Explaining Irrationality (by guest blogger G. Randolph Mayes)

In one of the last papers he wrote before dying almost exactly one year ago, John Pollock posed what he called “the puzzle of irrationality”:

Philosophers seek rules for avoiding irrationality, but they rarely stop to ask a more fundamental question ... [Assuming] rationality is desirable, why is irrationality possible? If we have built-in rules for how to cognize, why aren’t we built to always cognize rationally?

Consider just one example, taken from Philip Johnson-Laird’s recent book How We Reason: Paolo went to get the car, a task that should take about five minutes, yet 10 minutes have passed and Paolo has not returned. What is more likely to have happened?

1. Paolo had to drive out of town.

2. Paolo ran into a system of one way streets and had to drive out of town.

The typical reader of this blog probably knows that the answer is 1. After all (we reason) 2 can’t be more likely, since 1 is true whenever 2 is. But I’ll bet you felt the tug of 2 and may still feel it. (This human tendency to commit the ‘conjunction fallacy’ was famously documented by the Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.)

So we feel the pull of wrong answers, yet are (sometimes) capable of reasoning toward the correct ones.

Pollock wanted to know why we are built this way. Given that we can use the rules that lead us to the correct answers, why didn’t evolution just design us to do so all the time? Part of his answer- well-supported by the last 50 years of psychological research - is that most of our beliefs and decisions are the result of ‘quick and inflexible’ (Q&I) inference modules, rather than explicit reasoning. Quickness is an obvious fitness conferring property, but the inflexibility of Q&I modules means that they are prone to errors as well. (They will, for example, make you overgeneralize, avoiding all spiders, snakes, and fungi rather than just the dangerous ones.)

Interestingly, though, Pollock does not think human irrationality is simply a matter of the error proneness of our Q&I modules. In fact, he would not see a cognitive system composed only of Q&I modules as capable of irrationality at all. For Pollock, to be irrational, an agent must be capable of both monitoring the outputs of her Q&I modules and overriding them on the basis of explicit reasoning (just as you may have done above.) Irrationality, then, turns out to be any failure to override these outputs when we have the time and information needed to do so. Why we are built to often fail at this task is not entirely clear. Pollock speculates that it is a design flaw resulting from the fact that our Q&I modules are phylogenetically older than our reasoning mechanisms.

I think on the surface this is actually a very intuitive account of irrationality, so much so that it is easy to miss the deeper implications of what Pollock has proposed here. Most people think of rationality as a very special human capacity, the ‘normativity’ of which may elude scientific understanding altogether. But for Pollock, rationality is something that every cognitive system has simply by virtue of being driven by a set of rules. Human rationality is certainly interesting in that it is driven by a system of Q&I modules that can be defeated by explicit reasoning. What really makes us different, though, is not that we are rational, but that we sometimes fail to be.

Brie Gertler and I Argue about Introspection on Philosophy TV

here.  For what it's worth, I thought it went pretty well.  We were able to home in on some of our central points of disagreement and push each other on them a bit.

Are Ethicists Any More Likely to be Blood or Organ Donors Than Are Other Professors?

Short answer: no.  Not according to self-report, at least.

These results come from Josh Rust's and my survey of several hundred ethicists, non-ethicist philosophers, and professors in other departments. (Other survey results, and more about the methods, are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

Before asking for any self-reports of behavior, we asked survey respondents to rate various behaviors on a nine-point scale from "very morally bad" through "morally neutral" to "very morally good". Among the behaviors were:

Not having on one’s driver’s license a statement or symbol indicating willingness to be an organ donor in the event of death,

and

Regularly donating blood.

In both cases, ethicists were the group most likely to praise or condemn the behavior (though the differences between ethicists and other philosophers were within statistical chance).  60% of ethicists rated not being an organ donor on the "morally bad" side of the scale, compared to 56% of non-ethicist philosophers and 42% of non-philosophers (chi-square, p = .001).  And 84% of ethicists rated regularly donating blood on the "morally good" side of the scale, compared to 80% of non-ethicist philosophers and 72% of non-philosophers (chi-square, p = .01).

In the second part of the questionnaire, we asked for self-report of various behaviors, including:

Please look at your driver’s license and indicate whether there is a statement or symbol indicating your willingness to be an organ donor in the event of death,

and

When was the last time you donated blood?

The groups' responses to these two questions were not statistically significantly different: 67% of ethicists, 64% of non-ethicist philosophers, and 69% of philosophers reported having an organ donor symbol or statement on their driver's license (chi-square, p = .75); and 13% of ethicists, 14% of non-ethicist philosophers, and 10% of non-philosophers reported donating blood in 2008 or 2009 (the survey was conducted in spring 2009; chi-square, p = .67).  A related question asking how frequently respondents donate blood also found no detectable difference among the groups.

These results fit into an overall pattern that Josh Rust and I have found: Professional ethicists appear to behave no better than do other professors.  Among our findings so far:

• Arbitrarily selected ethicists are rated as overall no morally better behaved by members of their own departments than are arbitrarily selected specialists in metaphysics and epistemology (Schwitzgebel and Rust, 2009).
• Ethicists, including specialists in political philosophy, are no more likely to vote than are other professors (though Political Science professors are more likely to vote than are other professors; Schwitzgebel and Rust, 2010).
• Ethics books, including relatively obscure books likely to be borrowed mostly by professors and advanced students in philosophy, are more likely to be missing from academic libraries than are other philosophy books (Schwitzgebel, 2009).
• Although ethics professors are much more likely than are other professors to say that eating the meat of mammals is morally bad, they are just about as likely to report having eaten the meat of a mammal at their previous evening meal (Splintered Mind post, May 22, 2009).
• Ethics professors appear to be no more likely to respond to undergraduate emails than are other professors (Splintered Mind post, June 16, 2009).
• Ethics professors were statistically marginally less likely to report staying in regular contact with their mothers (Splintered Mind post, August 31, 2010).
• Ethics professors did not appear to be any more honest, overall, in their questionnaire responses, to the extent that we were able to determine patterns of inaccurate or suspicious responding (Splintered Mind post, June 4, 2010).

Nor is it the case, for the normative questions we tested, that ethicists tend to have more permissive moral views.  If anything (as with organ donation), they tend to express more demanding moral views.

All this evidence, considered together, creates, I think, a substantial explanatory challenge for the approximately one-third of non-ethicist philosophers and approximately one-half of professional ethicists who -- in another of Josh's and my surveys -- expressed the view that on average ethicists behave a little morally better than do others from socially comparable groups.

We do have preliminary evidence, however, that environmental ethicists litter less.  Hopefully we can present that evidence soon.  (First, we have to be sure that we are done with data collection.)

Graduate Student Conference on... Me?

Well, kind of. The full title is:

CoxiMAP: Mind, Action, and Perception II:

Graduate Conference on the Work of Eric Schwitzgebel, the Epistemological Status of First-Person Methodology in Science, and the Metaphysics of Belief

It's in Osnabrueck, Germany, Jan. 21-23, and presenters will be awarded 150 Euros toward travel costs.  The submission deadline is soon: October 20 (300 word abstract, with a full paper in English of 5000 words), sent to Sascha Fink at safink [at domain] uos.de.  Full-length call for papers here.

I have been assured that submissions in philosophy of mind and/or epistemology more generally will also be welcomed.
I will also be giving a series of talks in Osnabrueck:

Jan. 20: "Shards of Self-Knowledge"
Jan. 21: "The Problem of Known Illusion and the Problem of Unreportable Illusion"
Jan. 22: "The Moral Behavior of Ethics Professors"

Also on Jan. 21, I will lead a tutorial and discussion on experience sampling.

Perplexities of Consciousness: cover design

MIT Press has shown me the cover design for my forthcoming book, Perplexities of Consciousness:


The mind-bending cover art?  That's Pete Mandik's exomusicology (acrylic on canvas, 2001, photo by Rachelle Mandik). (You can get a bit of a closer look at another version of exomusicology here.)

How to Get a Big Head in Academia

Step 1: Get a tenure-track job at a research-oriented institution.

Step 2: Publish some stuff.

Step 3: Get tenure.

After Steps 1-3 -- which are, admittedly, something of a challenge -- the rest comes naturally!

Step 4: Read some stuff. You might especially find yourself reading material related to the subtopics on which you yourself have been publishing -- especially if any of that material cites your own work. The stuff that you choose to read will become especially salient to you in your perception of your field. (So also, of course, are your own publications.)

