What Experimental Philosophy Might Be

What is "experimental philosophy"? There is, I think, some tension in how philosophers use the term -- tension between a narrow and a wide conception.

Most of the work canonically identified as "experimental philosophy" surveys ordinary people's judgments (or "intuitions") about philosophical concepts, and it does so by soliciting people's responses to questions about hypothetical scenarios. (See, e.g., Knobe's chairman study regarding intentional action, Swain et al.'s study of order effects on knowledge judgments, and Machery et al.'s study of cultural variation in the perceived reference of proper names.) Thus, philosophers sometimes think of "experimental philosophy" as the enterprise of running these sorts of studies. Joshua Alexander, for example, in his 2012 book portrays experimental philosophy as the study of people's philosophical intuitions, as does Timothy Williamson, in his forthcoming critique of the "Experimental Philosophy revolution".

Conceived narrowly in this way, experimental philosophy is a coherent and (mostly) recent movement, with a distinctive methodology and an interrelated network of results. It is possible to discuss and critique it as a unified body.

However, there also seems to be a broader conception of experimental philosophy -- a conception that has never, I think, been adequately articulated, a conception that Josh Knobe and Shaun Nichols, for example, gesture toward in their "Experimental Philosophy Manifesto", before they shift their focus to experimental philosophy in the narrow sense. In this broad sense, philosophers who do empirical work aimed at addressing traditionally philosophical questions are also experimental philosophers, even if they don't survey people about their intuitions. In practice, the narrow/broad distinction hasn't meant too much because almost all of the empirical work of almost all of the people who are canonically recognized as "experimental philosophers" fits within both the narrow and the broad conceptualizations.

My own work, however, tends to fit only within the broad conception, not the narrow (with a couple of recent exceptions). So the difference has personal importance to me, affecting both my and others' conceptualization of my role in the "x-phi" community.

How to articulate the broad conception? Experimental work done by people in philosophy departments seems an odd category, since similar work can be done by people in different departments. Experimental work that addresses traditionally philosophical issues, however, seems far too broad, sweeping in too much research that we would not ordinary conceptualize as philosophical, including physics experiments on the structure of space and time, biological research on the origins of our social roles, and psychological work on the origins of our concepts, since these issues are at the root of philosophy of physics, philosophy of biology, and philosophy of psychology; and sometimes what the most theoretically ambitious physicists, biologists, and psychologists say is not so different from what philosophers of those disciplines say; if by adding experimentation to that, we get experimental philosophers, then most experimental philosophers are employed by science departments.

Here's a thought that is perhaps more satisfactory: Experimental philosophy in the broad sense is empirical research that is thoroughly contextualized within an intimate knowledge of the philosophical literature on which it bears, and which is presented, primarily, as advancing that philosophical literature. (For present purposes, we can define "philosophical literature" sociologically as what is published in philosophy journals and in books classified as philosophy books by academic presses.) This will omit the typical developmental psychologist working on conceptual categories, but probably allow as marginal cases of "experimental philosophers" the most philosophically informed developmental psychologists (such as Alison Gopnik and Susan Carey). It will allow in, as central, work by Shaun Nichols that is not typical intuition-polling x-phi (such as his work on disgust norms and on quantitative history of philosophy). Maybe some of Elisabeth Lloyd's empirical work on the female orgasm will also qualify.

And of course (my main, not-so-secret intention in developing this account) so also will all of my own empirical work. Included, for example, will be my work on the moral behavior of ethics professors, which does tend to be recognized as "experimental philosophy" by the x-phi crowd, despite not fitting the narrow conception; and also my empirical research on consciousness (e.g., here, and chapters 1 and 6 here), which is less often mentioned as x-phi.

But more than that, I think this conception explicitly encourages the thought that a broad range of traditionally philosophical issues can be illuminated by empirical studies, even though they have not yet commonly been approached with the tools of empirical science. For example, empirical research might help illuminate the question of whether philosophical study, over the centuries, tends to progress toward the truth. We might be able to take an experimental approach to the question of whether the external world exists. Questions in the history of philosophy might be approachable by means of the systematic study of citation patterns in philosophical venues. And so forth.

Experimental philosophers, break free! There is so much more to do than just surveying intuitions!

(No accident maybe, that I was a student of Gopnik and Lloyd?)

New Essay: A Dispositional Approach to Attitudes, or Thinking Outside of the Belief Box

I have long advocated a dispositional approach to belief (e.g., here). But I have been cagey about trying to extend that account to other attitudes such as desiring and loving. In this new essay, I finally set aside those hesitations and go all-in for dispositionalism.

Abstract: To have an attitude is, for the most part, just to live a certain way. It is, for the most part, just to be disposed to behave in certain ways, to be disposed to undergo certain conscious experiences, and to be disposed to exhibit certain folk-psychologically recognizable cognitive patterns. To have an attitude is, essentially, to be describable by means of a folk-psychologically recognizable superficial syndrome, regardless of one's deep cognitive or biological structure. To have an attitude is not, for example, essentially a matter of having a representation stored in a metaphorical functional box. It is more like having a personality trait. It is to have a certain temporary or habitual posture of mind.  

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

Video: If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious

My oral presentation to the Neuphi group at Tufts,

here.

Against Architectural Accounts of the Attitudes: Two Thought Experiments

Most recent Anglophone philosophers appear to favor what I will call architectural accounts of the attitudes. On such accounts, what is essential to possessing an attitude is that one be in some particular type of physical or biological state or that one possess some particular piece of cognitive architecture. On such an account, to have an attitude such as belief or desire might, for example, be to possess an internal representation of a certain sort, perhaps poised to play a particular cognitive role; or it might be a matter of being in a brain state of a certain sort. On my view, in contrast, such architectural facts should be regarded as matters of implementation only, not essence. What matters to having an attitude is instead, I suggest, that one live a certain way -- that across a wide range of actual and counterfactual circumstances, one is disposed to act and react, both inwardly and outwardly, in patterns that we would folk-psychologically tend to regard as characteristic of someone who possesses that attitude.

Call whatever architectural condition is essential to having Attitude A, on one of the architecturally-based views, Architectural Condition C. Unless Architectural Condition C just is the condition of being disposed to act and react, inwardly and outwardly, in the pattern characteristic of Attitude A, then presumably it is conceivable that Architectural Condition C could be possessed by a person who lacks the such a suite of dispositions, or such a suite of dispositions could be possessed by a person who lacks Architectural Condition C. What should we say about such cases? Let’s consider two.

One: Andi, let’s suppose, is in Architectural Condition C for the belief that giraffes are born six feet tall. Colorfully, we might imagine that a 22nd century brain scanner finds in her Belief Box a slip of paper containing the sentence, in the Language of Thought, “giraffes are born six feet tall”. Or maybe the giraffe neuron is linked to the six-feet-tall neuron is linked to the birth-size neuron. Despite this architectural fact, however, Andi is not at all inclined to act and react in the usual way. She is not at all disposed, for example, to say that baby giraffes are six feet tall. If asked explicitly, she would say giraffes are probably born no more than three feet tall. If shown a picture of a giraffe as tall as an ordinary man she would assume it’s not a newborn. If a zookeeper were to tell Andi that giraffes are born six feet tall, Andi would be surprised and would say, “Really? I had thought they were born much smaller than that!” And so forth, robustly, across a wide range of actual and counterfactual circumstances. None of these facts about Andi are due to the presence of weird factors like guns to her head or manipulation of evil neuroscientists or a bizarre network of other attitudes like thinking that “three” means six. (See also my post on Mad Belief.)

