I intend the phrase -- and I assume most readers of this blog are (consider: this is how you're spending your free time?!) -- then your sense of what's fun will tend to manifest some sort of attunement to what really is philosophically worth pursuing. You might not be able quite to put your finger on why it's worth pursuing, at first. It might even just seem a pointless intellectual lark. But my experience is that the deeper significance will eventually reveal itself. Maybe it's just that everything can be explored philosophically and brought around back to main themes, if one plunges deep enough. But I'm inclined to think it's not just that. The true dork's mind has a horse-sense of where it needs to go next.

(2.) It energizes you. Few things are more dispiriting than doing something tedious because "it's good for your career". You'll find yourself wondering whether this is really the career for you, whether you're really cut out for philosophy. You'll find yourself procrastinating, checking Facebook, spacing out while reading, prioritizing other responsibilities. In contrast, if you chase the fun first, you will find yourself positively eager, at a visceral level, to do your research. And this eagerness can then be harnessed back into a sense of responsibility. Finding your weird passion first, and figuring out what you want to say about it, can energize you to go back later and read what others have said about your topic, so you can fill in the references, connect it with previous research, sophisticate your view in light of others' work. It's much more rewarding to read the great philosophers, and one's older contemporaries, when you have a lens to read them through than when you're slogging through them from a vague sense of duty.

(3.) Fun is contagious. So is boredom. Readers are unlikely to enjoy your work and be enthusiastic about your ideas, if even you don't have that joy and enthusiasm.

These remarks probably generalize across disciplines. I think of Richard Feynman's description of how he recovered from his early-career doldrums (see the last fifth of this autobiographical essay).

Essays of 2012

2012 was a good research year for me.

These essays appeared in print in 2012:

• Introspection, what?  In Smithies & Stoljar, eds., Introspection and Consciousness (Oxford).
• Self-ignorance.  In Liu & Perry, eds., Consciousness and the Self (Cambridge).
• Ethicists' courtesy at philosophy conferences (with Rust, Huang, Moore, & Coates), Philosophical Psychology, 25, 331-340.
• Expertise in moral reasoning? Order effects on moral judgment in professional philosophers and non-philosophers (with Cushman), Mind & Language, 27, 135-153.
• Mad belief?  Neuroethics, 5, 13-17.

These essays are finished and forthcoming:

• A dispositional approach to attitudes: Thinking outside the belief box.  In Nottelmann, ed., New essays on belief (Palgrave).
• Knowing that P without believing that P (with Myers-Schulz).  Nous.
• The moral behavior of ethics professors: Relationships among self-reported behavior, expressed normative attitude, and directly observed behavior (with Rust).  Philosophical Psychology.
• Ethicists and non-ethicists' responsiveness to student emails: Relationships among expressed normative attitude, self-described behavior, and experimentally observed behavior (with Rust).  Metaphilosophy.

These essays are currently drafted and circulating:

• The crazyist metaphysics of mind.
• If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious.
• Are ethicists any more likely to pay their registration fees at professional meetings?
• Empirical evidence for the existence of an external world (with Moore).
• The problem of known illusion and the resemblance of experience to reality.

Some favorite blog posts:

• Group minds on Ringworld.
• Do you have infinitely many beliefs about the number of planets?
• Has civilization made moral progress? Sketch of an empirical test.
• The ghettoization of Nietzsche.
• Grounds for dream skepticism.
• Steven Pinker: "Wow, how awesome we liberal intellectuals are!"
• The egg came first.

May 2013 be equally fruitful!

New Essay: Experimental Evidence of the Existence of an External World

Here's exactly the pagan solstice celebration gift you were yearning for: a proof that the external world exists!

(Caveat emptor: The arguments only work if you lack a god-like intellect. See footnote 15.)

Abstract:

In this essay I attempt to refute radical solipsism by means of a series of empirical experiments. In the first experiment, I prove to be a poor judge of four-digit prime numbers, in contrast to a seeming Excel program. In the second experiment, I prove to have an imperfect memory for arbitrary-seeming three-digit number and letter combinations, in contrast to my seeming collaborator with seemingly hidden notes. In the third experiment, I seem to suffer repeated defeats at chess. In all three experiments, the most straightforward interpretation of the experiential evidence is that something exists in the universe that is superior in the relevant respects – theoretical reasoning (about primes), memorial retention (for digits and letters), or practical reasoning (at chess) – to my own solipsistically-conceived self.

This essay is collaborative with Alan T. Moore.

Available here.

Animal Rights Advocate Eats Cheeseburger, So... What?

Suppose it turns out that professional ethicists' lived behavior is entirely uncorrelated with their philosophical theorizing. Suppose, for example, that ethicists who assert that lying is never permissible (a la Kant) are neither more nor less likely to lie, in any particular situation, than is anyone else of similar social background. Suppose that ethicists who defend Singer's strong views about charity in fact give no more to charity than their peers who don't defend such views. Suppose this, just hypothetically.

For concreteness, let's imagine an ethicist who gives a lecture defending strict vegetarianism, then immediately retires to the university cafeteria for a bacon double cheeseburger. Seeing this, a student charges the ethicist with hypocrisy. The ethicist replies: "Wait. I made no claims in class about my own behavior. All I said was that eating meat was morally wrong. And in fact, I do think that. I gave sound arguments in defense of that conclusion, which you should also accept. The fact that I am here eating a delicious bacon double cheeseburger in no way vitiates the force of those arguments."

Student: "But you can't really believe those arguments! After all, here you are shamelessly doing what you just told us was morally wrong."

Ethicist: "What I personally believe is beside the point, as long as the arguments are sound. But in any case, I do believe that what I am doing is morally wrong. I don't claim to be a saint. My job is only to discover moral truths and inform the world about them. You're going to have to pay me extra if you want to add actually living morally well to my job description."

My question is this: What, if anything, is wrong with the ethicist's attitude toward philosophical ethics?