Step 5: Attend some meetings. The talks you see, the people you gravitate toward, will tend to discuss the same things you do. The field will thus seem to revolve around those issues. If other presenters in your area know you are around, they will be especially careful to mention your important contributions. You might even be sought out by a graduate student or two. That student or two will seem to you representative of all graduate students.

Step 6: Acquire some graduate students. They will tell you that your work is terrific and centrally important to the field.

Step 7: Read some emails. The people who like your work and think it is important are much more likely to email you than the people who ignore your work and think it's crappy. Also, the content of people's emails will tend to highlight what they like or, if critical, will frame that criticism in a way that makes it seem like a crucial issue on which you have taken an important public stand. (Additionally, the criticism will almost always be misguided, demonstrating your intellectual superiority to your critic.)

Finally: Given all the valuable input you have received through reading, attending conferences, talking to graduate students, and professional correpondence, it will seem clear to you that your field (post-Schnerdfootian widget studies) is central to academia, that the issues you are writing on are the most important issues within that field, and that your own contributions are centrally important to the academic understanding of those issues.

Sadly, your colleagues will not seem to fully appreciate this fact.

Can We All Become Delusional with Hypnosis? by guest blogger Lisa Bortolotti

Recent studies on hypnosis have suggested that delusions can be temporarily created in healthy subjects (see work by Amanda Barnier and Rochelle Cox). When you are given a hypnotic suggestion that you will see a stranger when you look in the mirror, it is probable that your behaviour in the hypnotic session will strikingly resemble that of a patient with a delusion of mirrored self misidentification. Both the hypnotic subject and the delusional patient deny that they see themselves in the mirror and claim instead that they see a stranger who looks a bit like them. Their beliefs are resistant to challenges and often accompanied by complex rationalisations of their weird experience.

Why would we want to create delusions in healthy subjects? It’s difficult to study the phenomenon of delusions in the wild, and especially the mechanisms responsible for their formation. Here are some reasons why we may need the controlled environment of the lab:

1. it is not always possible to investigate a clinical delusion in isolation from states of anxiety or depression that affects behaviour - comorbidity makes it harder to detect which behaviours are due to the delusion under investigation, and which are present for independent reasons;

2. ethical considerations significantly constrain the type of questioning that is appropriate with clinical patients because it is important to avoid causing distress to them, and to preserve trust and cooperation, which are beneficial for treatment;

3. for delusions that are rare, such as the delusion of mirrored self misidentification, it is difficult to find a sufficient number of clinical cases for a scientific study.

Evidence from the manifestation of hypnotically induced delusions has the potential to inform therapy for clinical delusions. Moreover, the use of hypnosis as a model for delusions can also inform theories of delusion formation, as analogies can be found in the underlying mechanisms. There are good reasons to expect that the hypnotic process results in neural patterns that are similar to those found in the clinical cases.

Given that during the hypnotic session healthy subjects engage in behaviour that is almost indistinguishable from that of clinical patients, reflecting on this promising research programme can not only help the science of delusions, but also invite us to challenge the perceived gap between the normal and the abnormal.

[This is Lisa's last guest post. Thanks, Lisa!]

How Big the Moon Is, According to One Three-Year-Old

A conversation I had with last night my daughter Kate, three years and seven months old:

Me: Which is bigger, the moon or the house?

Kate: The house.

Me: Which is bigger, the moon or a tree?

Kate: A tree.

Me: Which is bigger, the moon or a quarter?

Kate: No.

Me: No? What?

Kate: They're little.

Me: Which is smaller, the moon or a quarter?

Kate: A quarter.

Me: Which is smaller, the moon or a peanut butter jar?

Kate: The moon.

Me: So the moon is between a quarter and a peanut butter jar?

Kate: That's right, Daddy, you got it!

(See also my posts Development of the Moon Illusion? and How Far Away Is the Television Screen of Visual Experience?)

Are People Responsible for Acting on Delusions? by guest blogger Lisa Bortolotti

Consider this case. Bill suffers from auditory hallucinations in which someone is constantly insulting him. He comes to believe that his neighbour is persecuting him in this way. Exasperated, Bill breaks into the neighbour’s flat and assaults him. Is Bill responsible for his action? Matthew Broome, Matteo Mameli and I have discussed a similar case in a recent paper. On the one hand, even if it had been true that the neighbour was insulting Bill, the violence of Bill’s reaction couldn’t be justified, and thus it is not obvious that the psychotic symptoms are to blame for the assault. On the other hand, psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions don’t come in isolation, and it is possible that if Bill hadn’t suffered from a psychiatric illness, then he wouldn’t have acted as he did.

In the philosophy of David Velleman, autonomy and responsibility are linked to self narratives. We tell stories about ourselves that help us recollect memories about past experiences and that give a sense of direction to our lives. Velleman’s view is that these narratives can also produce changes in behaviour. Suppose that I have an image of myself as an active person but recently I neglect my daily walk and spend the time in front of the TV. So I tell myself: “I have to get out more or I’ll become a couch potato”. I want my behaviour to match my positive self-image so I can become the person I want to be. Our narratives don’t just describe our past but can also issue intimations and shape the future.

According to Phil Gerrans, who has applied the notion of self narratives to the study of delusions, when experiences are accompanied by salience, they become integrated in a self narrative as dominant events. People with delusions tend to ascribe excessive significance to some of these experiences and, as a result, thoughts and behaviours acquire pathological characteristics (e.g. as when Bill is exasperated by the idea of someone insulting him). Gerrans’ account vindicates the apparent success of medication and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) in the treatment of delusions. Dopamine antagonists stop the generation of inappropriate salience, and by taking such medication, people become less preoccupied with their abnormal experiences and are more open to external challenges to their pathological beliefs (“How can I hear my neighbour’s voice so clearly through thick walls?”) In CBT people are encouraged to refocus attention on a different set of experiences from those contributing to the delusional belief, and to stop weaving the delusional experiences in their self narratives by constructing scenarios in which such experiences make sense even if the delusional belief were false (“Maybe the voice I’ve heard was not my neighbour’s.”)

As Gerrans explains, self narratives are constructed unreliably in the light of abnormal experiences and delusional beliefs. If we take seriously the idea that self narratives may play an important role in the governance of behaviour, and accept that narratives constructed by people with delusions are unreliable, then it’s not surprising that people with delusions are not very successful at governing themselves.

Philosophy TV Launch

The brand-new, launched-today, Philosophy TV site promises to showcase conversations between philosophers, akin to Bloggingheads.tv. Unlike Bloggingheads TV, Philosophy TV will be dedicated solely to philosophy. The inaugural episode features Tamar Gendler and me chatting/arguing about implicit association and belief. Unfortunately, I can't view the episode myself yet because my sound card is busted.

The next few weeks promise Jamie Dreier and Mark Schroeder, Craig Callender and Jonathan Schaffer, Peter Singer and Michael Slote, Ken Aizawa and Mark Rowlands, and Andy Egan and Joshua Knobe. Pretty impressive lineup!

Are Ethicists More Attentive Daughters and Sons?

Not by self-report, at least. Here's a bit more data from a survey Josh Rust and I conducted of ethicists, non-ethicist philosophers, and comparison professors in other departments in five U.S. states. (Other preliminary survey results, and more about the methods, are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

In the first part of the survey we asked respondents their attitudes about various moral issues. One thing we asked was for them to rate "Not keeping in at least monthly face-to-face or telephone contact with one’s mother" on a nine-point scale from "very morally bad" (1) through "morally neutral" (5) to "very morally good" (9). As it turned out, the respondent groups were all equally likely to rate not keeping in contact on the morally bad side of the scale: 73% of ethicists said it was morally bad, compared to 74% of non-ethicist philosophers and 71% of non-philosophers (not a statistically significant difference). There was a small difference in mean response (3.4 for ethicists vs. 3.7 for non-ethicist philosophers and 3.3 for non-philosophers), but I suspect that was at least partly due to scaling issues. In sum, the groups expressed similar normative attitudes, with perhaps the non-ethicist philosophers a bit closer to neutral than the other groups. (Contrast the case of vegetarianism, where the groups expressed very different attitudes.)