Two: Tomorrow, aliens from Beta Hydri arrive. The BetaHydrians show all signs of valuing molybdenum over gold. They will trade ounce for ounce, with no apparent hesitation. When they list metal prices in their currency, they list the price of molybdenum higher than the price of gold. They learn English, and then they say things like “in BetaHydrian culture, molybdenum is more valuable than gold.” And so forth. Suppose, too, that BetaHydrians have conscious experiences. There is a kind of swelling they feel in their shoulders when they obtain things for which they have been striving. They translate this feeling into English as “the pleasure of success”. They experience this swelling feeling when they successfully trade away their gold for molybdenum. Like us, they have eyes sensitive to the visible spectrum, and like us they have visual imagery. They entertain visual imagery of returning to Beta Hydri loaded with molybdenum and of the accolades they will receive. Pleasurable feelings accompany such imagery. They plan ways to obtain molybdenum, at the cost of gold if that’s what it takes. They judge other BetaHydrians’ molybdenum-for-gold trades as wisely done. Etc. Ordinary people around Earth find it eminently natural to say that BetaHydrians value molybdenum over gold. But we know nothing yet about BetaHydrian biology or cognitive architecture, except that whatever it is can support this pattern of action, thought, and feeling. Whatever Architectural Condition C is, if we can coherently conceive its coming apart from the dispositional patterns above, the patterns characteristic of valuing molybdenum over gold, then suppose Architectural Condition C is not met. If we may conceive the physically impossible, we might even imagine that the BetaHydrians robustly, intrinsically, durably, and non-accidentally exhibit these behavioral and cognitive and phenomenological patterns, across a wide range of possible worlds, despite being made entirely of undifferentiated balsa wood. (See also my post on Betelgeusian Beeheads.)

If we are at liberty to choose an approach to the attitudes that is practically useful and that gets right what we care about in ascribing attitudes, we should choose an approach that says that BetaHydrians value molybdenum over gold and that Andi does not believe that giraffes are born six feet tall. The lived patterns are what matters, not, except derivatively, the underlying architecture.

Speaking at Harvard and Tufts

If you're in the Boston area, you're welcome to come to my talk at Harvard tomorrow (Thursday) and/or at Tufts on Friday.

Thursday Sep 13, 4 pm: "The Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind", Harvard University, Emerson Hall Room 305.

Friday Sep 14, 4 pm: "If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious", Tufts University (Neuphi group), 1 Braker Hall.

I'll also be attending Harvard's workshop on belief on Saturday, which looks very interesting!

Forgetting as an Unwitting Confession of Your Values

I woke this morning to find my Facebook feed full of reminders to "never forget" the September 11 terrorist attacks. I am reminded of the Jewish community's insistence that we keep vivid the memory of the Holocaust. It says something about a person's values, I think, what that person thinks worth striving to vividly remember -- a grudge, a harm, a treasured moment, a loved one now gone, an error or lesson.

What we remember says, perhaps, more about us than we would want. Forgetfulness is an unwitting confession of our values. The Nazi Adolf Eichmann, in Hannah Arendt's famous portrayal of him, had little memory of his decisions about shipping thousands of Jews off to their deaths, but he did remember in detail his small social triumphs with superiors in the Nazi hierarchy. He vividly remembered the notable occasion, for example, when he was permitted to lounge around by a fireplace with Reinhard Heyrich, watching the Nazi leader smoke and drink (Arendt 1963, p. 114). Eichmann's failures and successes of memory are more eloquent and accurate testimony of his values than any of his outward avowals.

I remember obscure little arguments in philosophy papers if they are relevant to an essay I am working on, but I can't seem to keep track of the parents of my children's friends. Some of us remember insults and others forget them; some remember the exotic foods they ate on vacation, others the buildings they saw, others the wildlife, and still others hardly anything specific at all.

From the leavings of memory and forgetfulness we could create a nearly complete map, I think, of a person's values. What you don't even see -- the subtle sadness in a colleague's face? -- and what you might briefly see but don't react to or retain, is in some sense not part of the world shaped for you by your interests and values. Others with different values will remember a very different series of events.

Michelangelo is widely quoted as having said that to make David he simply removed from the stone everything that was not David. Remove from your life everything you forget; what is left is you.

Has Civilization Made Moral Progress? Sketch of an Empirical Test

From a certain perspective, current liberal Western civilization seems to be a moral pinnacle. We have rejected slavery. We have substantially de-legitimized aggressive warfare. We have made huge progress in advancing the welfare of children. We have made huge progress toward gender and racial equality. In his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker says he is prepared to call our recent ancestors "morally retarded" (p. 658). Imagine how we would react if a Westerner today were seriously to endorse a set of views that would not have been radical in 1800: denying women the vote (or maybe even advocating a return to monarchy), viewing slavery and twelve-hour days of child labor in coal mines as legitimate business enterprises, advocating military conquest for the sake of glory, etc. "Morally retarded" might seem a fair assessment!

From another perspective, though, it appears almost inevitable that the average person in any culture will see his or her own culture's values as morally superior. Suppose that the average person in Culture 1 endorses values A, B, C, and D, the average person in Culture 2 endorses values A, B, -C, and E, and the average person in Culture 3 endorses values A, -B, D, and F. The average person from Culture 1 will think, "Well the average person in my culture has A, B, C, and D right! The people in culture 2 have C wrong and really should pay attention to D rather than E, while the people in Culture 3 have B wrong and should attend to C rather than F. So my culture's values are superior." If Culture 1 is temporally more recent than Cultures 2 and 3, then our average person from Culture 1 can laud the change in values as "progress".

The problem is, of course, that it might not be progress at all, but rather only a preference for local values. Call this the Local Pinnacle Illusion. Someone from the past might suffer the same illusion looking forward at us, condemning (say) our liberal Western neglect of proper class and gender role distinctions, our relative irreligiosity, and our relative tolerance of homosexuality, masturbation, divorce, and moneylending -- calling the changes "decadence" rather than progress.

The question then is whether there's a good way to tell whether those of us with a Pinkeresque preference for contemporary liberal values are merely victims of the Local Pinnacle Illusion, or whether we really have made huge moral progress in the last few centuries or millennia. I've been thinking about whether there might be a way to explore this empirically, using the history of philosophy.

Here's my thought: The temporal picture of progress and the temporal picture of a random walk look very different. If, say, rational reflection over the very long haul tends to guide us ever closer to right moral principles, as Pinker thinks, then issue-by-issue we ought to see opinion changes over the very long haul that look like progressive trends of moral philosophical discovery. If, in contrast, all that's going on is the Local Pinnacle Illusion, trends should be relatively short-lived, due to local cultural pressures, and not consistently directional over the very long haul.

Suppose we chose twelve issues that have been broadly discussed since ancient times and that in at least some eras -- not necessarily our own -- are regarded as morally important issues. If we could chart philosophers' opinions on these issues quantitatively (e.g., from strong support for democracy to strong support for monarchy with moderate views in the middle, from strong support for gender-neutral role expectations to strong support for gender-specific role expectations, etc.), using -1 and +1 to mark the average position in the historically most extreme eras for each pole of each issue, then on a random-walk picture, we ought to see something like this pattern among those issues:

I have assumed here a random starting spread from -1 to 1 and a random fluctuation from -0.3 to +0.3 in each successive period; then I renormalized the maximum value of each run to 1 and the minimum to -1. The result is basically a noisy walk, with extreme values as likely in the middle as at the ends.

On the other hand, if there's moral progress through philosophical reflection, the chart ought to look more like this:

For this chart, I assumed a progress factor, negative or positive, of one-third of the spread of the random fluctuation (i.e., adding or subtracting 0.1 to each step, in addition to the -0.3 to +0.3 random fluctuation). For the "toward 0" positions, I assumed positive incremental pressure when the previous period value was (absolutely) negative and negative incremental pressure when the previous period was positive. As with the previous graph, at the end I normalized the maximum and minimum values to +1 and -1.