Maybe nothing. Maybe academic ethics is only a theoretical enterprise, dedicated to the discovery of moral truths, if there are any, and the dissemination of those discoveries to the world. But I'm inclined to think otherwise. I'm inclined to think that philosophical reflection on morality has gone wrong in some important way if it has no impact on your behavior, that part of the project is to figure out what you yourself should do. And if you engage in that project authentically, your behavior should shift accordingly -- maybe not perfectly but at least to some extent. Ethics necessarily is, or should be, first-personal.

If a chemist determines in the lab that X and Y are explosive, one doesn't expect her to set aside this knowledge, failing to conclude that an explosion is likely, when she finds X and Y in her house. If a psychologist discovers that method Z is a good way to calm an autistic teenager, we don't expect him to set aside that knowledge when faced with a real autistic teenager, failing to conclude that method Z might calm the person. So are all academic disciplines, in a way, first-personal?

No, not in the sense I intend the term. The chemist and psychologist cases are different from the ethicist case as I have imagined it. The ethicist is not setting aside her opinion that eating meat is wrong as she eats that cheeseburger. She does in fact conclude that eating the cheeseburger is wrong. However, she is unmoved by that conclusion. And to be unmoved by that conclusion is to fail in the first-personal task of ethics. A chemist who deliberately causes explosions at home might not be failing in any way as a chemist. But an ethicist who flouts her own vision of the moral law is, I would suggest, in some way, though perhaps not entirely, a failure as an ethicist.

An entirely zero correlation between moral opinion and moral behavior among professional ethicists is empirically unlikely, I'm inclined to think. However, Joshua Rust's and my empirical evidence to date does suggest that the correlations might be pretty weak. One question is whether they are weak enough to indicate a problem in the enterprise as it is actually practiced in the 21st-century United States.

Intuitions, Philosophy, and Experiment

Herman Cappelen has provocatively argued that philosophers don't generally rely upon intuition in their work and thus that work in experimental philosophy that aims to test people's intuitions about philosophical cases is really beside the point. I have a simple argument against this view.

First: I define "intuition" very broadly. A judgment is "intuitive", in my view, just in case it arises by some cognitive process other than explicit, conscious reasoning. By this definition, snap judgments about the grammaticality of sentences, snap judgments about the distance of objects, snap judgments about the moral wrongness of an action in a hypothetical scenario, and snap folk-psychological judgments are generally going to be intuitive. Intuitive judgments don't have to be snap judgments -- they don't have to be fast -- but the absence of explicit conscious reasoning is clearest when the judgment is quick.

This definition of "intuition" is similar to one Alison Gopnik and I worked with in a 1998 article, and it is much more inclusive than Cappelen's own characterizations. Thus, it's quite possible that intuitions in Cappelen's narrow sense are inessential to philosophy while intuitions in my broader sense are essential. But I don't think that Cappelen and I have merely a terminological dispute. There's a politics of definition. One's terminological choices highlight and marginalize different facets of the world.

My characterization of intuition is also broader than most other philosophers' -- Joel Pust in his Stanford Encyclopedia article on intuition, for example, seems to regard it as straightforward that perceptual judgments should not be called "intuitions" -- but I don't think my preferred definition is entirely quirky. In fact, in a recent study, J.R. Kuntz and J.R.C Kuntz found that professional philosophers were more likely to "agree to a very large extent" with Gopnik's and my definition of intuition than with any of six other definitions proposed by other authors (32% giving it the top rating on a seven-point scale). I think professional psychologists and linguists might also sometimes use "intuition" in something like Alison's and my sense.

If we accept this broad definition of intuition, then it seems hard to deny that, contra Cappelen, philosophy depends essentially on intuition -- as does all cognition. One can't explicitly consciously reason one's way to every one of one's premises, on pain of regress. One must start somewhere, even if only tentatively and subject to later revision.

Cappelen has, in conversation, accepted this consequence of my broad definition of "intuition". The question then becomes what to make of the epistemology of intuition in this sense. And this epistemological question is, I think, largely an empirical one, with several disciplines empirically relevant, including cognitive psychology, experimental philosophy, and study of the historical record. Based on the empirical evidence, what might we expect to be the strengths and weaknesses of explicit reasoning? And, alternatively, what might we expect to be the strengths and weaknesses of intuitive judgment?

Those empirical questions become especially acute when the two paths to judgment appear to deliver conflicting results. When your ordinary-language spontaneous judgments about the applicability of a term to a scenario (or at least your inclinations to judge) conflict with what you would derive from your explicit theory, or when your spontaneous moral judgments (or inclinations) do, what should you conclude? The issue is crucial to philosophy as we all live and perform it, and the answer one gives ought to be informed, if possible, by empirically discoverable facts about the origins and reliability of different types of judgments or inclinations. (This isn't to say that a uniform answer is likely to win the day: Things might vary from time to time, person to person, topic to topic, and depending on specific features of the case.)

It would be strange to suppose that the psychology of philosophy is irrelevant to its epistemology. And yet Cappelen's dismissal of the enterprise of experimental philosophy on grounds of the irrelevance of "intuitions" to philosophy would seem to invite us toward that exactly that dubious supposition.

Second- vs. Third-Person Presentations of Moral Dilemmas

Is it better for you to kill an innocent person to save others than it is for someone else to do so? And does the answer you're apt to give depend on whether you are a professional philosopher? Kevin Tobia, Wesley Buckwalter, and Stephen Stich have a forthcoming paper in which they report results that seem to suggest that philosophers think very differently about such matters than do non-philosophers. However, I'm worried that Tobia and collaborators' results might not be very robust.

Tobia, Buckwalter, and Stich report results from two scenarios. One is a version of Bernard Williams' hostage scenario, in which the protagonist is captured and given the chance to personally kill one person among a crowd of innocent villagers so that the other villagers may go free. If the protagonist refuses, all the villagers will be killed. Forty undergrads and 62 professional philosophers were given the scenario. For half of the respondents the protagonist was "you"; for the other half it was "Jim". Undergrads were much more likely to say that shooting the villager was morally obligatory if "Jim" was the protagonist (53%) than if "you" was the protagonist (19%). Professional philosophers, however, went the opposite direction: 9% if "Jim", 36% if "you". Their second case is the famous trolley problem, in which the protagonist can save five people by flipping a switch to shunt a runaway trolley to a sidetrack where it will kill one person instead. Undergrads were more likely to say that shunting the trolley is permissible in the third-person case than in the second-person "you" case, and philosophers again showed the opposite pattern.