In the second part of the survey we asked respondents to describe their own behavior on the same moral issues that we had inquired about in the first part of the survey. We asked two questions about keeping in touch with mom. First we asked: "Over the last two years, about how many times per month on average have you spoken with your mother (face to face or on the phone)? (If your mother is deceased, consider how often you spoke during her last two years of life.)" The response options were "once (or less) every 2-3 months", "about once a month", "2-4 times a month", and "5 times a month or more". Only the first of these responses was counternormative by the standards of the earlier normative question. By this measure there was a statistically marginal tendency for the philosophers to report higher rates of neglecting their mothers: 11% of ethicists reported infrequent contact, compared to 12% of non-ethicist philosophers and only 5% of non-philosophers (chi-square, p = .06). (There was a similar trend for the non-philosophers to report more contact overall, across the response options.)

Second, we asked those with living mothers to report how many days it had been since their last telephone or face-to-face contact. The trend was in the same direction, but only weakly: 10% of ethicists reported its having been more than 30 days, compared to 11% of non-ethicist philosophers, and 8% of ethicists (chi-square, p = .82). We also confirmed that age and gender were not confounding factors. (Older respondents reported less contact with their mothers, even looking just at cases in which the mother is living, but age did not differ between the groups. Gender did differ between the groups -- philosophers being more likely to be male -- but did not relate to self-reported contact with one's mother.) So -- at least to judge by self-report -- ethicists are no more attentive to their mothers than are non-ethicist professors, and perhaps a bit less attentive than professors outside of philosophy.

Maybe this isn't too surprising. But the fact that most people seem to find this kind of thing unsurprising is itself, I think, interesting. Do we simply take it for granted that ethicists behave, overall, no more kindly, responsibly, caringly than do other professors -- except perhaps on a few of their chosen pet issues? Why should we take that for granted? Why shouldn't we expect their evident interest in, and habits of reflection about, morality to improve their day-to-day behavior?

You might think that ethicists would at least show more consistency than the other groups between their expressed normative attitudes about keeping in touch with mom and their self-reported behavior. However, that was also not the case. In fact the trend -- not statistically significant -- was in the opposite direction. Among ethicists who said it was bad not to keep in at least monthly contact, 8% reported no contact within the previous 30 days, compared to 13% of ethicists reporting no contact within 30 days among those who did not say that a lack of contact was bad. Among non-ethicist philosophers, the corresponding numbers were 6% and 27%. Among non-philosophers, 4% and 14%. Summarized in plainer English, the trend was this: Among those who said it was bad not to keep in at least monthly contact with their mothers, ethicists were the ones most likely to report not in fact keeping in contact. And also there was less correlation between ethicists' expressed normative view and their self-reported behavior than for either of the other groups of professors (8%-13% being a smaller spread than either 6%-27% or 4%-14%). It bears repeating that these differences are not statistically significant by the tests Josh and I used (multiple logistic regression) -- so I only draw this weaker conclusion: Ethicists did not show any more consistency between their normative views and their behavior than did the other groups.

Perhaps the ethicists were simply more honest in their self-described behavior than were the other groups? -- that is, less willing to lie or fudge so as to make their self-reported behavior match up with their previously expressed normative view? It's possible, but to the extent were were able to measure honesty in survey response, we found no trend for more honest responding among the ethicists.

Delusions and Action (by guest blogger Lisa Bortolotti)

As I suggested in my previous post, we sometimes have the impression that people do not fully endorse their delusions. In some circumstances, they don’t seem to act in a way that is consistent with genuinely believing the content of their delusions. For instance, a person with persecutory delusions may accuse the nurses in the hospital of wanting to poison him, and yet eat happily the food he’s given; a person with Capgras delusion may claim that his wife has been replaced by an impostor but do nothing to look for his wife or make life difficult for the alleged “impostor”.

Some philosophers, such as Shaun Gallagher, Keith Frankish and Greg Currie, have argued on the basis of this phenomenon (which is sometimes called “double bookkeeping”) that delusions are not beliefs. They assume that action guidance is a core feature of beliefs and maintain that, if delusions are not action guiding, then they are not beliefs. Although I have sympathies with the view that action guidance is an important aspect of many of our beliefs, I find the argument against the belief status of delusions a bit too quick.

First, as psychiatrists know all too well, delusions lead people to act. People who believe that they are dead Cotard delusion may become akinetic, and may stop eating and washing as a result. People who suffer from delusions of guilt, and believe they should be punished for something evil they have done, engage in self-mutilation. People who falsely believe they are in danger (persecutory delusions) avoid the alleged source of danger and adopt so-called “safety behaviours”. The list could go on. In general it isn’t true that delusions are inert.

Second, when delusions don’t cause people to act, a plausible explanation is that the motivation to act is not acquired or not sustained. Independent evidence suggests that people with schizophrenia have meta-representational deficits, flattened affect and emotional disturbances, which can adversely impact on motivation. Moreover, as Matthew Broome argues, the physical environment surrounding people with the delusion doesn’t support the action that would ensue from believing the content of the delusion. The content of one’s delusion may be so bizarre (e.g., “There’s a nuclear reactor in my belly”) that no appropriate action presents itself. The social environment might be equally unsupportive. One may stop talking about one’s delusion and acting on it to avoid incredulity or abuse from others.

My view that delusions are continuous with ordinary beliefs is not challenged by these considerations: maybe to a lesser extent than people with delusions, we all act in ways that are inconsistent with some of the beliefs we report - when we’re hypocritical - and we may fail to act on some of our beliefs for lack of motivation - when we’re weak-willed.

Philosopher's Annual vs. Philosophical Review

Brian Leiter just revealed this year's selections for the Philosopher's Annual "attempt to pick the ten best papers of the year". I'm led to wonder: How successful are such attempts? Selection for the Philosopher's Annual is certainly prestigious -- but to what extent does selection reflect durable quality as opposed to other factors?

There is of course no straightforward way to measure philosophical quality. But here's my thought: If an article is still being cited thirty years after publication, that's at least a sign of influence. [Insert here all necessary caveats, qualifications, hesistations, and hem-haws about the relationship between quality and citation rates.]

I compared citation rates of the 30 articles appearing in the first three volumes of Philosopher's Annual (articles published 1977-1979) with the citation rates of the first ten articles published in Philosophical Review during the each of those same years. (I only included citations of the articles' original appearances, not citations of later reprints of those articles, since the latter are much harder to track. I see no reason to think this would bias the results.) To the extent the Philosopher's Annual selection committee adds valuable expertise to the process, they ought to be able to beat a dumb procedure like just selecting the first ten articles each year in a leading journal.

Evidently, however, they don't. Or at least they didn't. (Time will tell if this year's committee did any better.)

The median total citation rate in the ISI citation database was 14 for Philosopher's Annual and 18 for Philosophical Review -- that's total citations in indexed journals over the course of 30+ years (excluding self-citations), less than half a citation per year on average. (The difference in median is not statistically significant by the Mann-Whitney test, p = .72.) The median total citations since 2001 is 2.5 for Philosopher's Annual and 3.5 for Philosophical Review (again not significantly different, p = .62).

But the medians might not tell the whole story here. Look at the distribution of citation rates in the following graph.

Although the median is about the same, it looks like Philosophical Review has more articles near the median, while Philosopher's Annual has more barely-cited articles and much-cited articles. It's hard to know this for sure, though, since we're dealing with small numbers subject to chance fluctuation: Only three articles, all with Philosopher's Annual, had 100 or more citations. (My measure of the difference in spread is statistically marginal: Levene's test for equal variances on a log(x+1) transform of the data, p = .09.)

The three articles with at least 100 citations? Walton's "Fearing Fictions" (118 cites), Lewis's "Attitudes De Dicto and De Se" (224 cites), and Perry's "The Problem of the Essential Indexical" (301 cites) -- all good choices for influential articles from the late 1970s. The most cited article from the Philosophical Review list was Watson's "Skepticism about Weakness of Will" (73 cites). Worth noting: Lewis's "Attitudes De Dicto and De Se", though counted toward PA rather than PR, was actually published in Philosophical Review -- just not among the first ten articles its year. Also, skimming forward through the mid-1980s, my impressionistic sense is that it is not the case that 10% of the PA articles are as influential as the three just mentioned. So possibly the apparent difference is chance after all, at least on the upside of the curve.

Maybe those people who selected articles for Philosopher's Annual in the late 1970s were more likely both to pick swiftly-forgotten duds and to pick home-run articles, compared to an arbitrary sample from Philosophical Review. The selection process did not appear to favor quality, as measured by influence over three decades, but possibly the selection procedure added variance in quality, both on the upside and the downside. The normative implications of all this, I leave to you.