As you can see, many more moral issues show consistent trend directions over time and the most extreme positions tend to be held at the beginning and the end of the analysis period. The latter pattern follows from the fact that even if the initial historical position at time zero is by some objective standard moderate, as long as it is not spot on the target number, the trend over time should be roughly unidirectional toward the target number; and then the normalizing will make that initial position look extreme.

Two caveats and a final note:

Caveat 1: It will of course be difficult to code this objectively, and it's quite possible that the final outcome will vary depending on hard-to-justify coding decisions.

Caveat 2: My guess is that if we were to chart moral and political positions from the 1600s to the present we would see a chart somewhat like the second (progressive) chart, whereas if we were to chart equal time intervals back to the ancient West, we would see a more random-looking chart like the first. So which time period should be examined? A case for choosing the shorter period might be that it is only after the printing press and widespread communication of philosophical ideas that we should expect to see rationally-driven moral progress. However a consideration against choosing the shorter period is this: There might be cultural factors, such as industrialization and capitalization, that have created consistent unidirectional pressures on moral and political norms, independently of the rational case for adopting those norms; and for that reason the broader the temporal span the better.

Final note: We might be able to construct similar charts to evaluate whether there has been progress in metaphysics.

(By the way, see here for another post of mine on Pinker's intellectualist liberalism.)

Desiring, Valuing, and Believing Good: Almost the Same Thing

Philosophers typically think of belief as one thing and desire as quite another. Beliefs, for example, represent the world as it is; desires picture the world as we want it to be. Desires are intrinsically motivating; beliefs are maps by which we steer once motivated. Action, it's often thought, requires the copulation of a belief and a desire -- for example the desire to get a cupcake and the belief that the store I'm passing has them at a reasonable price. In generating my action, these attitudes play entirely different roles, sometimes labeled "cognitive" and "conative".

And yet I am struck by how belief and desire can sometimes seem to blur into each other. To believe that it would be good for X to happen is probably not quite the same thing as to desire that X happen, but it takes an unusual psychological wedge to pull them apart. It might not be possible to have an entirely canonical case of the one alongside an entirely canonical lack of the other. And valuing seems a kind of intermediate case: To value one's privacy seems to be almost, on the one hand, to have a kind of belief or set of beliefs about one's privacy but also, on the other hand, to have a certain sort of desire for privacy. Where's the sharp line between cognitive and conative?

I've come to think there is, in fact, no sharp line between the attitude types. This falls out of a general theory of psychological attitudes on which I have been working. (A paper is in progress, but not yet in circulating shape.)

On my view, to believe that something is the case -- for example, to believe that gold is more valuable than molybdenum -- is just to live in a particular way. It is to act and react, and to be disposed to act and react, across a wide variety of hypothetical scenarios, in ways that ordinary people would tend to regard as characteristic of having that belief. So, for example, it is to be willing to say, ceteris paribus (that is, all else being equal or normal, or absent countervailing forces like the intent to deceive), that gold is more valuable than molybdenum. It is to be willing to trade away molybdenum for gold. It is to be disposed to judge others' molybdenum-for-gold trades as wisely done. It is to feel happier upon receiving gold than upon receiving molybdenum, and to judge it reasonable to price the one higher than the other. And so forth. If space aliens were to visit tomorrow and they exhibited this psychological pattern, we would rightly say they believe that gold is more valuable than molybdenum, even though we may know virtually nothing about their internal operations.

To value one thing over another is also, I think, to live in a particular way. In fact, valuing A over B involves almost the same set of characteristic patterns of behavior, subjective experience, and cognition as does believing that A is more valuable than B. The same way of living that makes it true to say of our space aliens that they believe that gold is more valuable than molybdenum also makes it true to say that they value gold over molybdenum.

The same goes for desiring one thing more than another. Almost the same set of dispositions, perhaps with a shift of focus or emphasis, are involved in desiring A over B as in valuing A over B and believing A more valuable than B.

Now perhaps in using the term "desire", we put more emphasis on something like visceral reward or impulse, while "valuing" seems more intellectual or cognitive and "believing valuable" seems more intellectual still; but this is a subtlety. It's a subtlety that can make a difference in an unusual sort of case, where the intellectual and the impulsive pull apart -- where one has an impulse, say, to eat a cupcake but also a sense that it would be bad to do so all things considered. Then we might say, "I want that cupcake, but I don't think it would be good to eat it". But this is not really a canonical case of wanting something. In a way, it seems just as accurate to say that what one really wants is not to eat the cupcake, and what one is fighting is not so much a desire as an impulse.

Shortly after moving into one of my residences I met a nineteen-year-old neighbor. Call him Ethan. In my first conversation with Ethan, it came out (i.) that he had a beautiful, expensive new pickup truck, and (ii.) that he unfortunately had to attend the local community college because he couldn't afford to attend a four-year school. Although I didn't ask Ethan directly whether he thought owning an awesome pickup truck was more important than attending a four-year university, let's suppose that's how he lived his life in general: Ethan's inward and outward actions and reactions -- perhaps not with absolute consistency -- fit the profile of someone who wanted an awesome pickup truck more than he wanted to go to a four-year school, who valued having an awesome pickup truck more than he valued going to a four-year school, and who believed it better or more important to have the one than the other. Approximately the same set of dispositional facts makes each of these psychological attributions true.

Desiring, valuing, believing good, believing valuable -- if to have these attitudes is just a matter of living a certain way, of being disposed to make certain choices, to have certain feelings, to regret some things and celebrate others, etc., then although these attitudes might differ somewhat in flavor and thus sometimes partly diverge, the difference between them is vastly overstated by philosophical talk of the cognitive-conative divide and of the very different psychological roles of belief and desire.

The Ghettoization of Nietzsche

A major sociological divide in recent Anglophone philosophy is the divide between philosophers who see themselves as working in the tradition of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida -- so-called "Continental" philosophers -- and those working in the tradition of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Quine -- so-called "analytic philosophers". The labels are problematic and the divisions not always clear, but plainly there's a non-trivial sociological division here. This division is reflected, in part, in journal citation patterns. You might wonder about this history of this. Was Philosophical Review always allergic to Nietzsche? Or is that a relatively recent phenomenon? And how extreme is the phenomenon? Do leading Continental figures get at least some play in the top analytic journals, or are they almost entirely excluded?

Let's look at this quantitatively.

The "Big Three" Anglophone philosophy journals -- all of which have been leading journals since the first decade of the 20th century -- are Philosophical Review, Mind, and Journal of Philosophy (formerly Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods). All currently seem to lean heavily "analytic". Also, all are also indexed in JStor, along with a diverse group of 93 other philosophy journals, many of which are not as sociologically aligned with the analytic tradition. So I have looked, decade by decade, at the rates at which the names of central analytic and Continental philosophers appear in these "Big Three" journals compared to other journals.

Compare, first, Nietzsche and Frege -- foundational figures for both traditions, both born in the 1840s. The crucial measure is the rate at which each is cited in the Big Three vs. the rate at which each is cited in the remainder. For methodological details see this note.* For a clearer view of the charts below, click them.

As you can see, apart from a difference for Nietzsche in 1900-1909, through the 1940s or 1950s the Nietzsche lines stay more or less together and the Frege lines stay more or less together. The dashed and solid lines are clearly separated in the 1970s, after which the separation seems to continue to slowly increase. Particularly remarkable is the fact that in the 1990s-2000s, although the terms "Frege*" and "Nietzsche*" appear approximately as often in journals outside the Big Three, there's a huge difference in how often they appear in the Big Three. Over those two decades, the term "Nietzsche*" appears 20 times total in the Big Three, or about once a year total among the three journals, a citation rate of 1.7% -- compared to 7.2% outside the Big Three.  (For Frege it's 24.1% vs. 10.6%.)