Weird! Are we to conclude that undergrads would rather let other people get their hands dirty for the greater good, while philosophers would rather get their hands dirty themselves? Or...?

When I first read about these studies in draft, though, one thing struck me as odd. Fiery Cushman and I had piloted similar-seeming studies previously, and we hadn't found much difference at all between second- and third-person presentations.

In one pilot study (the pilot for Schwitzgebel and Cushman 2012), we had given participants the following scenario:

Nancy is part of a group of ecologists who live in a remote stretch of jungle.  The entire group, which includes eight children, has been taken hostage by a group of paramilitary terrorists.  One of the terrorists takes a liking to Nancy.  He informs her that his leader intends to kill her and the rest of the hostages the following morning.  He is willing to help Nancy and the children escape, but as an act of good faith he wants Nancy to kill one of her fellow hostages whom he does not like.  If Nancy refuses his offer all the hostages including the children and Nancy herself will die.  If she accepts his offer then the others will die in the morning but she and the eight children will escape.

The second-person version substituted "you" for "Nancy".  Responses were on a seven-point scale from "extremely morally good" (1) to "extremely morally bad" (7). We had three groups of respondents, philosophers (reporting Master's or PhD in philosophy), non-philosopher academics (reporting graduate degree other than in philosophy), and non-academics (reporting no graduate degree). The mean responses for the non-academics were 4.3 for both cases (with thousands of respondents), for academic non-philosophers 4.6 for "you" vs. 4.5 for "Nancy" (not a statistically significant difference, even with several hundred respondents in each group). And the mean responses for philosophers were 3.9 for "you" vs. 4.2 for "Nancy" (not statistically significant, with about 200 in each group). Similarly, we found no differences in several runaway trolley cases, moral luck cases, and action-omission cases. Or, to speak more accurately, we found a few weak results that may or may not qualify as statistically significant, depending on one how one approaches the statistical issue of multiple comparisons, but nothing strong or consistent. Certainly nothing that pops out with a large effect size like the one Tobia, Buckwalter, and Stich found.

I'm not sure how to account for these different results. One difference is that Fiery and I used internet respondents rather than pencil-and-paper respondents. Also, we solicited responses on a 1-7 scale rather than asking yes or no. And the scenarios differed in wording and detail -- including the important difference that in our version of the hostage scenario the protagonist herself would be killed. But still, it's not obvious why should our results be so flat when Tobia, Buckwalter, and Stich find such large effects.

Because Fiery and I were disappointed by seeming ineffectuality of switching between "you" and a third-party protagonist, in our later published study we decided to try varying, in a few select scenarios, the victim rather than the protagonist.  In other words, what do you think about Nancy's choice when Nancy is to shoot "you" rather than "one the fellow hostages"?

Here we did see a difference, though since it wasn't relevant to the main hypothesis discussed in the final version of the study we didn't detail that aspect of our results in the published essay. Philosophers seemed to treat the scenarios about the same when the victim was "you" as when the victim was described in the third person; but non-philosophers expressed more favorable attitudes toward the protagonist when the protagonist sacrificed "you" for the greater good.  In the hostage scenario, non-academics rated it 3.6 in the "you" condition vs. 4.1 in the other condition (p < .001) (remember, lower numbers are morally better on our scale); non-philosopher academics split 4.1 "you" vs. 4.5 third-person (p = .001); and philosophers split 3.9 vs. 4.0 (p = .60, N = 320). (Multiple regression shows the expected interaction effects here, implying that non-philosophers were statistically more influenced by the manipulation than were philosophers.) There was a similar pattern of results in another scenario involving shooting one person to save others on a sinking submarine, with philosophers showing no detectable difference but non-philosophers rating shooting the one person more favorably when the victim is "you" than when the victim is described in third-person language. However, we did not see the same pattern in some action-omission cases we tried.

Fiery and I didn't end up publishing this part of our findings because it didn't seem very robust and we weren't sure what to make of it, and I should emphasize that the findings and analysis are only preliminary; but I thought I'd put it out there in the blogosphere at least, especially since it relates to the forthcoming piece by Tobia, Buckwalter, and Stich. The issue seems ripe for some follow-up work, though I might need to finish proving that the external world exists first!

A Story in Which I Acquire Fisheyes, or The Paranoid Jeweler and the Sphere-Eye God

I become paranoid and quit philosophy. But I need to make money somehow, so I become a jeweler. The problem with being a paranoid jeweler is this: Since I am doing close work, I must focus closely through a magnifying lens, which drastically reduces my ability to keep a constant wary eye on my surroundings. Fortunately, being the clever sort, I hit upon a solution: fisheye lenses!

Above each ear, I mount a fisheye lens, each with a 180-degree field of view, together drawing light from the entire 360 degrees of my environment. Mirrors redirect the light to a screen mounted eight inches in front of my eyes, entirely occluding my normal forward view. Reflections from the right-mounted lens fill almost the whole space before my right eye. Reflections from the left-mounted lens fill almost the whole space before my left eye. Thus, binocularly, I simultaneously see my entire 360-degree environment. No one can sneak up on me now! By shifting attention between my right and left eyes and by shifting my gaze direction, I can focus on different objects in my visual field, thus doing my jeweler's tasks. My best view is of objects near my ears, which in fact are magnified relative to what I could see unaided, while objects near midline, directly in front of me, behind me, or above or below me, are radically shrunk and curved. This is no big problem, though, because I can rotate my head to put whatever I want into the privileged field of view. I quickly acquire the habit of walking with my head turned ninety-degrees sideways and with my ear slightly angled toward the ground.