UPDATE, August 22:

Given the uncertainty about whether Philosopher's Annual shows greater variance, I couldn't resist looking at the next three years (which, it turns out, are articles published in 1980, 1981, and 1983, skipping 1982). The trend toward similar median and greater variance appears to be confirmed. On the high side, PA had three articles with 100 or more cites (R. Dworkin "What is Equality: Part 2" [426 cites], Lewis "New Work for a Theory of Universals [262], and Shoemaker "Causality and Properties" [106]), while PR had only one article in that group, the least-cited of the four (Dupre, "Natural Kinds and Biological Taxa" [104]). On the low side, PA had 6 articles cited 3 times or fewer, while PR had only 3. Here is a new graph of the spread, merging all the data from 1977-1983:

The medians of the merged data remain tied: 15.5 for Philosopher's Annual vs. 16.0 for Philosophical Review (Mann-Whitney, p = .75). And Levene's test for equal variance (on the log(x+1) transform) now shows statistical significance (p = .009).

Delusions and Self-Knowledge (by guest blogger Lisa Bortolotti)

Suppose that Chloe suffers from a delusion of erotomania and believes that President Obama is secretly in love with her. Chloe has never met him, so how does she know about his feelings? When probed, Chloe may offer no reason in support of her belief or offer reasons that others would consider unsatisfactory or irrelevant (e.g., “He is sending me love messages that only I can decipher”).

One explanation is that the belief is so certain for Chloe that she doesn’t feel the need to provide a justification for it. John Campbell argued that at least some delusions play the role of framework beliefs, a notion introduced by Wittgenstein in On Certainty. Framework beliefs (e.g., “The Earth existed long before my birth”) are central to our world-view and become virtually indubitable. They are the pillars on which the rest of our belief system rests, and can’t themselves be justified on the basis of beliefs that are more certain. However, they are manifested in our way of life - we wouldn’t believe our grandparents’ war stories if we thought that the Earth had come into existence at the same time as we did. In my view, delusions are unlikely to play the same role as framework beliefs. Framework beliefs are typically shared by an entire linguistic community, delusions are not. Framework beliefs are perfectly integrated in a belief system, whereas delusions are often in conflict with other beliefs.

What puzzles us about those delusions that seem to come out of nowhere is that the person reports them with conviction but doesn’t seem to genuinely endorse them, whereas there is no doubt that framework beliefs are endorsed. Richard Moran developed the notion of authorship which captures the sense in which we know what our beliefs are on the basis of the fact that we endorse their content. We can introspect some of our beliefs. We can infer some of our beliefs from our past behaviour. But at times we know that we believe that p, because we have made our mind up that p based on evidence for p. This mode of knowledge is direct like introspection, but it’s not as passive as perceiving a belief floating around in our stream of consciousness, and doesn’t involve looking inward, but looking outward, at the evidence for p. I know that I believe that the death penalty should be abolished because I have good reasons to believe that the death penalty should be abolished.

When I justify my beliefs with reasons that I regard as my best reasons, according to Moran I’m the author of the belief. The notion of authorship combines aspects of rationality and self-knowledge that we tend to take for granted. We expect that, if Chloe is convinced that Obama is in love with her, she must have some reasons to believe that, and she must be able to justify her belief on the basis of those reasons. But in the case of delusions, authorship can be fully or partially compromised. This suggests that people like Chloe experience a failure of self-knowledge.

Josh Knobe & Eric Schwitzgebel Chatting about the Moral Behavior of Ethicists

on Bloggingheads tv.

The Spelunker Illusion

Ten years ago, when I visited the Luray Caverns in Virginia, the tour guide took us down to the deepest cave and turned off the lights. He told us to wave our hands in front of our faces and asked if we could see our hands waving. We could, faintly -- or so we thought. He then asked us to wave our hands in front of our friends' faces. Our friends' hands we couldn't see at all. When we thought we could see our own hands we were fooling ourselves, he said. Not a single photon penetrated that darkness; no light actually came from our hands into our eyes.

Call this the spelunker illusion. The existence of this illusion appears to be common lore among avid cave explorers. I have also confirmed it in more pedestrian lightless environments. Yet no psychologist discusses it in any of literature I've reviewed in writing my forthcoming chapter on visual experience in darkness. But surely someone must have written a treatment? If you know of any discussions, I'd appreciate the reference!

I see three possible explanations of the spelunker illusion:

(1.) The brain's motor output creates hints of visual experience in accord with that output.

(2.) Since you know you are moving your hand, your visual system interprets low-level sensory noise in conformity with your knowledge (much as you might see a meaningful shape in a random splash of line segments).

(3.) There is no visual experience of motion, but the spelunker mistakenly thinks there is such experience because she expects there to be.

There might be other explanations too. I can see how we might start to empirically tease apart the three explanations above. For example, (1) and (2) seem to come apart if you have your friend move your passive hand rather than actively moving your hand yourself. And (3) can come apart from (1) and (2) if we can quash the expectation of experience.

Is this a mere curious triviality? Maybe. But the three explanations above do bear somewhat differently on different theories of sensory experience and our knowledge of it. Like other illusions, this illusion promises to reveal something about the hidden operation of the visual system, if it can be properly understood.

Update, April 28, 2014:

Leonard Rosgole and Miguel Roig point out to me that these phenomena were reported in the psychological literature in Hofstetter 1970, Brosgole and Neylon 1973, Brosgole and Roig 1983. They have since been confirmed by Dieter et al. 2013. If you're aware of earlier sources, I'd be curious to know.

Can You Believe That You Are Dead? (by guest blogger Lisa Bortolotti)

Irrationality is considered a defining feature of delusions in many influential definitions. But in what sense are delusions irrational?

Delusions can be procedurally irrational if they are badly integrated in one’s system of beliefs. They can also be inconsistent with other beliefs one has. Lucy who has Cotard delusion believes at the same time that dead people are motionless and speechless, that she can move and talk, and that she is dead. Here there is an apparent inconsistency that is “tolerated”, that it, doesn’t lead her to revise or reject one of the beliefs. Typical delusions are epistemically irrational, that is, they are badly supported by the evidence available to the subject, and they are not adequately revised in the light of new evidence. John who suffers from anosognosia doesn’t acknowledge that one of his legs was amputated and explains the fact that he can’t climb stairs any longer by a violent attack of arthritis.

These examples are striking. For many philosophers, the irrationality of delusions is a reason to deny that delusions are beliefs. Lucy can’t really believe that she’s dead, maybe what she means is that she feels empty and detached, as if she were dead. John can’t really believe that he has both legs because there is no problem with his visual perception. Maybe he wishes he still had both legs. This way of discounting delusions as metaphorical talk or wishful thinking is appealing. It is based on the view that there is a rationality constraint on the ascription of beliefs. We wouldn’t be charitable interpreters if we ascribed to Lucy the belief that she’s dead and to John the belief that he has arthritis.

I want to resist the idea that people with delusions don’t mean what they say. First, people often act on their delusions and base even important decisions in their lives on the almost unshakeable conviction that the content of their delusions is true. We couldn’t make sense of their behaviour at all if we couldn’t ascribe to them delusional beliefs. Second, the type of irrationality delusions exhibit is not qualitatively different from the irrationality of ordinary beliefs. Delusions may be irrational to a greater extent than ordinary beliefs, and the examples we considered were certainly puzzling, but procedural and epistemic irrationality can be found closer to home.

Students believe that wearing clothes of a certain colour will bring them good luck during the exam and nurses believe that more accidents occur in the nights of full moon. These beliefs are certainly inconsistent with other beliefs well-educated people have about what counts as the probable cause of an event. Prejudiced beliefs about black people being more violent are groundless generalisations that can be just as insulated from evidence and as resistant to change as clinical delusions.

Maybe what makes delusions so puzzling is only that they are statistically less common (not necessarily more irrational) than other procedurally and epistemically irrational beliefs.

On the Moral Behavior of Moral Psychology Researchers

Marc Hauser, author of Moral Minds, is now on leave from Harvard after an inquiry finds evidence of scientific misconduct.

Clinical Delusions: What Are They? (by guest blogger Lisa Bortolotti)

(Lisa Bortolotti is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at University of Birmingham and author of Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs.)

In the last five years I have been working on the nature of clinical delusions, and have asked what they can tell us about the philosophy and psychology of belief. Clinical delusions are a symptom of a variety of psychiatric disorders, among which are schizophrenia and dementia. Some delusions have fairly mundane content, such as delusions of persecution or jealousy. Other delusions are very bizarre, and people may come to assert that they are dead (Cotard delusion) or that their spouse or family member has been replaced by an impostor (Capgras delusion).