A similar story holds for Heidegger and Wittgenstein -- leading early figures in the Continental and analytic traditions, respectively -- and both born in 1889.  (Again, click chart for clarity.)

Despite being cited in over 5% of articles outside the Big Three, the word "Heidegger*" appears only 16 times in the Big Three from 1990-2009, or in 1.3% of the articles.

Okay, how about the Continentals Sartre (b. 1905), Foucault (b. 1926), and Derrida (b. 1930) vs. the analytics Quine (b. 1908), Chisholm (b. 1916), and Putnam (b. 1926)? The graph is a little crowded but the following should be evident: The muted-color analytics show higher in the Big Three (solid lines) than in the remaining journals (dashed lines), while the bright-color Continentals show the reverse pattern -- and the spread is much more evident in the past few decades than it was mid-century. (There's a bit of false-positive noise for Foucault and Putnam, but not enough to mask the general trend. Russell I have chosen to exclude entirely due to false positives.)

Combining the five analytic and five Continental philosophers in a disjunctive search (Frege or Wittgenstein or Quine or Chisholm or Putnam vs. Nietzsche or Heidegger or Sartre or Foucault or Derrida; no wildcards) yields the following aggregate result.

The trends started rapidly pulling apart in the 1950s through 1970s and have continued to slowly pull farther apart since then.

Here's another way to look at it: For any philosopher or group, divide the percentage representation in the Big Three by the percentage representation in all the remaining journals. This yields an index of proportionally how much the Big Three favor that person or group compared to other journals. Call this the "Big Three favor ratio". Unity would mean equal representation in the Big Three vs. the other journals.

The favor ratio of about 1.5 for the analytics over the past couple decades means that the five sample analytic philosophers are about 50% more likely to be cited in the Big Three journals than in other journals. The favor ratio of about 0.2 for the Continentals means that they are about five times more likely to be cited in journals outside the Big Three than by the Big Three.

In the 1990s and the portion of the 2000s that has so far been indexed in JStor, the words Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida appeared in 45 articles total among 1209 Big Three journal articles (3.7%). Thus, the Big Three journals have included, on average, about one article per journal per year that even passingly mentions any of these five authors.

(On the word "ghetto" in the title of this post: I mean it only to refer to the average Anglophone philosopher's perception of what counts as an elite journal. See, for example, this poll. It is not intended as a personal judgment about journal quality.)

_____________________________________

*Percentages are divided by a representative universe of articles hitting search terms philos* or ethic* or mind*. Only English-language articles are included. Reviews and minor documents are excluded by limiting the results to "articles" in JStor and also by excluding articles with a variety of titles such as "books received", "front matter", "back matter", etc. Without these exclusions the results reported above look very different. For example, not using such exclusions raises the occurrence rate of Nietzsche in the Big Three in the 2000s from 1.3% to 12.0%. Although the search terms run through 2009, JStor only covers through the mid-2000s for many journals, including the Big Three.

In Defense of Uncharitable and Superficial History of Philosophy

Charity sounds like a good thing. And it sounds like a good thing when reading the history of philosophy. If a philosopher seems to be incoherent, or self-contradictory, or if the argument seems problematically gappy or to admit of obvious counterexamples, or if the philosopher seems to be saying something patently false, we should still try to put the best possible light on the work. We shouldn't take the text at face value but instead plunge deeper, looking for the real insight beneath the surface.

Okay, maybe sometimes we should do that. But I think most historians of philosophy and most enthusiasts for particular dead philosophers take charity much too far. There are reasons to prefer uncharitable and superficial readings.

One reason is that people are stupid. Or -- more accurately and politely -- people are remarkably poor at abstract thought about big philosophical issues. Even evaluating simple conditional claims about abstract matters is a substantial cognitive challenge for us, as revealed, for example, by our hideous performance on the Wason Selection Task, and as I found in my experience writing logical reasoning questions for the LSAT years ago. (Simple formula for a killer LSAT question: put together a conditional and a negation or two in ordinary language: "Only if interest rates don't decline will the Parliament be re-elected" vs. "The Parliament will not be re-elected unless interest rates don't rise" vs. etc.) Even philosophers are bad at this. Even Kant was a normal muddleheaded human in this regard, I daresay -- as one can see in his works when he comes down from his usual hard-to-evaluate abstractions to make concretely-evaluable claims about, e.g., the a priori necessity of 18th-century physics (oops!) or about the moral horrors of masturbation. So if a philosopher seems to be getting tangled up in her own abstract logic, that appearance is reasonably likely, I think, to reflect cognitive reality.

Another reason favoring uncharitableness and superficiality involves a certain sort of externalist or public view of what philosophy is. Philosophy is not, I submit, primarily a matter of private performances of profound insight. It is a public act of stringing together words and arguments. What is on the page is the philosophy, regardless of what the philosopher might have thought in his secret heart. So if what is on the page is nonsense or self-contradictory or plainly false, the philosophy itself is nonsense or self-contradictory or plainly false. In fact, without the structure enforced by committing one's views to words, philosophical thought tends to be amorphous and weak. Thus, especially in light of the first consideration above, it's a dubious conjecture that beneath the philosopher's surface incoherences are hidden diamond arguments, only poorly expressed. Philosophical thinking is for the most part, and at its best, an outward act of explicit writing or speaking before others.

A third reason to avoid excessive charity is this: What you think is plausible or obviously true might differ enormously from what other people, especially in different cultures and times, think is plausible or obviously true. The reader of philosophy risks hiding this from herself if she insists on de-radicalizing and commonsensifying the texts she encounters, transforming Hegel or Plotinus or Ibn Rushd or Laozi into some approximation of a 21st-century New Yorker. Much of the value of reading history is lost if we insist on turning a blind eye to what seems to us to be obviously crazy -- partly because what we currently think of as "crazy" might in the end be true and partly because, even if it's not true, it's a salutary and humbling exercise to appreciate the wide range of bizarre things that philosophers have believed across history.

I hereby resolve to remain, until further notice, a superficial and uncharitable reader of the history of philosophy!

The External World: Further Experimental Evidence of Its Existence

(collaborative with Alan Moore)

It occurs to me to doubt whether the external world exists -- that is, whether anything exists other than my own stream of conscious experience. Radical solipsism is of course crazy. But can I show it to be wrong? Or is my only recourse simply to assume it's wrong, since any attempt at proof would be circular? Can I break out of the solipsistic circle, using facts about my own stream of experience, knowable from within the solipsistic perspective, to license an inference to the existence of something beyond my stream of experience?

The most famous philosophical attempts to prove the existence of an external world from solipsism-compatible assumptions and methods -- for example, Descartes's and Kant's -- are generally acknowledged by the philosophical community to fail.  I'm inclined to think those attempts fail because they set the bar too high: They aim for certainty through deductive proof.  Better, perhaps, to aim lower -- to use scientific methods and scientific standards, licensing only tentative conclusions as the current best explanation of the available evidence. In another way, too, I aim low: I aim only to refute solipsistic doubts in particular, not other sorts of skeptical doubts such as doubts about memory or reasoning. In fact, I will take the general standards of science for granted, insofar as those general standards are compatible with solipsism. I aim to do solipsistic science.

Last year on my blog I presented the results of two experiments designed to provide evidence that an external world does indeed exist. The first experiment suggested that something exists ("my computer") that is swifter than I at calculating prime numbers. The second experiment suggested that the world has some constancy to it that exceeds the constancy of my memory. Today, I will report on a third experiment.