At first, of course, everything looks radically distorted, given what I am used to. Here's how things look on the right side of my visual field when I turn my right ear toward the sky:

(image from http://www.sandydan.com/photo/wide/fish/ftest5.jpg)

After a while, though, I get used to it -- just like people get used to convex rearview mirrors in cars and just like, given long enough, people adapt to lenses that completely invert the visual field. I come to expect that a gemstone of constant size will look like [this] when held before my forehead and like [that] when held before my ear. I learn to play catch, to ski, to drive a car (no need for rearview mirrors!). After long enough, things look right this way. I would be utterly stymied and physically incompetent without my fisheye lenses.

After long enough, do things go back to looking like they did before I put on the fisheye lenses, the way some people say (but not others!) that after adapting to visual-field inverting lenses things eventually go back to looking the way they did before having donned the lenses? That doesn't seem possible. Unlike in the inverting-lenses case, there doesn't seem to be sufficient symmetry to enable such an adaptation back. I see much better near my ear than in front of my forehead. I see a full 360 degrees. Things might come to look just like I expect, but they can't come look the same as before.

Do things nonetheless look illusory, though now I am used to the illusion? I'm inclined to say no. With full adaptation they will come to seem right, and not illusory -- just as it seems right and not illusory that the angle a person occupies in my visual field grows smaller as he walks away from me, just like it seems right and not illusory that the car behind me appears in my central rear view mirror in my forward gaze as I am driving (and not like a small car somehow elevated in the air in front of me, which I only intellectually know is really behind me). There's nothing intrinsically privileged, I'm inclined to think, about the particular camera obscura optics of the human eye, about our particular form of refraction and focus on an interior retinal hemisphere. Another species might be born with fisheyes, and talk and fight and do physics with us -- do it better than us, and think we are the ones with the weird set-up. A god might have a giant spherical eye gathering light from its interior, in which mortals dwell, with objects occupying more visual angle as they approach the surface of the sphere that bounds its indwellers' world. There is no objectively right visual optics.

From this, I think it might follow that our visual experience of the world as like [this] (and here I inwardly gesture at the way in which my office presents itself to me visually right now, the way my hand before my eyes looks to me right now), is no more the one right veridical visual phenomenology of shape and size and distance than that of my fisheye future self or that of the sphere-eye god.

Re-Post: Does Studying Economics Make You Selfish?

Sometimes when I present my work on the mediocre moral behavior of ethics professors, someone tells me that it's been shown that professional economists behave more selfishly than do non-economists. I was all prepped today to write a post on how the empirical evidence for that claim is actually quite weak. It turns out I already posted on this in 2008, and had just forgotten about it! Perhaps you've forgotten too. Since my thoughts haven't changed much since then, I thought I'd just be lazy and re-post:

There's been a lot of discussion in economics circles about how economics training makes people more selfish -- in particular, by teaching people "rational choice theory", the cartoon version of which portrays rationality as a matter of always acting in one's perceived (economic) self interest (for example, by defecting in prisoner's dilemma games and offering very little in ultimatum games). Accordingly, the economics literature contains a few much-cited studies that seem to show that economics students behave more selfishly than other students.

However, virtually all the experiments cited in support of this view are flawed in one of two ways. Either they test students on basically the same sorts of games discussed in economics classes, or they rely on self-report of selfishness. Relying on econ-class games makes generalizing the results very problematic. It's no surprise that after a semester of being told by your professor that defecting (basically, ratting on your accomplice to get less prison time) would be the rational thing to do in a prisoner's dilemma game, when that same professor or one of his colleagues gives you a pencil-and-paper version of the prisoner's dilemma, you're more likely to say you'd defect than you would otherwise have been (even with small real stakes). What relationship this has to actually screwing over acquaintances is another question.

Likewise, relying on self-report of selfishness is problematic for all the reasons self-report is usually problematic in the domain of morality, and in this case there's an obvious additional confound: People exposed to rational choice theory might feel less embarrassed to confess their selfish behavior (since it is, after all, rational according to the theory), and so might show up as more selfish on self-report measures even if they actually behave the same as everyone else.

I've found so far only three real-world studies of the relationship between economics training and selfishness, and none suggest that economics training increases selfishness.

(1.) Though I find their study too problematic to rely much on, Yezer et al. (1996) found that envelopes containing money were more likely to be forwarded with the money still in them if they were dropped in economics classes than other classes.

(2.) Frey and Meier (2003) found that economics majors at University of Zurich were less likely than other majors to opt to give to student charities when registering for classes, but that effect held starting with the very first semester (before any exposure to rational choice theory), and the ratio of economics majors to non-economics majors donating remained about the same over time (all groups declined a bit as their education proceeded). [Update 21 Nov 2012: Bauman and Rose 2011 finds similar results for students at University of Washington.]

(3.) Studying professional economists, Laband and Beil (1999) found a majority to pay the highest level of dues to the American Economic Association (dues prorated on self-reported income), though they could without detection or punishment have reported lower income and so paid less. Through an analysis of proportion paying dues in each income category vs. proportion in the profession making income in those categories they found similar rates of cheating in self-reported income among sociologists and political scientists.

I see these findings as the flip side of what I've been finding with ethicists: Just as ethical training doesn't seem to increase rates of actual moral behavior much, if at all, so also being bathed in rational choice theory (if, indeed, this is what economics students are mostly taught) doesn't seem to induce real-world selfishness.

New Essay: The Problem of Known Illusion and the Resemblance of Experience to Reality

I'll be presenting a new essay at the Philosophy of Science Association meeting in San Diego on Friday in the morning sessions. I've been drafting it out since 2010, in various shapes and lengths, and I presented it orally in 2011 at UMSL, but the thing always seems to crumble in my hands, and until now I haven't been comfortable posting a circulating draft. However, by stripping it down to 2000 words for a brief oral presentation, I can conveniently decline to delve into the issues that keep stymieing me and present the core idea fairly simply, I hope, with a couple of examples.