In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association DSM-IV-TR, 2000), delusions are defined in epistemic terms, as beliefs that are false, insufficiently supported by the available evidence, resistant to counterevidence and not shared by other people belonging to the same cultural group. In the philosophical literature it is an open question whether delusions should be considered as genuinely instances of belief.

According to the two-factor theory of delusions, delusions are explanatory hypotheses for an abnormal experience which is due to brain damage. The first factor contributing to the formation of the delusion is a neuropsychological deficit and the second factor is an impairment in the evaluation of hypotheses. Imagine that, overnight, Julia’s sister appears different to Julia, and this is powerful experience. One possible explanation is that an alien has abducted Julia’s sister during the night and replaced her with an almost identical replica without anybody else noticing. This hypothesis is implausible and even Julia would consider it as highly improbable, but if her hypothesis-evaluation system doesn’t work properly and doesn’t dismiss it, Julia may endorse it as something she truly believes. As a result, she may become hostile and even aggressive towards the alleged impostor.

Even from the oversimplified example above, one can see where the tension is. On the one hand, delusions seem to be just like any other beliefs. They are reported with sincerity and they can affect the person’s other intentional states and behaviour. They “make sense” of a very unusual experience. On the other hand, there is a neuropsychological deficit at the origin of delusions that is not present in the non-clinical population. The affective channel of Julia’s facial recognition process is damaged. The good functioning of the hypothesis-evaluation system is also compromised, maybe due to exaggerated versions of common reasoning biases. Julia “jumped to conclusions” as she accepted her initial hypothesis on the basis of insufficient evidence and without considering other, more probable, alternatives. This unusual aetiology and the apparent extreme irrationality might seem to be in tension with the view that delusions are “beliefs” in the ordinary sense of that term.

However, in my view, the main difference between clinical delusions and other irrational beliefs is that delusions severely undermine well-being. People with schizophrenia are often isolated and withdrawn and their life plans are disrupted. But on purely epistemic grounds we can’t easily tell delusions apart from the false beliefs that we ourselves report and ascribe to others on an everyday basis, such as: “Women make poor scientists” or “I failed the exam because the teacher hates me”. Irrationality is indeed all around us.

Knowing That P Without Believing That P

(with Blake Myers-Schulz) now available in draft here.

Abstract:

The standard view in contemporary epistemology is that knowledge entails belief. Proponents of this claim rarely offer a positive argument in support of it. Rather, they tend to treat the view as obvious, and if anything, support the view by arguing that there are no convincing counterexamples. We find this strategy to be problematic. In particular, we do not think the standard view is obvious, and moreover, we think there are cases in which a subject can know some proposition P without (or at least without determinately) believing that P. In accordance with this, we present four plausible examples of knowledge without belief, and we provide empirical evidence which suggests that our intuitions about these scenarios are by no means atypical.

Comments welcome, as always! (Either on this post or to my email address.)

This research was previously summarized in this post. The current version presents the issues and results in more detail and includes some new controls to address objections raised in the comments to the earlier post.

Self-Unconsciousness

... a new essay of mine, available here. I first presented this essay at a conference in Fullerton organized by JeeLoo Liu and Heather Battaly in 2009. (See here for a YouTube video of the original talk.)

This is a (relatively) short paper arguing that we have poor knowledge of our stream of conscious experience, of our morally most important attitudes, of our evaluatively loaded personality traits, and of our overall moral character.

It sacrifices depth and detail for breadth and readability, but I suppose that isn't always a bad thing.

Comments welcome, as always, either by email or on this post.

Young Female Philosophers Must Feel Bad About All That Meat They Eat

Regular readers may recall that in 2009 Josh Rust and I surveyed several hundred philosophers and non-philosophers on their opinions about various moral issues; we also asked survey respondents to describe their own behavior on those same issues. Some preliminary results of the study are here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The biggest divergences in moral opinion concerned our question about "regularly eating the meat of mammals such as beef and pork". 60% of ethics professor respondents rated mammal-meat consumption as morally bad, compared to 45% of non-ethicist philosophers and just 19% of non-philosophers. Opinion also divided by gender and age. Women were about 1.5 times as likely to condemn mammal-meat consumption (55% of women rated it bad vs. 37% of men). There was a similar shift of opinion with age: 55% of respondents born in 1960 or later condemned mammal-meat consumption, compared to 35% born before 1960. One might expect a compound effect for young female philosophers, and indeed it was so: Fully 81% of female philosophers born in 1960 or later said it was morally bad to regularly eat the meat of mammals. To put this degree of consensus in perspective: In last year's PhilPapers survey of philosophical opinion, only 82% of philosophers endorsed non-skeptical realism about the existence of an external world. (No word, so far, on how philosophers who deny the existence of an external world feel about seeming to consume meat.)

People often do things they think are a little morally bad. For example, I think eating meat is slightly morally bad (on par with driving a gas-guzzling car or being somewhat neglectful of emails from undergraduates), and yet for lunch today I had a salami sandwich. Apparently, a substantial proportion of young female philosophers think and act as I do: 38% of them reported having eaten the meat of a mammal at their previous evening meal -- a rate not statistically different from the 39% reported rate among respondents overall. (Caveat: The total number of female philosopher repondents born 1960 or later was small -- twenty-six -- so the exact percentage should be interpreted cautiously.) Similarly, despite the difference in normative view, there was no statistically detectable difference in the mean age of respondents who said they had eaten the meat of a mammal at their previous evening's meal: mean birth year 1954.3 for those who said they had vs. 1955.1 for those who said they hadn't.

Our survey doesn't call into doubt the relationship between normative ethical view about meat-eating and strict vegetarianism: 78% of those who reported that they never eat mammal meat said eating mammal meat is bad, compared to 32% of those who reported sometimes eating meat. However, it seems that among non-vegetarians there is little if any relationship between normative ethical view and actual meat consumption: If you don't think eating meat is bad enough to warrant strict vegetarianism, but you still think it's somewhat bad, you're just as likely as anyone else, it seems, to have a salami sandwich for lunch. Conscience and behavior go separate ways.

Yosemite

Apologies for being slow in posting and replying to comments recently. I spent last week on vacation in Yosemite.

In Yosemite, I heard two bears (on two different occasions), each within about 20-30 feet, but I saw neither. For some reason, this is vastly more disappointing than had I seen two bears at the same distance but not heard them. Why is that? I don't think it's just that visual information is much richer than auditory information -- for I would have been happy even with a fleeting glimpse, even if that glimpse contained no more information than I received by hearing the crashing sounds through the underbrush.

It is also quite likely that light from those bears was reflected into my eyes and made some difference to my visual experience, despite the fact that I was unable to discern its bearish source. This also is disappointing, for some reason. In some sense, I probably saw both bears -- I just didn't see that they were bears. Seeing that is just much cooler.

In about 20 miles of hiking the trails of Yosemite, I noticed only two pieces of litter. I find that quite remarkable given that some of these trails get 10,000 hikers a day.

John Stuart Mill on the Value of Moral Disagreement

I have been thinking lately about the value (or disvalue) of philosophical moral reflection, and I find myself reading, yet again, Mill's On Liberty. I love the prose in that book. Here is what Mill says about the value of moral disagreement:

We often hear the teachers of all creeds lamenting the difficulty of keeping up in the minds of believers a lively apprehension of the truth which they normally recognise, so that it may penetrate the feelings, and acquire a real mastery over the conduct. No such difficulty is complained of while the creed is fighting for its existence: even the weaker combatants then know and feel what they are fighting for, and the difference between it and other doctrines; and in that period of every creed's existence, not a few persons may be found, who have realised its fundamental principles in all the forms of thought, have weighed and considered them in all their important bearings, and have experienced the full effect on the character which belief in that creed ought to produce in a mind thoroughly imbued with it. But when it has come to be an hereditary creed, and to be received passively, not actively -- when the mind is no longer compelled, in the same degree as at first, to exercise its vital powers on the questions which its belief presents to it, there is a progressive tendency to forget all of the belief except the formularies, or to give it a dull and torpid assent, as if accepting it on trust dispensed with the necessity of realising it in consciousness, or testing it by personal experience, until it almost ceases to connect itself at all with the inner life of the human being. Then are seen the cases, so frequent in this age of the world as almost to form the majority, in which the creed remains as it were outside the mind, incrusting and petrifying it against all other influences addressed to the higher parts of our nature; manifesting its power by not suffering any fresh and living conviction to get in, but itself doing nothing for the mind or heart, except standing sentinel over them to keep them vacant.