If solipsism is true, nothing in the universe should exist that is better than I am at chess. Nothing should exist with chess-playing practical capacities that exceed my own. Now I believe that I stink at chess, and my seeming student "Alan" seems to have told me that he is good at chess. If solipsism is true, then he should not be able to beat me at rates higher than statistical chance. I agreed with this seeming-Alan to play twenty games of speed chess, with a limit of about five seconds per move.

Here is what seems to be a picture of our procedure:
(photo credit: seeming-Gerardo Sanchez)

The results: seeming-Alan won 17, I won 2, and one stalemate. 17/19 is statistically higher than 50%, p < .001 (hand calculated).

It occurs to me that I might have hoped to lose, so as to generate results confirming my preferred hypothesis that the external world exists. Against this concern, I comfort myself with the following thoughts: If it was an unconscious desire to lose, then that implies that something exists in the universe besides my own stream of conscious experience, namely, an unconscious part of my mind. So radical solipsism is false. If it was, instead, a conscious desire to lose, I should have been able to detect it, barring an unusual degree of introspective skepticism. What I detected was a desire to win as many games as I could, given my background assumption that if Alan actually exists I would be hard pressed to win even one or two games. I found myself repeatedly and forcefully struck by the impression that the universe contained a practical intelligence superior to my own and bent on defeating me -- an impression, of course, confirmed by the results. The most natural scientific explanation of the pattern in my experience is that that impression is correct.

I might easily enough dream of being consistently defeated in chess. But dreams of this sort, as I seem to remember, differ from the present experiment in one crucial way: They are vague on the specific moves or unrealistic about those moves. In the same way, I might dream of having proven Fermat's last theorem. Both types of case involve dream-like gappiness or irrationality or delusive credulity -- the type of gappiness or irrationality or delusive credulity that might make me see nothing remarkable in my daughter's growing wings or in discovering a new whole number between 5 and 6. Genuine dream doubt might involve doubt about my basic rational capacities, but if so such doubts are additional to simply solipsistic doubt. Whether I am dreaming or not, if I consistently experience specific clever and perceptive chess moves that repeatedly exploit flaws in my own conscious strategizing, flaws that I experience as surprising, it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that something exists that surpasses my own conscious intelligence in at least this one area.

Vogon Poetry Contest: Rules

As fans of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy well know, the Vogons are an evil alien race who use their hideous poetry to torture prisoners. But you needn't torture people with bad poetry only in your imagination! You can have a Vogon Poetry Contest here in real life.

It absolutely crucial that this contest be live. Bad poetry skimmed over in print is a mere annoyance. True poetic agony requires more -- requires that the bad poetry be declaimed passionately at a live reading, each word milked with slow lingering passion.

Rules of the Game:
* One host, approximately 12 competitors.
* Each competitor receives a pen and a smallish slip of paper.
* Each competitor writes the title of a bad poem at the top of the paper.
* The host collects the papers and redistributes them so that each competitor has a paper with someone else's title.
* At the signal, each competitor has ten minutes to complete a poem. The time limit is strict, and the host may grab the paper from a competitor mid-sentence if necessary to enforce the time limit.
* The content of the poem need not relate to the title.
* The poem must fit on one side of that slip of paper.
* At the end of the ten minutes, the host gathers the papers and shuffles them randomly.
* The host then reads each poem in self-important, dramatic open-mic fashion. (Imitations of William Shatner are welcome.)
* Anything illegible will be read as nonsense.
* Any stage directions to the host (e.g., "pause here") will be read aloud.
* For each poem, the host will note the volume and the sincerity of the groans of agony, both during the reading of the lines and after the completion of each poem.
* The poem that rates highest on the "groanmeter", in the judgment of the host, wins.
* If necessary, the worst poems will be read a second time in a runoff.

Saturday, I hosted the Third Annual Vogon Poetry Contest at my parents' house in Thousand Oaks. My son, defending champion from the previous year, was the repeat winner, I'm proud to say!

I would share his poem if I thought the goons from the American Poetry Association wouldn't break my legs for the harm done to their favorite art form.

Confessions of a Boltzmann Brain

If the universe is infinite, either in space or time, or if there is an infinite number of finite universes, or if there is even one actually existing infinite universe sufficiently like our own, then any event of finite probability will occur an infinite number of times (given certain assumptions about cosmic diversity). The spontaneous congealment of a brain from relatively disorganized matter, by sheer quantum or statistical-mechanical chance, is often held to have a very tiny but finite probability. Following recent tradition, we can call this entity a Boltzmann brain.

If the universe is infinite, then, I might expect there to be an infinite number of Boltzmann brains molecule-for-molecule identical to my own, thinking the same thoughts as I do and having the same feelings as I have. If you think, as most philosophers do these days, that some form of externalism is true, then maybe a lone Boltzmann brain can't have exactly my thoughts. It couldn't think about my wife, for example, since it has never met my wife. No matter: Suppose that there is some minimal section of brain-plus-body-plus-environment that is constitutively necessary for a being to have thoughts qualitatively identical to my own. There will be an infinite number of randomly congealed Boltzmann beings that meet those minimal conditions. For convenience, I'll still call them Boltzmann brains.

Now the fate of a Boltzmann brain is very likely to be different from the fate I envision for myself. The odds of simply a brain randomly congealing while the rest of the surrounding matter stays disorganized are massively higher than the odds of an earth-and-sun system congealing full of durable life and society. Setting aside some concerns about probability with infinite cases, it seems reasonable to conclude that the odds are miniscule that a Boltzmann brain will live more than a few minutes, or maybe hours if a fair chunk of environment is assumed. If only a brain is assumed, then virtually right away things will go wrong: My optic nerves won't be stimulated by well-structured light. I won't feel like I'm breathing. If I'm in a churning soup, my brain will start tearing apart. If I'm in a near-vacuum, my brain will do whatever unpleasant thing brains do in near-vacuums. If some environment is assumed, right away it will start to crumble. The oxygen will start to dissipate into space, or gray goo will start to ooze through the walls.

Should I worry that I might be a Boltzmann brain? The odds seem rather hard to assess. By stipulation, the Boltzmann brain differs from the me that I would prefer to think I am, as of right now, not at all in quality of experience, including apparent memories.

The subjective probability judgment seems to depend, first, on the odds that the universe is infinite in the relevant sense. It seems reasonable enough, and common enough among cosmologists (if I'm right that cosmologists exist) to think the universe might be infinite. So let's call it 50-50, for all I can tell. Given the non-trivial possibility of an infinite universe, the issue then seems to turn on the odds that this sort of qualitative experience that I'm having right now (and whatever else is in the relevant, non-question-begging evidence base?) would arise from a non-Boltzmannian process of cosmological formation with an earth and sun, human society, and biological birth, as opposed to arising through Boltzmannian chance. How confidently can I assess those odds? Maybe one way to think of it is this: Given some arbitrary huge-huge-huge but not infinite chunk of the infinite universe, what should I expect the ratio to be of beings qualitatively identical to me that arise through normal cosmological Big-Bang-to-now processes as opposed to Boltzmannian chance? Hm! It doesn't seem to me that I really can in good conscience justifiably say that I know that the ratio whoppingly favors the me I think I am. How many Eric-Schwitzgeblian lives will there be in in that huge-huge-huge arbitrary chunk as opposed to Eric-Schwitzgeblian Boltzmann brains? I really have no idea! I'm tempted again, to call it even odds for all I can tell, but maybe it's better to say I just don't know. It seems, then, that I can't dismiss the possibility that I am a Boltzmann brain.

Sometimes I think about this when I wake in the middle of the night or when I'm driving down the freeway and my mind is wandering. Or at least I am now experiencing apparent memories of that sort.