Abstract: If Locke is right, when I visually experience a cubical thing and judge rightly that it is in fact a cube, then there is a mind-independent thing out there the shape of which in some important way resembles my experience of its shape. If Kant is right, in contrast, we have no good reason to think that things in themselves are cubical; there's nothing independent of the human mind that has cubical properties that resemble the properties of my visual experience of cubes. I believe we can start to get a handle on this dispute empirically through introspection. Suppose that there are multiple different ways of veridically experiencing the same object and that it can sometimes be the case that there's no good reason to think that one of the two different experiences more closely resembles things as they are in themselves. It would then seem to follow that there's a kind of looseness between features of experience and features of things in themselves. Things in themselves might be more like this or they might be more like that or somewhere in between; but we can no longer say that we know they are like this -- a miniature Kantian victory over Locke. And then the question would be: How far can we push this type of argument? In this paper, I consider two test cases: convex passenger-side car mirrors and inverting lenses of the sort invented by George Stratton.

Full paper here. As always, comments and criticisms welcome, either on this post or by email.

Aaron James's Theory of Assholes

The nature and management of assholes -- or as I generally prefer to say, jerks -- deserves far more attention than it has received thus far in moral psychology. Thus, I commend to your attention Aaron James's recent book Assholes: A Theory.

James defines an asshole as follows. The asshole

(1.) allows himself to enjoy special advantages and does so systematically;
(2.) does this out of an entrenched sense of entitlement; and
(3.) is immunized by his sense of entitlement against the complaints of other people (p. 5).

Nuances of ordinary usage aside, it does seem to me that this captures an important type of person, and one deserving of the epithet.

Two of James's insights about the asshole particularly strike me. First, why is the asshole so infuriating, even when the harm he does is slight? James's answer is that the asshole's entrenched sense of entitlement -- the asshole's refusal to treat others as equals -- adds particular sting to the injuries he forces upon us. It's not just that he cuts in line or takes the last two cookies for himself. It's that, even when confronted, he refuses to recognize us as deserving equal consideration for line position and cookie consumption. A mere jerk (in James's terminology) might be moved upon reflection to confess the wrongness of his actions (even if still refusing to yield the second cookie) but all such appeals slide off the asshole. In fact, the more you protest, the more the asshole glazes over and rises, in his own mind, above you. (Here I go somewhat beyond James's own remarks, but I hope I remain within his general spirit.)

Second -- and equally infuriating -- the asshole, unlike the psychopath, is morally motivated. It's not just "morality be damned, I'm getting mine!" Rather, the asshole feels morally entitled to special advantages. An injustice is done, he feels, if he has to wait in the post office line equally with everyone else. After all, he's not a mere schmoe like you! Sanctimonious selfishness is the mark of the asshole.

However, I think James hits one wrong note repeatedly in the book, concerning the asshole's self-knowledge. For example, in the conclusion of his book -- his "Letter to an Asshole" -- he addresses the asshole with remarks like this: "we should ask about the nature of your own presumed special moral status" (p. 198) and "I address you here to give you... an argument that you really should come to recognize others as equals, that you should in this way change your basic way of being" (p. 190). This is off key, I think, because many assholes, perhaps most, would not explicitly acknowledge, even privately to themselves, that they deserve special moral consideration; they would not deny that "all men are created equal" -- in the morally relevant sense of "equal". Rather, I suggest, their spontaneous reactions and their moral judgments about particular cases reveal that they implicitly regard others as undeserving of full moral consideration; but when pushed to verbalize, and when reflecting in their usual self-congratulatory mode, they will deny that this is in fact their view.

Why shouldn't the asshole wait his turn in the post office line, then, in his own mind? Well, it's not that others aren't his equals -- not really -- it's just that he is particularly busy, since he owns his own business, or that he's a particularly important person around town, since he's a distinguished professor at the local university, or... whatever. Anyone else in the same position would (the asshole insists) deserve exactly the same special treatment! It's not that he's inherently superior, he says, but rather that he has achieved something that others have not, and this is entitles him to special privileges. Or: I've got especially important stuff going on today! Alternatively, if achievement and importance-based rationalizations aren't handy, the asshole has the following ready fallback: Cutting in line if you can get away with it is just how this game is supposed to work. Others could easily do so too, if they were more on the ball, if they weren't such cow-like fools. (But not in front of me! Part of the game is also enforcing your line position against intruders; too bad for them that those other people didn't.)

Conveniently for him, there always seems to be a rationalization lying around somewhere. All men are created equal, of course, of course! But not all achieve the same and not everyone can take first place.

Update, Nov. 8: Aaron James has launched a blog on assholes.

Tips for Writing Philosophy Papers

In my undergraduate classes, I normally distribute tips for writing philosophy papers along with my essay assignments. Perhaps others will find these tips helpful.

General Instructions on Writing Philosophy Papers

Philosophy papers can take a variety of forms; no single formula suffices to describe them all. However, most philosophy papers are built around two components: textual analysis and critical discussion. The simplest and most common form of a philosophy paper is the presentation of a particular author’s point of view, coupled with an argument against that view. Another common form is to contrast the views of two authors on a particular issue and to support one author’s view against the other.

The first element: textual analysis. The first element of a successful philosophy paper is an accurate, sympathetic, and cogent presentation of a point of view – typically the point of view of one or more of the authors we have been reading in the class. For longer papers, you should probably present not only a sketch of the author’s position, but also, as sympathetically as possible, some of the reasons the author gives for accepting his or her view. You might also offer your own, or others’, arguments supporting the author’s view. Using your own fresh examples, in the context of more abstract exposition, can especially effectively convey your command of the material.

You should put special care into accurately representing views with which you disagree, since it is tempting to oversimplify or caricature such views. You should also use citations to support your analysis (see below).

The second element: critical discussion. The second element of a successful philosophy paper is a critical discussion of the view (or views) presented. A plausible argument must be mounted either for or against at least one point of view. In constructing this argument, you may use ideas from the readings, lectures, class discussion, or any other source. When using an idea that you obtained from someone else, you must cite the source (see below). While it is not expected in most cases that you will discover wholly novel arguments, you will be expected to put the arguments in your own words, take your own angle on them, and use your own examples, going deeper into at least one issue or objection than we have in class. You should also bear in mind how an opponent might respond to your argument. The best papers often explicitly develop a potential line of criticism against the view the student favors and then show how the view advocated can withstand that criticism. (Of course, it is of little value to do this if the criticism anticipated is too weak to be advocated by thoughtful opponents of your position.) One or two powerful criticisms developed in convincing detail is almost always better than a barrage of quick criticisms treated superficially. Students sometimes relegate their critical discussion to the last paragraph or last page of their papers. Generally, that is a mistake. This is what the rest of the paper is building towards. Spend some time with it; work it out in detail.