You go, baby!

The Nature of Attitudes

I've written extensively on belief (e.g., here, here, and here), but very little on other attitudes like desire, intention, and love (though see here on love). (I regard desire and intention as "propositional attitudes" in the philosopher's sense, but not love.) Here's the summary version of my current thinking:

(1.) Attitudes are dispositional. To believe that there's beer in the fridge is to be disposed to act, react, and cognize in certain ways. It is not a matter of what you're currently doing or thinking. So, for example, your attitudes don't change simply by virtue of your falling unconscious. To believe that there's beer in the fridge is to be disposed to go to the fridge if you decide to have a beer, to say "yes" if someone asks you if there is beer in the fridge, to feel surprise were you to open the fridge and find no beer, to conclude "I will win a million dollars!" if you're told that you will win a million dollars if there is beer in your fridge, etc. Such dispositions are, of course -- like virtually all dispositions -- subject to defeaters or excusing conditions (for example, you might not tell the truth if you want to keep the beer a secret). Similarly: To want to complete your dissertation is to be disposed to feel good if it seems that you're making progress on your dissertation, to favor actions that promote completion of the dissertation over other actions all else being equal, to think to yourself "completing that dissertation would be a good thing to do", etc. To love someone is to be disposed to prioritize that person's well-being in your choices, to feel especially bad when bad things happen to that person, to value having a connection with that person, etc.

(2.) But attitudes also have an occurrent face. In fact, they have two occurrent faces. (By "occurrent" here I mean having to do with events that transpire at particular moments of time.) Attitudes can manifest, that is, the disposition can be activated. You can actually go to the fridge to find the beer, do something to further your dissertation work, choose something reflecting your prioritization of the welfare of someone you love. And attitudes can form (or disappear). A minute ago, perhaps, you had no desire for the chicken sandwich vs. the roast beef. You hadn't started thinking about it yet; sometimes you choose one, sometimes the other. You look at the menu and make a choice, forming a desire for the chicken.

Forming an attitude can be nonconscious, if it happens underground, as it were, or it can involve dedicating attention or consciousness. The conscious formation of a belief -- or the conscious reinforcement of that belief, if it was already present -- we can call a "judgment". The conscious formation of an intention we can call a "choice". We don't have natural names for some of the other conscious attitude formation episodes. ("Falling in love" isn't quite what I have in mind as the conscious formation of love; judging that something is good isn't quite the same as forming a desire for it -- though perhaps judging good and forming/reinforcing a desire are close enough to explain why we don't have separate terms for them.) Of course, sometimes the judgments and choices don't stick and the attitude isn't actually formed. You choose to exit the freeway at the next offramp, for example, but then forget. You say to yourself, and quite sincerely judge, that death is not bad while failing to form the dispositional profile appropriate to that attitude. (I have a paper about such cases here.)

(3.) Attitudes are not discrete entities; rather they overlap. This is true both within and between attitude types.

First, within attitude types: I do not have one ball in my "belief box" for "my cat is in the tree" and another separate ball for "Waterball [the name of my cat] is in the tree" and yet another separate ball for "Waterball is in the oak" and yet another for "our only pet is in that tall plant right there", etc. I believe all those things, more or less, but not via discretely held contents. What I have is a cluster of dispositions such that all of these things are approximately true to say of me -- though possibly some are more apt than others (for example, if I'd be disposed to call the tree an elm rather than an oak if asked).

Second, between attitude types: The dispositional profile for thinking that it would be good to finish your dissertation largely overlaps with the dispositional profile for wanting to finish your dissertation, such that probably you have both or you have neither. But the dispositional profiles come apart enough that in some cases one way of putting things can be more apt: Intellectual acceptance is more central to the belief-good profile and emotionality is more central to the desire profile so that if you are prone to form pro-dissertation-completing intellectual judgments that leave you cold, it might be more apt to describe you as believing-good than as desiring (though still, in a way, you desire or half-desire), and vice versa if you're more prone to desirous emotionality than intellectual endorsement. But let me be clear: On my view this is not a matter of the attitudes being ontologically distinct and causally connected; rather it's a matter of their having partly overlapping dispositional profiles with different dispositions closer to the center. Similarly for hating vs. loathing, appreciating vs. being thankful, resentment vs. anger vs. feeling wronged vs. thinking you've been wronged, etc.

Lots of cool things follow from this approach to the attitudes, such as weak motivational internalism; the avoidance of puzzles about the countability of beliefs and of problems in drawing the line between implicit and explicit beliefs, an appealing gradualism about attitude change (including learning and forgetting), the lack of a need for a discrete type of cognitive token for every attitude verb, and a nicely moderate position about the relationship between desiring and believing good.

Psychology of Philosophy: The Strong Program

Why do you endorse Platonism about numbers, or idealism, or skepticism, or consequentialism, or any other a priori justified (you think) philosophical opinion? I suggest that you look not to the philosophical truth of that view, with which you are somehow better in touch with than those with whom you disagree. Rather, look to your own biases, personality, and background.

The "strong program" in sociology of science holds as a methodological precept that in explaining the rise and fall of scientific theories one may not appeal to the truth or falsity of those theories. So also, I recommend, in thinking about the origins of your own and others' philosophical views, you would do well not to think about the truth of those views. You would also do well not to think in other terms that imply success or insight, such as "seeing the weaknesses" in a predecessor's view, or "recognizing" troubles or advantages of a substantive, philosophical sort, or "proving" or "establishing" anything.

Where philosophy blurs into science or math, this constraint becomes blurry. I say this because I think -- unlike the cartoon version of sociologists of science -- that in science and math features of the world (or of mathematical structures) start to apply strong pressures on views. The farther toward a priori philosophy, the less influence from such pressures. The farther toward concrete science or formal mathematics, the more the influence from such pressures.

No a priori claim is so patently false that no philosopher would endorse it. No constellation of views is so bizarre and self-contradictory that no philosopher would sign up for those views, were her background motivations and culturally-given assumptions right. If there are any a priori philosophical truths among the factors influencing our philosophical theorizing, their influence is modest.

Call for Papers: Workshop on Ethics and Mind at the University of Miami

... keynote speaker John Doris.

Submissions are invited for the 3rd annual Mind and Ethics [Graduate Student] Workshop at the University of Miami, November 20th-21st 2010. Proposals are due September 1st. We encourage submissions of finished works or works in progress (5,000-10,000 words) addressing issues at the intersection of philosophy of mind and ethics. Please send papers prepared for blind review to ethicsandmind@gmail.com.

The Winner of the Sound-Color Qualia Inversion Contest

... is Edmond Wright.

The aim of the contest was to find a published discussion of the possibility of sound-color qualia inversion, that is, the possibility of someone linguistically and behaviorally practically indistinguishable from normal people but who has auditory experiences when stimulated by light and visual experiences when stimulated by sonic vibrations. Several satisfactory citations were submitted in the comments thread and by email, so the contest rules required that I select what I judged to be the best example (as of the June 14 deadline). This was, I thought, Edmond Wright's article in Synthese (1993, vol. 97, p. 365-382, esp. p. 370-371), which Wright himself mentioned in an email to me. Per the terms of the contest, I owe Wright a drink of his choice next time we are in the same town.

Honorable mention goes to Jeremy Goodman, both for being the first to mention Adam Wager's excellent 1999 article in Philosophical Psychology (vol. 12, p. 263-281, esp. p. 269) and for his insightful comments and references throughout the discussion thread.

If you saw the original post announcing the contest, you may recall that the contest was prompted by Saul Kripke's claim, made twice in a two oral presentations at U.C. Riverside, that no philosopher had ever suggested the possibility of sound-color qualia inversion. If only it were always so easy to definitely refute what Kripke says!

Do Metaethicists Really Behave Worse Than Other Ethicists?

On Friday, I presented data suggesting -- contrary to common opinion -- that deontologists behave no worse than virtue ethicists and consequentialists. Another opinion I've often heard from philosophers is that metaethicists -- that is, philosophers who focus on the most abstract general questions about ethics (such as whether there are moral truths at all and if so what their metaphysical grounding is) -- behave, on average, less well than do other ethicists, perhaps especially applied ethicists. The same data set provides evidence on this question too.