[slightly revised July 31]

Chinese Philosophy Discussion Arcs

Different classical Chinese philosophers have drawn different amounts of discussion in the Anglophone world over the past seventy years.  I want to look at this phenomenon quantitatively and then suggest a general conjecture about the history of philosophy.

The six target philosophers include two who are well-known in the Western world outside scholarly circles, Confucius and Laozi (aka Lao Tzu), and four who are much less well known, Mencius, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, and Mozi (aka Mengzi, Chuang Tzu, Hsün Tzu, and Mo Tzu).  Below is a graph of their "discussion arcs" -- that is, the rates, times 1000, at which their names appear in keyword (including abstract and title) searches in Philosopher's Index, divided by a representative universe of articles. Click the image for a clearer view.

(For more details on discussion arcs, see here and here. My search terms also included many less common early spellings such as Mocius and Chuangtze.)

One result that jumps out is (as one might expect) the relative prominence of Confucius. Also striking, though, on closer inspection, is another phenomenon: The relative decline of Confucius and Laozi compared to the other four philosophers. To better display this trend, here's a comparison of the proportion of articles mentioning Confucius or Laozi to the proportion mentioning any of the other four. (Again, click for clarity.)

I don't interpret as meaningful the apparently very tight match of the lines at the end of the graph -- but the approximate match does seem meaningful. In the 1940s-1970s, Confucius and Laozi combined received about twice as much discussion as the other four philosophers combined. Starting in the 1980s or 1990s, that situation changed.

My general conjecture is this: As a subfield in the history of philosophy matures (as I believe the history of Chinese philosophy has done in the past couple decades), proportionately less expository attention is devoted to the most famous headline figures and proportionately more attention is devoted to less well known figures. This is a kind of "winnowing of the greats" in reverse.

If that conjecture is correct, we ought to see the same effect in other subareas of the history of philosophy.

"Propositional Attitudes": Belief vs. Desire Grudge Match

If contemporary analytic philosophers are to believed, "propositional attitudes" are a central feature of mentality, perhaps the central feature. What is a propositional attitude? It is a mental state like belief, desire, intention, hope, fear, etc., that can take a full proposition -- speaking loosely, a sentence -- as its complement. I can believe that grass is green. I can desire that we eat cookies. I can hope that aliens will rescue us soon. The mainstream view is that human action arises from the confluence of our beliefs, desires, intentions, and other attitudes.

Now there's a funny thing about how philosophers discuss propositional attitudes. When we list the canonical propositional attitudes we always seem to list belief first. Why is that? Is belief more propositional or more psychologically important an attitude than desire or intention? Not according to conventional wisdom. Also, desire always seems to be listed second. After that, it's a grab bag.

This is not just a quirk of conventional linguistic ordering. Philosophers studying propositional attitudes also typically analyze belief first and most centrally, desire secondarily if at all, and other attitudes only haphazardly. The literature in philosophy of language on "propositional attitude reports" (i.e., sentences like "Lois believes Superman is strong") is especially striking in almost always using only belief examples. The Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Propositional Attitude Reports might be typical. A search within the page yields 183 hits for "belief", 169 hits for "believe", and 2 hits for "desire". The two occurrences of "desire" are not examples of desire reports, but rather gestures toward an interest in propositional attitude reports generally, including desire.

This monomaniacal focus on belief despite an advertised general interest in propositional attitudes seems, on the face of it, likely to be distortive. Things might go differently, in some ways, for belief than for other propositional attitudes. It's risky to generalize from a narrow range of cases, especially if other people in your subfield are also generalizing from the same narrow range.

I thought it might be fun to quantify this "belief first" distortion. So I set up a grudge match between belief and desire in philosophical work on propositional attitudes. Belief enters, of course, as the heavy favorite.

Here's what I did. I downloaded all the entries in Philosopher's Index that included "propositional attitude*" in a keyword/title/abstract search. Within those entries, I looked for appearances of "belief*", "believe*", and "desire*". (I needed only one search term for "desire*" since same word serves as both verb and noun; the asterisk is a truncation symbol.) If both "belief*"/"believe*" and "desire*" appeared in the same entry, I recorded which term appeared first.

Here are the results. The total number of "propositional attitude" entries was 616. Of these, 382 contained neither "belief*"/"believe*" nor "desire*" in the keywords/title/abstract. (Most of these will presumably discuss belief and/or desire in the body, but the abstract is framed more, shall we say, abstractly.) Of the 234 entries that mentioned either belief or desire, 182 (78%) only mentioned belief, 13 (6%) only mentioned desire, and 39 (17%) mentioned both belief and desire. Among the 39 mentioning both belief and desire, belief appeared first in all 39 cases.

Final score: belief 221, desire 13. Belief wins, with blood on the moon! Tim Schroeder, time to get back to work!

Discussion Arcs of APA Presidents from the 1970s

One of the highest forms of recognition a philosopher in the U.S. can receive is the presidency of an APA division. Lists of the APA divisional presidencies thus provide information, not filtered through current lenses, of people who were regarded as prominent philosophers in their day.

If, like me, you have a kind of morbid curiosity about the fleetingness of academic fame, you might wonder what becomes of these divisional presidents. Lists from the 1930s and 1940s are almost entirely names I don't recognize: Albert Perly Brogan? Marten ten Hoor?

In several past posts, I have used the concept of a "discussion arc". A discussion arc for a topic or a philosopher is simply the number of times the topic or philosopher appears in a keyword search (including title and abstract) in the Philosopher's Index, divided by some representative number of the universe of articles. Some topics and philosophers have fairly steady rates of discussion over the decades (dualism, Kant); others show sharp temporal peaks (ordinary language, Chisholm). I have found that, in general, twentieth century Anglophone philosophers' discussion arcs tend to peak at around age 55-70.

The three divisions (Eastern, Central, Pacific) had a total of 30 presidents in the years ending 1970-1979. I excluded from analysis nine presidents with last names generating too many false positives in keyword searches.[note 1] Of the 21 remaining presidents, six achieved discussion rates of over five per thousand articles (from a representative universe of articles [note 2]). For analysis, discussion is broken into five-year chunks. Click for a clearer view of the figure below:

Around 1975, most of this group had similar discussion rates (though John Rawls rather more). Most arcs show the typical hump shape with peaks at around ages 55-70. The declines of Jaakko Hintikka and especially Norman Malcolm (both of whom peaked a bit young) are notably more severe than the others.  Rawls and Wilfrid Sellars show bimodal distributions, with the typical late-career peak followed by a more recent resurgence.

A second group of five philosophers had peak discussion rates between 1.5 and 5 per thousand (again click for clarity):

Although the data are noisier, as one might expect with fewer data points, all five show the typical hump-shaped arc, though Stuart Hampshire peaks a bit earlier than typical and Alan Gewirth a bit later. Paul Grice appears to have had considerably more staying power than the others, though his recent discussion rate of about 1.5 remains lower than all in the first group except Hintikka and Malcolm.

Four more 1970s APA divisional presidents, while peaking below 1.5, still continue to draw a bit of discussion, with William Alston and Patrick Suppes recently exceeding all in the mid-tier group except Grice.

Finally, there's a group of six who together have drawn only three keyword hits since the year 2000:

Could we have predicted these results in the 1970s? Yes! If we average the discussion arcs of the four tier groups, the overall trend is clear: The much-discussed remained much discussed, the less discussed remain less discussed:

In fact, the decline is much less sharp, on a percentage basis, for the Tier 1's than for the lower tiers, which might be partly explained by my hypothesis about the Winnowing of Greats.