One common mistake is to simply state (or restate) your position, or the position of one of the authors, as your critical discussion. Instead, you should mount an argument that brings new considerations to bear or shows some specific weakness in the position or argument you are criticizing. Give reasons for accepting the view you endorse.

Sentences. You should separately evaluate each sentence of your paper along the following three dimensions.

(1.) Is it clear? Although philosophers such as Kant and Heidegger are notorious for their opacity, opacity is not generally accepted in student papers. It should be clear what every sentence means, on the face of it. Avoid technical terms as much as is feasible. When you do use a technical term, for the most part it should be clearly defined in advance. Generally speaking, you should aim to write so that an intelligent person with no background in philosophy can understand most of your paper.

(2.) Is it true or plausible? Every claim you make in a philosophy paper – indeed, every element of every claim – should be either true or plausibly true. Claims that are true or plausible on their face (e.g., “damage to the brain can affect the capacity to think”) may be offered without further support. Claims likely to be questioned by an alert reader (e.g., “nothing immaterial can cause the motion of a material object”) should either precede or be preceded by some sort of consideration or argument in support, although in some cases the support may be fairly simple or preliminary, especially if the point is subsidiary or taken for granted by all the relevant parties.

(3.) Is it relevant? Often, the aim of a philosophy paper is to criticize the view of some particular author. In that case, most of the sentences should serve either to articulate relevant parts of the view that is to be criticized, or they should somehow support the criticism, or they should serve summary or “signpost” functions. In longer papers, digressions and speculations, if they are of sufficient interest, are also acceptable. In more purely interpretive papers, relevance may be harder to assess, but generally you should try to confine yourself either to a single interpretive thesis (e.g., “Descartes would not have accepted Malebranche’s occasionalism”) or you should focus on a narrow enough range of ideas that you can present an insightfully deep exploration of one aspect of the author’s view (as opposed to a scattered, superficial treatment).

Paragraphs. The basic unit of writing is not the sentence but the paragraph. As a general rule, every major point deserves its own paragraph. To make a claim clear it is often desirable to do at least one of the following: Restate it in different words, qualify and delimit it, contrast it to a related point with which it may be confused, present an example of its application, or expand it into several subpoints. To make a claim plausible, it is often desirable to present an example or application, show how it is supported by another claim that is plausible on the face of it, rephrase it in a way that brings out its commonsensicality, or cite an author who supports it. In your critical discussion, it is generally desirable that every major objection you raise receive at least a full paragraph of explanation.

If you treat the paragraph as the basic unit of writing, you will find that only a few points can truly be made well in any one paper, and five or even seven pages will start to seem (if it does not already) a narrow stricture.

Preparation for the paper. In preparing for the paper, I advise that you review the readings and notes relevant to the topic in question. If you have thought of what you consider to be a convincing objection to something in the texts or the lectures, you might want to build your paper around that, carefully describing the view or argument you oppose and then showing why you think we ought not accept that view or argument. If you raise your objection in class discussion, in office hours, or in discussion with friends, then you can see whether others find it convincing and perhaps how someone who disagrees with you would be inclined to respond.

Use of sources. Frequent citations should be used to back up the claims you make in your paper, both in describing an author’s view and in mounting your criticisms, if you depend on the ideas of other people in doing so. Citations serve two purposes: (1.) They credit people for their views, omission of this credit being plagiarism. (2.) If I disagree with your interpretation or recollection of what an author has said, a page reference allows me to check what you have said against the text – otherwise, in cases of disagreement I will have simply to assume that you are mistaken. Citations to particular authors and pages should be included parenthetically in the text, and the bulk of your references should be paraphrases, not direct quotations. Quotes take a lot of space and do not make clear what it is you mean to highlight or extract from the quoted passage, nor do they effectively convey that you understand the quoted material.

Below are two examples of parenthetical citation format for paraphrases. Both are written in the student's own words, not quoting from but rather conveying the crucial idea of the cited text:

It might be thought that materialism cannot be true because people can talk quite intelligently about mental states without knowing anything about brain states – without even believing that the brain is involved in thinking. Consider, however, the case of lightning as an electrical discharge: One can talk intelligently about lightning without knowing about electrical discharges, but this does not prove that lightning is not an electrical discharge (Smart, p. 171).

Or:

In support of the view that the mind continues to exist after death, Paterson cites evidence from reports of near-death experiences. Occasionally, Paterson claims, people who have near-death experiences report details of objects and places it would have been impossible for them normally to observe, such as friends unexpectedly arriving in the hospital waiting room (p. 146).

It is not necessary to appeal to secondary sources in discussing your interpretation of the texts. If you do choose to refer to such sources, you should always make your own judgment about whether what they say is plausible and back up your judgment, if possible, with references to the primary texts. Information found on the internet should be treated with special caution. Wikipedia is an unreliable source for philosophy; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is usually much better. If you find information on the internet that in any way informs your paper, you should be certain to cite it (including the U.R.L.) as you would any other sort of secondary material.

Audience. Imagine the audience of your paper to be a mediocre student taking this class. You need not explain such basic things as who Descartes is. However, you should not assume that your reader has any more than the most rudimentary acquaintance with the texts and arguments or any knowledge at all of literature not assigned in the class. Jargon should be minimized. When you do use jargon, explain carefully what you mean by it.

Introductions. For such a short paper, there is no need for a general introduction to the issues or the particular thinkers being discussed. Get right to the point. The first paragraph should probably contain an explicit statement of what you take your primary point or points to be. There is no need to keep the reader in suspense.