At the center of the dataset is a survey Josh Rust and I sent to hundreds of professional philosophers. Near the end of the survey we asked respondents, "If an ethics-related area is among your specializations, which of the following best reflects the level of abstraction at which you tend to consider ethical issues? (check all that apply)". Response options were "metaethics", "normative ethics" [i.e., theoretical debates about deontology vs. consequentialism, etc., an intermediate level of abstraction], "applied ethics", and "no ethics-related area among my specializations". 28% of philosophers claimed a specialization in metaethics, 45% in normative ethics, 32% in applied ethics (these three groups overlapping, of course), and 36% claimed no such specialization. Although there was a trend for the non-ethicists to be more male (78% vs. 72%) this was not statistically significant given our sample size (361 respondents). Non-ethicist respondents did tend to be a little younger (mean birthyear 1958 vs. 1954). We saw no gender or age differences by level of abstraction within ethics.

Looking at our various questions about respondents' opinions on various applied ethical issues, applied ethicists seemed to think it morally better to vote regularly than did the other groups; ethicists in general thought it morally worse than did non-ethicists not to keep in at least monthly telephone or face-to-face contact with one's mother; and ethicists asserted more of a duty to give to charity (13% of ethicists said it was not the case that the typical professor should donate to charity vs. 24% of non-ethicists). We saw no detectable differences among the groups on the morality of belonging to one's main disciplinary society (for philosophers, the APA), eating the meat of mammals, being an organ or blood donor, or responding to student emails.

The groups did not differ in their self-reported rates of dues-paying membership in the APA, but looking directly at APA membership lists, applied ethicists were less likely than were other groups actually to be members of the APA (61% vs. 75%). Metaethicists tended to report voting in fewer public elections than did applied ethicists, and actual voting data obtained from public records appeared to bear out that trend (an estimated 1.26 votes/year for applied ethicists, vs. 1.05 for metaethicists; I should clarify here that Josh and I "de-identified" the survey data so that we cannot make inferences about particular individuals' survey responses). Metaethicists also reported eating more mammal meat than did applied ethicists (mean 5.2 vs. 3.2 meals/week, and 50% vs. 31% reporting having eaten the meat of a mammal at the last evening meal). Meta-ethicists self-reported giving less to charity (mean 3.9% of income vs 5.2%, excluding one applied ethicist who claimed to have given 500% of his income to charity) and metaethicists appeared to be less motivated by the survey's charity incentive (half of survey recipients received a charity incentive, that is a promise by us (which we did fulfill) to give $10 to a charity of the respondent's choice among six major charities in return for the completed survey; 45% of returned metaethicists' surveys had the charity incentive vs. 57% of applied ethicists'). We found no differences in self-reported organ or blood donation, self-reported or actual responsiveness to undergraduate emails, overall rate of suspicious responding to the survey, or frequency of contact with one's mother (if living).

Obviously, there's room for difference of opinion about these measures, but my interpretation of the data is that they tend to weakly confirm the hypothesis that metaethicists behave not quite as morally well as do applied ethicists.

Do Kantians Really Behave Worse Than Other Ethicists?

As I noted in a previous post, Kantian ethicists seem to have a reputation among philosophers for behaving worse than other sorts of ethicists. But who has any systematic empirical data on this? Well, Josh Rust and I do!

Our data are based on a questionnaire Josh and I sent to hundreds of philosophers last year (more description and other results here, here, here, and here). The questionnaire asked first about the goodness or badness of theft from a friend, paying membership dues to the APA, voting in public elections, having regular conversations with your mother, eating the meat of mammals, being an organ donor, being a blood donor, responding to undergraduate emails, and donating to charity. Then, second, we solicited self-reports of these same behaviors (except for theft). In some cases we also have direct data about actual behavior. Near the end of the questionnaire, we asked about normative ethical view -- that is, about the philosopher's general theoretical approach to ethics. The response options were consequentialist, deontologist, virtue ethicist, skeptical, or no settled position.

(If you're not familiar with those terms: Consequentialists think, roughly, that one should act so as to produce the best expected consequences for everyone. Deontologists think, roughly, that one should act according to certain moral rules, such as don't lie or don't kill innocent people, even if you know that abiding by those rules won't produce the best consequences overall. Kant is currently the most eminent deontologist. Virtue ethicists think, roughly, that ethics is about having moral virtues like honesty, courage, and kindness.)

First, let's look at the general distribution of theoretical approach. Ethicists were more likely to be deontologists (29%) than consequentialists (10%), whereas non-ethicists were split about equally between those two positions (17% for both). One might wonder about causal direction here: Does seriously studying ethics tend to lead philosophers to abandon consequentialism? Or are consequentialists less likely to become ethicists? Or...? Rounding out the answers: 30% of ethicist and 27% of non-ethicist respondents espoused virtue ethics, 29% of ethicists and 33% of non-ethicists said they had no settled position, and 2% of ethicists and 6% of non-ethicists expressed skepticism. We detected no differences by age or gender.

There were two questions where I thought consequentialists, deontologists, and virtue ethicists would differ substantially in their normative opinions -- the meat question and the charity question. Consequentialists have a reputation for emphasizing the importance of charitable donation and vegetarianism (most famously Peter Singer). Surprisingly to me, however, the groups showed no difference in moral opinion on these questions. Only 52% of consequentialists rated "regularly eating the meat of mammals" toward the morally bad end of the scale, compared to 58% of deontologists and 53% of virtue ethicists -- well within statistical chance. Likewise, the mean percentage of income that respondents said that the typical professor should donate to charity was 7.5% (for consequentialists) vs. 7.4% (for both virtue ethicists and deontologists), again well within chance. Apparently, Singer's views aren't representative of consequentialists generally.

Virtue ethicists were less likely than others to say that it's morally bad not to be an organ donor (48% vs. 65% for consequentialists and deontologists) and that it's morally good to regularly donate blood (81% vs. 94% of consequentialists and 91% of deontologists). Virtue ethicists were also least likely to say it was good to pay membership dues to support one's main disciplinary society (59% vs. 80% of consequentialists and 74% of deontologists). Responses to the other normative questions seemed to be about the same for all groups.

Looking at self-reported and actual behavior: Virtue ethicists were least likely to belong to the APA (philosophers' main disciplinary society), based on our examination of the membership list: 58% vs. 65% of consequentialists and 74% of deontologists. However, they were just as likely to report being members (74% vs. 67% and 77%). Virtue ethicists were also least likely to report having an organ donor indicator on their drivers' license (58% vs. 78% and 70%). On the other hand, the deontologists were the ones who reported the longest lapse of time since their last blood donation (for eligible donors): 1994 vs. 2001 for consequentialists and 2000 for virtue ethicists. (Does this have anything to do with Kant's odd views on the matter?) And consequentialists appeared to be more responsive to the survey's charity incentive: Half of the questionnaires went out with a promise that we would donate $10 to a charity of the respondent's choice (among six major charities) when the survey was returned. 67% of the consequentialists' returned surveys were charity-incentive surveys, compared to 46% of deontologists' and 51% of virtue ethicists'.

We found no other differences in self-reported behavior, or in actual measured behavior -- including voting rate in public elections (based on actual voting records), responsiveness to sham undergraduate emails we had sent, or detected honesty or dishonesty in their survey responses.

In sum, we found no evidence that deontologists -- many or most of whom are presumably Kantians, broadly speaking -- behave any worse than professors who favor other normative theories.

Ethicists' vs Non-Ethicists' Honesty in Questionnaire Responses

In 2009, Josh Rust and I ran a survey asking hundreds of ethicists, non-ethicist philosophers, and comparison professors, first, a variety of questions about their views on ethical matters (e.g., vegetarianism, voting, staying in touch with one's mother) and second, about their own personal behavior on the same matters. (No identifying information was associated with the responses, of course.) Some previous posts on the survey are here and here and here.

Now one of the cool things about this study is that in some cases we also have data on actual behavior -- thus enabling a three-way comparison of normative attitude, self-reported behavior, and actual behavior (as you'll see in the links above).

Thus, a measure of honesty falls out of the questionnaire: How well are the self-reports related to the actual behavior? Actually, we have two different types of measures of honesty: For most of the topics on which we didn't have direct behavioral data we asked two behavioral questions, one vague and easy to fudge, the other concrete and more difficult to fudge without explicit deceptive intent. So, for example, we asked at how many meals per week the respondent ate the meat of a mammal (the fudgy question) and also whether she ate the meat of a mammal at her last evening meal not including snacks (the concrete question). If, hypothetically, half the respondents who reported eating mammal meat at 3 or fewer meals per week also reported having eaten it at the last evening meal, we could infer that that group of respondents were fudging their answers.