The spread also seems to be clearly evident by the early 1960s, when these philosophers were in their early 40s to early 50s -- maybe even earlier. We can to a substantial extent predict discussion rates in the 2000s, among APA division presidents from the 1970s, based on those presidents' discussion rates in the five-year span during which they turned 45. If we rank their age-mid-40s discussion rates and also rank their discussion rates since 2000, the ranks correlate at r = .59 (p = .006). Nine of the 21 are ranked very near their age-mid-40's discussion ranks (within 2) and 13 are within 4. The biggest outliers are Malcolm (fell from 2 to 12), Donald Davidson (rose from 12 to 2), and Grice (rose from 14 to 5).

Notes:
1. William Thomas Jones, John Wisdom, Lewis White Beck, Alonzo Church, William Henry Hay, Ruth Barcan Marcus, Kurt Baier, Wesley Charles Salmon, and William Craig.  Also: I hand-culled false positives in any five-year period in which the target philosopher generated 40 or fewer keyword hits on a truncation-symbol appended version of his last name (e.g., Lazerowitz*); for those with 40 or more keyword hits, I spot-checked for problematic patterns.

2. Search term: KW=ethic* or KW=moral* or KW=politic* or KW=language* or KW=epistem* or KW=mind* or KW= metaphys*.

Deflating the Moral Thermostat

Ethics professors don't appear to behave any better than do non-ethicists. (See here for my most recent work on this topic, collaborative with Josh Rust.) On what I've been calling the "inert discovery" model of philosophical moral reflection, moral reflection nonetheless still tends to lead to the discovery of moral truths.  It just has no improving effect on one's personal behavior.  So, for example, philosophical moral reflection might lead one to think that eating meat is morally bad (which indeed a majority of ethicists do seem to think), but without any material effects on one's cheeseburger consumption rate (as my studies also seem to show).

Now, on the face of it, the inert discovery model has seemed to me empirically somewhat unlikely.  If one discovers that something is morally bad, shouldn't that add to one's motivations not to do it? And shouldn't one then, on average, do it a bit less?  Shouldn't coming to believe that eating meat is morally bad slightly reduce, at least on average, one's cheeseburger consumption rate?

Here's one possible way, though, to make the inert discovery model work. Plausibly, most people do not -- despite the classic Dixieland song -- actually wish to number among the saints. Instead, maybe, most people have what we might think of as a moral thermostat. We want to be about as morally good as our neighbors, or maybe (in our perhaps somewhat deluded self-conception) somewhat better, or at least not among the first-class jerks.  (Different people might have different thermostat settings.) If we do have moral thermostats, that would explain the moral licensing effect -- the tendency to be more likely to do something a little morally bad after having done something a little morally good. Once you have met or exceeded your target level of moral goodness, you can then better justify getting away with some small violation. And to a large extent, for most people, this moral thermostat might be comparative: If other people are cheating, it is easier to justify allowing yourself to also cheat than if no one else is cheating. Who wants to be the sucker saint?

So maybe, then, if an ethicist who comes to accept high moral standards against eating meat, and in favor of donating large amounts of money to famine relief, etc., does not adjust her moral thermostat relative to others, her behavior will not change despite the moral discovery. She wants, say, to be morally better than 80% of those around her. And even before discovering the badness of eating meat, she conceptualized herself that way. Now, if she ceases eating meat while others do not, she will be (in her own conception) better than, say, 85% of others -- heading too far toward sucker-saint territory for her own tastes.

Thus, the result of an ethicist's accepting high moral standards would be not an improvement in personal behavior but rather the adoption of the view that both she and other people are morally worse, by absolute standards, than she had previously thought.

New Paper in Draft: If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious

Regular readers will have noticed over the past year a so a variety of posts on group consciousness.  I have finally synthesized my thoughts into a full-length paper draft, which I have posted online here.

Here's the core argument: There seems to be no principled reason to deny entityhood to spatially distributed but informationally integrated beings (such as Martian Smartspiders or Betelgeusian beeheads). The United States can be considered as a concrete, spatially distributed but informationally integrated entity. Considered as such, the United States is at least a candidate for the literal possession of real psychological states, including consciousness. The question, then, is whether it meets plausible materialistic criteria for consciousness. My suggestion is that if those criteria are liberal enough to include both small mammals and alien species that exhibit sophisticated linguistic behavior, then the United States probably does meet those criteria. The United States is massively informationally interconnected and responds in sophisticated, goal-directed ways to its surroundings. Its internal representational states are functionally responsive to its environment and not randomly formed or assigned artificially from outside by the acts of an external user. And the United States exhibits complex linguistic behavior, including issuing self-reports and self-critiques that reveal a highly-developed ability to monitor its evolving internal and external conditions.

I leave it open whether we should (a.) do modus ponens and accept the conclusion, (b.) do modus tollens and deny the antecedent, (c.) see this as a challenge to find a good justification for accepting the antecedent while denying the consequent, or (d.) see this exercise as supporting skepticism about a certain style of metaphysics.

As always, thoughts and comments welcome.

Chinese Room Persona

I just came across this passage in Karl Schroeder's science fiction novel Sun of Suns (from a conversation between high-tech engineer Aubri Mallahan and low-tech Admiral Chaison Fanning):

"Max is a Chinese Room persona, which makes him as real as you or I." She saw his uncomprehending stare, and said, "There are many game-churches where the members of the congregation each take on the role of one component of a theoretical person's nervous system -- I might be the vagus nerve, or some tiny neuron buried in the amygdala. My responsibility during my shift is to tap out my assigned rhythm on a networked finger-drum, depending on what rhythms and sounds are transmitted to me by my neural neighbors, who could be on the other side of the planet for all I--" She saw that his expression hadn't changed. "Anyway, all of the actions of all the congregation make a one-to-one model of a complete nervous system... a human brain, usually, though there are dog and cat churches, and even attempts at constructing trans-human godly beings. The signals all converge and are integrated in an artificial body.  Max's body looks odd to you because his church is a manga church, not a human one, but there's people walking around on the street you'd never know were church-made."

Chaison shook his head. "So this Thrace is... a fake person?"

Aubri looked horrified. "Listen, Admiral, you must never say such a thing! He's real. Of course he's real. And you have to understand, the game-churches are as incredibly important part of our culture. They're an attempt to answer the ultimate questions: what is a person? Where does the soul lie? What is our responsibility to other people? You're not just tapping on a drum, you're helping to give rise to the moment-by-moment consciousness of a real person.... To let down that responsibility could literally be murder.

Although John Searle would likely disagree with Aubri's perspective on the Chinese room, I'm inclined to think that on general materialist principles there's no good reason to regard such details of implementation as sufficient to differentiate beings who really have consciousness from those who don't. We don't want to be neurochauvinists after all, do we?

New Data on The Generosity of Philosophy Students

In 2007, I analyzed data on student charitable giving at University of Zurich, broken down by major.  When paying registration fees, students at Zurich could choose to give to one or both of two charities (one for foreign students, one for needy students). Among large majors, philosophy students proved the most charitable of all majors. However, philosophy majors' rates of charitable giving didn't rise over the course of their education, suggesting that their giving rates were not influenced by their undergraduate training.

I now have some similar data from University of Washington, thanks to Yoram Bauman and Elaina Rose.  At UW from 1999-2002, when students registered for courses, they had the opportunity to donate to two charities: WashPIRG (a broadly left-leaning activist group) and (starting in fall 2000) "Affordable Tuition Now" (an advocacy group for reducing the costs of higher education in Washington). Bauman and Rose published an analysis of economics students' charity and they kindly shared their raw data with me for reanalysis. My analysis focuses on undergraduates under age 30.

First, looking major-by-major (based on final declared primary major at the end of the study period), we see that philosophy students are near the top. The main dependent measure is, in any given term, what percentage of students in the major gave to at least one of the two charities. Among majors with at least 1000 student enrollment terms, the five most charitable majors were:

Major: percent giving
Comparative History of Ideas: 31%
International Studies: 24%
Philosophy: 24%
Physics: 22%
Anthropology: 20%

The five least charitable were:

Construction Management: 7%
Business Administration: 7%
Sociology: 7%
Economics: 8%
Accounting: 9%

These numbers compare with a 14% donation rate overall.