Drafts, outlines, sketches. Many people find it helpful to create an outline of the paper before writing. At a minimum, one should have a general idea, in advance, of the main points one will make. One potential danger with outlines for philosophy papers is that it is often difficult to judge in advance the proper amount of time to spend on any particular sub-claim. Brief sketches of one’s main points and arguments – e.g., a summary of the main project of the paper in one or two paragraphs – are sometimes more helpful. Once you have completed the paper, it can be very rewarding to set it aside for a few days and then return to it, rewriting it from scratch from the beginning. Such rewriting forces you to rethink every sentence afresh as you retype it, which generally results in a clearer, tighter, and more coherent paper. (I rewrite my own essays multiple times before submitting them for publication.)

Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence, Scrambled Sideways

Nietzsche writes:

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy, and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence? -- even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, a speck of dust!"

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine." If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, "Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? (Gay Science 341, Kaufmann trans.).

Unlike some readers of Nietzsche, I'm inclined to think Nietzsche intended his remarks about eternal recurrence not as a mere thought experiment but rather as a genuine cosmological possibility. His unpublished reflections on eternal recurrence suggest a view not unlike that of his contemporary, physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. In a universe of finite relevantly different combinatorial possibilities, infinite duration, and some means of avoiding permanent collapse into entropy, it is plausible to think that eventually the current configuration of the world will recur, not just once but infinitely often. And if one adds determinism to the picture (as most would have done in the 19th century), then once the current configuration recurs, the same subsequent states will follow. Voila, eternal recurrence.

Now update to the early 21st century by adding multiverse theory and randomness. What do we get? Eternal recurrence scrambled sideways! Sideways because the infinitely many duplicates of you need not exist only in your past and future (and in fact probably don't, assuming a finite or entropy-collapsing observable universe and universe-local spacetime) -- rather they exist "sideways", outside of our observable universe. And scrambled because rather than being destined always to play out the same, every finite possibility is played out, infinitely often.

So, on this view -- which is well within the range of the mainstream options in contemporary scientific cosmology -- there are infinitely many "Eric Schwitzgebel"s in infinitely many universes who have lived their lives identically to mine up to this minute. Given that there is a huge variety of highly improbable but finitely probable weird futures for these Eric Schwitzgebels, infinitely many Eric Schwitzgebels play out each of these weird outcomes. Infinitely many of my up-to-now counterparts decide to leave philosophy forever to pursue a hopeless career in football, infinitely many leap to death from the top of the tower, infinitely many spend the rest of the week stapling pages of Kant's first critique atop relevant passages of Hume's Treatise. And of course infinitely many also finish this blog post, in every possible way it might be finished.

How should I feel about these counterparts of mine, assuming such a cosmology is the correct one, as seems possible? They are oddly close to me, in a way, though universes distant. I can't quite find myself indifferent to them -- just as Nietzsche can't find himself indifferent to his future counterparts who must live out his every decision. Though it seems weird to say so, I find myself feeling sorry as I imagine their sufferings. I don't feel the heavy weight of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, though. I'm not sure I would feel that weight even on Nietzsche's original assumptions, but definitely not now. Maybe instead there's a lightness: Even if I decide wrong, there will be infinitely many Erics who get it right! Conversely, there's an eeriness too: Infinitely many Erics bashed their cars headlong into that oncoming traffic.

Maybe I shouldn't take such reflections very seriously. The cosmology might not be correct. Even if it is correct, I'm the only Eric Schwitzgebel, UC Riverside philosopher, in this universe, and I really shouldn't care at all about what transpires in other universes, no matter how eerily similar. Should I? There are plenty of other people, right here on our own Earth, past and future, whom I should care about more, right? Because they're... well, why exactly? Because they're closer?

Group Minds on Ringworld

In the year 3000, let's suppose, humanity completes its greatest construction project ever: Ringworld, a habitable surface as wide as a planet but spanning an entire planetary orbit -- a ring around a neighboring star with 10,000,000,000,000 square kilometers of living space. A big place!

Earthly nations send colonists. Once on Ringworld, the colonists form independent nations, free of Earthly control. These nations grow and spread. For sociological reasons, let's suppose, Ringworld nations function best with populations near 100,000,000. Once a nation grows much larger than that, it tends either to fission or to stagnate. Now, what type of nation will be well represented on the surface of Ringworld after ten thousand years?

Although it could play out in various ways, the most straightforward answer seems to be: nations that grow fast, then fission, then repeatedly grow again and fission again. Mobility to unpopulated parts of Ringworld, away from competitors, might also be favored. Also, we might expect the most evolutionarily successful nations to have intergenerationally stable developmental resources -- that is, to be such that their fission products tend to develop the same traits that the fissioning parent nations had, i.e., the very traits that made those parents evolutionarily successful. Otherwise, after a few generations, those nations' fission-produced offspring nations will be outcompeted. We might further imagine that the most successful nations employ eugenics: Their governments select a range of DNA strands containing especially desirable traits, which then serve as the genetic basis of the next generation of their citizens; and the governments that do so with the best eye to maximizing their nations' eventual descendant nations, and that do so stably over the generations, are eventually the nations that are best represented on the Ringworld surface.

We might imagine, too, that as the Ringworld surface becomes more crowded, aggression starts to pay. In response, the competing nations develop protective physical borders, grown using nanotechnology and difficult to penetrate without permission. Nations might also strictly limit immigration as contrary to their eugenic plans. If nations are somewhat mobile -- and we might imagine that gravity (or centrifugal inertia) is light and fusion power plentiful -- they might best compete with each other by moving toward opportunities and away from threats, bringing their citizenry and physical defensive borders along with them. Eventually, these defensive borders might gain appendage-like functionality -- e.g., offensive weaponry and the ability to harvest minerals and sources of power. Once this happens, the majority of individual citizens might become largely sedentary, communicating via radio and microwave signals. And once sedentary, size-reduction might be selected for, to reduce the energetic costs of nation-scale movement; and transmission of essential nutrients between citizens might be achieved by purely mechanical means. Furthermore, once free of the demands of individual mobility and individual-level reproduction, citizens might start to specialize ever more narrowly in tasks that serve the reproductive interests of the nation -- or at least the nations whose citizens develop in that direction might in the long run outcompete the nations whose citizens do not.

Over time, as individual citizens shrink and become increasingly specialized, and as the membrane around the nation becomes more functional and more effectively protective of the interior, the overall physical structure of the nation might start to look increasingly like that of what we would call an individual organism that reproduces by fission.