We created a composite of six types of suspicious (or demonstrably false) responses and we compared the rates of suspicious responding between the groups. The six measures were:

* comparison of self-reported number of votes since the year 2000 with actual voting records;

* comparison of claims to have voted in the Nov. 2008 U.S. general Presidential election with actual voting records;

* comparison of claims of 100% or 95% responsiveness to undergraduate emails with responsiveness to emails that we had sent that were designed to look as though they were from undergraduates (see here, and yes we got IRB approval);

* for philosophers only, comparison of claims of membership in the American Philosophical Association with membership records (excluded from the analysis in this post, but discussed here);

* comparison of a general claim about how often the respondent talks with her mother (if living) with a specific claim about date of last conversation;

* comparison of a general claim about how often the respondent donates blood (if eligible) with a specific claim about date of last donation;

* comparison of a general claim about meals per week at which the respondent eats the meat of a mammal with a specific claim about the last evening meal.

We found that all three groups showed similar rates of suspicious responding: 50% of ethicists, 49% percent of non-ethicist philosophers, and 49% of comparison professors gave at least one suspicious response -- variation well within chance, of course, given the number of respondents. (Remember that on the second three measures a suspicious response is not necessarily a lie or even an unconscious self-serving distortion, but only an answer or pattern of answering that seems more likely to be false or distortive than another pattern would be, when aggregated across respondents.)

Thus, as in previous research we failed to find any evidence that ethicists behave any better than other socially comparable non-ethicists.

This is assuming, of course, that lying or giving distorted answers on surveys like ours is morally bad. Now, as it happens, we asked our respondents about that very issue, and 87% (89% of ethicists) said it was morally bad to answer dishonestly on surveys like ours. We also had a measure of how bad they thought it was -- a 9-point scale from "very morally good" through "morally neutral" to "very morally bad". As it turned out, there was no statistically significant relationship between normative attitude and rate of suspicious responding.

Near the end of the survey, we also explicitly asked respondents whether they had answered any of the questions dishonestly. Few said they did, and answers to this question appeared to be unrelated to rates of suspicious responding: Among respondents with no suspicious looking responses, 6 (2.2%) said they had answered dishonestly, compared to 7 (2.6%) of the respondents with at least one suspicious response.

Finally, we had asked the philosophy respondents whether they prefered a deontological, consequentialist, virtue ethical, or some other sort of normative ethical view. Deontologists are often portrayed as sticklers about lying -- Kant, the leading historical deontologist, was notoriously very strict on the point. However we detected no difference in patterns of suspicious responding according to normative ethical view. To the extent there was a trend, it was for the consequentialists to be least likely to have suspicious or false responses (47%, vs. 56% for deontologists and 58% for virtue ethicists; this analysis includes the APA question).

An Opportunity to Collaborate with Psychologists on Experimental Philosophy Research

Jonathan Phillips writes:

The Experiment Month initiative is a program designed to help philosophers conduct experimental studies. If you are interested in running a study, you can send your study proposal to the Experiment Month staff. Then, if your proposal is selected for inclusion, we will conduct the study online, send you the results and help out with any statistical analysis you may need. All proposals are due Sept. 1.

For further information, see the Experiment Month website: http://www.yale.edu/cogsci/XM/

Qualia Inversion: Sound and Color (A Contest with a "Valuable Prize"!)

If you're the kind of person who reads philosophy blogs, you've probably heard of inverted qualia thought experiments. The most famous example is red-green inversion: The red-green invert is someone who has reddish color experiences when she looks at green things (grass, leaves) and has greenish color experience when she looks at red things (blood, ripe tomatoes). Since the invert, like the rest of us, learns the meaning of color terms by example, her language and behavior is entirely, or at least virtually, indistinguishable from anyone else's. She uses the English word "red" to refer to the color of blood and "green" to refer to the color of grass, despite the difference in her color experiences of those things.

In a talk at UC Riverside a couple of weeks ago, Saul Kripke asserted that no philosopher had ever suggested the possibility of sound-color qualia inversion -- that is, the possibility of a person who experiences sound qualia when stimulated by light and color qualia when stimulated by sonic vibrations. Let's be clear that Kripke was not denying the possibility of synaesthesia. He was not denying that people sometimes (for example) experience colors alongside sounds when stimulated by sounds. Kripke's claim, rather, was that no philosopher had contemplated a true sound-color qualia invert -- someone who normally experiences sound rather than color when stimulated by light and color rather than sound when stimulated by sonic vibration and whose language and behavior from the outside is indistinguishable from that of non-inverts.

Kripke said this twice. I told him I was pretty sure he was wrong and that I had read such a discussion. Kripke challenged me to send him the citation. After a little research, I turned up my source: an unpublished essay by one of my graduate students, Nathan Westbrook. When I asked Nathan whether he knew of any precedents, he said he didn't. I also tried asking someone who had recently published a review of the qualia inversion literature; he too said he didn't know of anyone who had advanced that type of example.

But given the huge number of philosophy articles published each year and the prominence of qualia inversion examples, I feel sure someone must have discussed this kind of case somewhere. Therefore, I offer a challenge: Find a published discussion of sound-color qualia inversion. The winner will receive a "valuable prize" -- hm, what can I offer? How about: a drink of your choice (coffee, beer, whatever) on me, next time we are in the same city. (Okay, maybe that's no so valuable.)

Rules:

* The contest is open until June 14th or until someone delivers a satisfactory example, whichever comes later.

* To be satisfactory, the discussion must be published in a reputable philosophy journal or press.

* To be satisfactory, the discussion need not ultimately endorse the possibility of color-sound qualia inversion, just take it seriously.

* If more than one satisfactory example is submitted, the person who submits the best example will be declared the winner, where I will judge "best" impressionistically, criteria including but not limited to: the length and quality of the discussion, the prominence of the writer or venue, and how seriously the possibility is taken.

* If more than one person submits the best example, the first person to submit the best example will be declared the winner.

* Submit your example as a comment on this post or by email to me.

For the record, I lean toward thinking that sound-color qualia inversion is possible in a conceptual/metaphysical/pulling-it-out-of-my-a-priori-hindquarters-for-the-little-that's-worth sense of possibility.

Color experiences famously differ along three dimensions: hue, saturation, and lightness or brightness. They also differ in egocentric, subjective location. To work an inversion with sound, we need a one-to-one mapping of dimensions of variation. Subjective location would appear to be easy, since both colors and sounds have subjective location. Since brightness and saturation are both unidimensional, we might be able to map them one-to-one onto pitch and volume, which are also unidimensional. Hue varies in a bit more complex a way, with red-green as opposites and blue-yellow as opposites, but perhaps patterns in the overtone series could be used. Probably the hue-overtone series mapping would require some tweaking to work, but presumably human-like beings with a slightly different set of visual and auditory capacities could exhibit a clean mapping (e.g., if the beings were only capable of discriminating certain patterns in overtone variation). Another complication is our much higher sensitivity to variation in visual as opposed to auditory position. But I don't see why, for the purposes of the thought experiment, we shouldn't be liberal about such matters: The sound-color invert, for example, might be an invert only of a relatively poor-sighted person and/or might have an exquisite appreciation of subtle variations in the position of sound sources subjective location of sound qualia.

55-Year-Old Philosophers vs. 55-Year-Old Scientists

I continue to be struck by my finding, last week, that great philosophers produce their most influential work at a very broad distribution of ages. (Nifty chart here; if it's blurry click a second time to enlarge.) Physicists and mathematicians, in contrast, are reputed to peak early. Einstein notoriously said "A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so".

Stephan and Levin (1992) have compiled data on the age at which Nobel-Prize-winning scientists did the work leading to the Nobel Prize. (The data could use updating, admittedly.) Their data confirm that scientists do tend to peak fairly early (even if not as early as Einstein suggests) -- in their mid-thirties. The graph below contrasts the distribution of ages at which scientists did the work earning them the Nobel with the (approximate) distribution of ages at which leading philosophers born before 1920 did their most influential work (see the earlier post for my method; one tweak on that method: I used Google Scholar to break the two ties).

Note that while chemistry, physics, and medicine all peak sharply in the 30s, philosophy distributes evenly across the 30s, 40s, and 50s. Note also that although there is almost no Nobel work done by scientists in their 60s or older (0.8%, according to Stephan and Levin), in my sample -- admittedly small, just 46 philosophers -- 8.7% of great philosophers' most-cited work was done at age 61 or older.

So take heart, my gray-haired friends!