As reported by Bauman and Rose and also in Frey and Meier 2003 (the original source of my Zurich data), business and economics majors are among the least charitable. The surprise here (to me) is sociology. In the Zurich data, sociology majors are among the most charitable. (Hypotheses welcome.)

But what is the time course of donation? Bauman and Rose and Frey and Meier found that business and economics students were among the least charitable from the very beginning of their education and their charity rates did not decline further. Thus, they suggest, their low rates of charity are a selection effect -- an effect of who tends to choose such majors -- rather than a result of college-level economics instruction. My analysis of the Zurich data suggests the converse for philosophers: Their high rates of charity reflect a fact about who chooses philosophy rather than the power of philosophical instruction.

So here are the charity rates for non-philosophers, by year of schooling:

First year: 15%
Second year: 15%
Third year: 14%
Fourth year: 13%

And for philosophers (looking at 1172 student semesters total):

First year: 26%
Second year: 27%
Third year: 21%
Fourth year: 24%

So it looks like philosophers' donation rates are flat to declining, not increasing. Given the moderate-sized data set, the slight decline from 1st and 2nd to 3rd and 4th years is not statistically significant (though given the almost 70,000 data points the smaller decline among non-philosophers is statistically significant).

One reaction some people have had to my work with Josh Rust on the moral behavior of ethics professors (e.g., here and here) is this: Although some professional training in the humanities is morally improving, one reaches a ceiling in one's undergraduate education after which further training isn't morally improving -- and philosophers, or humanities professors, or professors in general, have pretty much all hit that ceiling. That ceiling effect, the objection goes, rather than the failure of ethics courses to alter real-world behavior, explains Josh's and my finding that ethicists behave on average no better than do other types of professors. (Eddy Nahmias might suggest something like this in his critical commentary on one of Josh's and my papers next week at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology.)

I don't pretend that this is compelling evidence against that position. But it does seem to be a wee bit of evidence against that position.

Moral Order and Happiness in Fiction

Imagine this change to Macbeth: Macbeth kills King Duncan and some other inconvenient people, he feels briefly anxious and guilty, and then he gets over it.  Macduff finds out, comes after Macbeth, and Macduff and his family are killed.  Macbeth lives happily ever after.  In a final soliloquy, perhaps, Macbeth expresses satisfaction with his decision to kill Duncan and with how his life has gone.

What would the message of such a play be?

It's hard to imagine Shakespeare writing such a play.  Even if in real life evil sometimes prospers and the perpetrators feel no regret, in fiction evil cannot in the end prosper -- not unless the work is a very dark one.  (Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors comes to mind.)  In reality, I think, evil sometimes prospers and sometimes fails, but somehow this nuanced attitude is difficult to bring across in any but the most subtle fiction.  We are, perhaps, prepared from early childhood to expect fictional wrongdoers to suffer by the end, so when they don't, it's jarring enough to suggest that the writer embraces a dark vision of the world.

Similarly, when the protagonist makes a difficult moral choice and then suffers as a result, we read the work as suggesting that the protagonist made the wrong choice.  But why is that?  In real life, sometimes we make the right choice and suffer.  Here I think of the Spielberg film Saving Private Ryan.  The platoon captures a German soldier and after much debate decides to set him free out of mercy rather than execute him.  Later that same German solider returns to kill one of the group that freed him.  The audience, I think, is invited to conclude that setting him free had therefore been the wrong decision.  Watching the film, it's hard to avoid feeling that!  But might it instead have been the right decision that happened to have a bad consequence?

Here's what I'd like to see -- what I can't recall ever seeing (though I welcome suggestions! [update Jun. 14: in light of further suggestions and reflection, I think I overstated this point yesterday]) -- a work of fiction in which the protagonist makes the morally right decision, and suffers in consequence with neither an outward triumph in the end nor even a secret inner victory of the soul, no sweet comfort in knowing that the right choice was made.  I want a work that advises us: Be a good guy and lose.  Even if evil triumphs, even if the wicked thrive and the upright protagonist collapses in misery, even if the protagonist would have been much happier choosing evil, still he or she was right to have chosen the moral path.

Or is it just a fact about fiction that prudiential triumph -- the final happiness of the protagonist -- will inevitably be understood as a kind of endorsement of the character's choices?

Update June 16:
This is one of those posts I would reorganize from scratch if I could. First: I think I overstate the conclusion somewhat.  And second: I don't think I was sufficiently clear about what the conclusion was, even in my own head. Of course there are a number of works in which a morally upright protagonist loses, without even a secret inner victory, and the morally vile opponent thrives without even secret inner suffering. What I think is challenging -- not impossible! -- is to portray that in a way that is neither (a.) some sort of critique of conventional morality, or (b.) dark enough to constitute some sort of critique of what might be thought of as the mainstream moralistic picture of the world. Such an outcome shouldn't have to be dark, one might think. Sometimes good guys lose and bad guys thrive in in a relatively upbeat understanding of the real world (anything short of pollyannaish), so it should be possible to portray it in fiction without committing to it as typical.  But maybe the darkness flows from the symbolic function of fiction as presenting the moral order, or lack of it, within the fiction as somehow representative of how things generally are...?

(The Book of Job is an interesting case, as pointed out in one comment.)

Where Do We Go from Here? Some Final Thoughts

(by guest blogger Carrie Figdor)

I've discussed growing public anger and confusion about science, and the role of scientists, the popular science press, and philosophers who may all contribute to or fail to alleviate this confusion in different ways. I'll end my guest stint with a big "thank you" to Eric and the readers of his blog, and a few concluding ruminations.

There have already been calls for greater attention to miscommunication between "the folk" and scientists. In a 2010 article on neuroscience communication and the need to address public concerns, Illes et al. recommend a cultural shift among neuroscientists (including more openness regarding the potentials and limitations of the research), the development of neuroscience communication specialists, and additional empirical research on science communication. And at least one neuroscientist is being openly critical about the field online with the Neuroskeptic blog. However, there's also reason to think even these steps will not suffice to end miscommunication.

In a recent New Books in Philosophy interview about In Praise of Reason, Michael Lynch provides an interesting interpretation of data from a 2007 Gallup poll on American beliefs about evolution. According to the poll, the majority of Americans don’t believe in evolution.  But why don’t they?  Only 14 percent cited lack of evidence for evolution as the reason for their disbelief. That is, most agree there is overwhelming scientific agreement on evolution. Although the persistent lack of belief in the face of this evidence is often blamed on lack of scientific education, psychological factors, and so on, Lynch suggests an alternative (which is compatible with there being several factors): many Americans are implicitly skeptical about the methods and practices associated with science, and are not at all convinced that these methods are reliable when it comes to things that matter.

If so, the miscommunication problem is not just a matter of misleading uses of words and a lack of vigorous critical scrutiny of science by professional skeptics. These factors may just exacerbate prior widespread public skepticism about science and its methods of getting at truth when the truths are more complex than science is well-equipped to handle. Such skepticism needn't be an expression of religious conviction or the brute denial of empirical data, but of inchoate doubt that the simplifications required by the scientific method to generate empirical data will ever do justice to real phenomena. From this perspective, the public has good reason to be pissed off when scientists fail to treat it with respect: What make them think their method is so keen and wonderful when it comes to understanding real humans? The question is a propos, because we're living a moment in which science urges replacing our old vision in which we are not machines with a new vision in which we are. Ah, but everything, the public might say, hangs on the word "machine". As a professional skeptic, I'm inclined to agree.