Nations -- at least the evolutionarily most successful ones -- will presumably engage in social intercourse among each other, both cooperatively and competitively. Possibly, some of these nations will evolve so that no single individual citizen is responsible for between-nation communication but rather the communicative efforts arise in a complex way from the citizenry as a whole. If individual citizens become sufficiently small and specialized, and if they learn to communicate with each other non-linguistically (e.g., by direct brain-to-brain stimulation), then it might eventually become the case that no individual citizen can even understand the linguistic communications emitted by her own nation.

A million years passes, during which Earth loses communication with Ringworld. Social pressures on Ringworld favor increasingly sophisticated forms of communication between nations, including the emergence of nation-level art, poetry, song, history, and philosophy -- none of which is comprehensible to the individual citizens of the species of nation that eventually conquers the rest. After these million years, visitors from Earth arrive, and they decide that conscious experience is primarily to be found at the level of nations, not at the level of individual citizens.

Question: At what point in this process did the nations first have nation-level conscious experience?

Might it have been from the very beginning?

Do You have Infinitely Many Beliefs about the Number of Planets?

If you're like me, you believe that the solar system contains eight planets. (Stubborn Plutophiles may adjust accordingly.) You probably also believe that the solar system contains fewer than nine planets. And you probably believe that it contains more than just the four inner planets. Do you also believe that the solar system contains fewer than 14 planets? Fewer than 127? Fewer than 134,674.6 planets? That there are eight planet-like bodies within half a light year? That there are 2^3 planets within the gravitational well of the nearest large hydrogen-fusing body? That there are 1000(base 2) planets, or -i^2*e^0*sqrt(64) planets? That Shakespeare's estimate of the number of planets was probably too low? Presumably you can form these beliefs now, if you didn't already have them. The question, really, is whether you believed these things before thinking specifically about them.

Standard philosophical representationalist approaches to belief seem to fare poorly when faced with this question.

Here's a typical first-pass representationalist account of belief: To believe some proposition P (e.g., that the solar system has fewer than 9 planets) is to have stored somewhere in one's mind a language-like representation with the content P -- and to have it stored in such a way that the representation can be deployed for appropriate use in inference and practical reasoning. Now, one possibility, on such a view, is to say we have all the beliefs described above and thus that we have a vast number of stored representations with very similar content. But that doesn't seem very appealing. Another possibility seems more initially promising: Say that we really only have a few stored representations concerning the number of planets. Probably, then you didn't believe (until you thought about it just now) that there were fewer than 14 planets.

But there are two problems with this approach. First, although I certainly agree that it would be weird to say that you believe, before doing the relevant calculation, that there are -i^2*e^0*sqrt(64) planets, it seems weirdly misleading to say that you don't believe that there are fewer than 14. But if we do want to include the latter as a belief, there are probably going to have to be, on this view, quite a few stored representations regarding the number of planets (at least the 15 representations indicating that the number is >0, >1, >2, ... <14). Second, the line between what people believe and what they don't believe turns out, now, to be surprisingly occult. Does my wife believe that the solar system contains more than just the four inner planets? Well, I know she would say it does. But whether she believes it is now beyond me. Does she have that representation stored or not? Who knows?

Jerry Fodor and Dan Dennett, discussing this problem, suggest that the representationist might distinguish between "core" beliefs that require explicitly stored representations and "implicit" beliefs which are beliefs that can be swiftly derived from the core beliefs. So, if I have exactly one stored representation for the number of planets (that there are 8), I have a core belief that there are 8 and I implicitly believe that there are fewer than 14 and fewer than 134,674.6, etc. Although this move lets me safely talk about my wife -- I know she believes either explicitly or implicitly that there are fewer than 14 planets -- the occult is not entirely vanquished. For now there is a major, sharp architectural distinction in the mind -- the distinction between "core" beliefs and the others (and what could be a bigger architectural difference, really, for the philosophical representationalist?) -- with no evident empirical grounding for that distinction and no clear means of empirical test. I suspect that what we have here is nothing but ad hoc maneuver to save a theory in trouble by insulating it from empirical evidence. Is there some positive reason to believe that, in fact, all the things we would want to say we believe are either the explicit contents of stored representations or swiftly derivable from those contents? It seems we're being asked merely to accept that it must be so. (If the view generated some risky predictions that we could test, that would be a different matter.)

An alternative form of representationalism -- the "maps" view -- has some advantages. A mental map or picture of the solar system would, it seems, equally well represent, in one compact format, the fact that the solar system has more than 1 planet, more than 2, more than 3,... exactly 8, fewer than 9, ... fewer than 14.... That's nice; no need to duplicate representations! Similarly, the same representation can have the content that Oregon is south of Washington and that Washington is north of Oregon. On the language view, it seems, either both representational contents would have to be explicitly stored, which seems a weird duplication; or one would have to be core and the other merely implicit, which seems weirdly asymmetrical for those of us who don't really think much more about one of those states than about the other; or there'd have to some some different core linguistic representation, an unfamiliar concept, from which xNORTHy and ySOUTHx were equally derivable as implicit beliefs, which seems awkward and fanciful, at least absent supporting empirical evidence.

However, these very advantages for the maps view become problems when we consider other cases. For it seems like a map of the solar system represents that there are -i^2*e^0*sqrt(64) planets, and that there are 1000(base 2) planets, just as readily as it represents that there are 8. Maps aren't intrinsically decimal, are they? And it seems wrong to say that I believe those things, especially if I am disposed to miscalculate and thus mistakenly deny their truth. For related reasons, it seems difficult if not impossible to represent logically inconsistent beliefs on a map; and surely we do sometimes have logically inconsistent beliefs (e.g., that there are four gas giants, five smaller planets, and 8 planets total).

It seems problematic to think of belief either in terms of discretely stored language-like style representations (perhaps plus swift derivability allowing implicit beliefs), or in terms of map-like representations. Is there some other representational format that would work better?

Maybe the problem is in thinking of belief as a matter of representational storage and retrival in the first place.