One Reason I'm Worried About My Concept of Consciousness

Consciousness must, it seems, be a vague phenomenon. The newly formed zygote has no conscious experience; the two-year-old child has conscious experience. I find it hard to believe that consciousness suddenly pops in, in a quantum leap. Even if it emerges fairly suddenly, it must still spread out across some stretch of time (a day, a second, a hundred milliseconds?) such that at a narrow enough temporal resolution it is gradual. Actually, I suspect the transitional period is fairly long: I know of no sudden neural or behavioral change (even at birth) that suggests anything other than an extended gradualism. In the transitional period, by definition, it will be a vague matter whether the organism is conscious, such that it's not quite right simply to say it's conscious and not quite right to say it's not, except perhaps as governed by flexible practical norms. (Compare going bald.)

The same considerations apply phylogenetically: Humans clearly have consciousness. Viruses clearly do not (unless you go panpsychist and say that everything is conscious -- that would clear up the zygote problem too -- but I assume we don't want to do that!). Why think there will be a sharp line across the phylogenetic tree? The only plausible place, it seems, for a sharp line would be between human beings and all others. But then evolutionary history becomes a problem: Modern humans, early homo sapiens, homo erectus, homo habilis, australopithecus, etc., which of these have conscious experience?

And yet I can't get my head around this vagueness. I can imagine what it is like for it to be a vague matter whether one is bald; I can picture the gradual transition. I can imagine what it is for it to be a vague matter whether a bottle is in a backpack (perhaps the bottle is partly melted or hanging half out). But how can it be a vague matter whether a particular being has conscious experience or whether a particular state is conscious?

Consider visual experience: I can imagine a very small speck of visual experience, with the visual field limited to one second of arc. But that's still straightforwardly a case of conscious experience, even if it's very limited. It wouldn't be a matter of convention or pragmatics whether to regard such a case as qualifying as conscious experience. I can imagine a very hazy visual experience, or a gappy experience, or one fading out toward medium gray; but all these too are straightforwardly cases of experience, however impoverished that experience is. They are discretely different in kind from lacking visual experience. So what then would it be to be partway between having visual experience and lacking it, so that it's a vague matter, so that it would be a pragmatic decision like with baldness or the water bottle half hanging out of the pack? As soon as there's the itsiest bit of visual consciousness, there's visual consciousness, end of story -- right?

You might point to cases of organisms with barely any sensory capacities as plausibly having perceptual consciousness so limited that it would be a vague case. But what would those organisms be? Not snails or ants, surely, who have complex sensory systems; the most extremely limited perceptual manifold must belong to the simplest of the mutlicellular animals, maybe even single celled organisms. That seems rather far down the phylogenetic tree to find vague cases of consciousness, doesn't it? And if such simple organisms are conscious, why not also the personal computer you're viewing this post on, or the nation in which you live, which is in some ways as complicated in its reactions? If simple reactivity to the environment is sufficient for consciousness, why not go wholly panpsychist? If it takes more than simple reactivity, then there will be organisms with complex perceptual manifolds but for which it is transitional, vague, indeterminate, a pragmatic decision about the application of terms, whether they are conscious. So there would be complex perceptual not-quite-experience-not-quite-non-experience. Huh?

Theoretically, it seems to me that there must be vague cases, and that those cases must be reasonably far along the developmental and phylogenetic spectrum, to the point where the organism's reactivity is fairly richly structured. But I cannot imagine such vague cases. I can't make sense of them. I can't understand what they would be like.

And that seems to indicate that there's something fundamentally flawed in my concept of consciousness.

Applying to MA Programs in Philosophy

by guest blogger Robert Schwartz, Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

Disclaimer

Although I will try to speak in generalities, my knowledge of MA programs is based primarily on my experience as chair of admissions at UWM. Thus some of my remarks may not generalize. For example, the criteria our admissions committee uses in evaluating applicants may not be the same as that of other schools.

Kinds of Programs

There are essentially three types of MA programs:

1. Those that are part of PhD programs

Comment- Unless they indicate otherwise, by and large these programs do not focus on placing students in PhD programs, including their own.

2. Those that are geared mainly toward awarding terminal degrees in philosophy

Comment- These schools are not appropriate for someone wishing to go on for a PhD in philosophy.

3. Those that focus on placing students in PhD programs

Comment- These schools are appropriate, and my remarks will be limited to such programs.

Who should apply to these MA programs?

The commitment and reasons for pursuing an MA degree are not necessarily the same as those for pursuing a PhD. With few exceptions those seeking PhD’s in philosophy wish to have academic careers. At UWM almost all of our students have such plans, but not all do. Some intend to apply to law school, some are unsure of their career plans and wish to determine whether philosophy and teaching are what they really want, some may not want to pursue a research career but hope to teach philosophy in high schools, etc.

I would advise anyone who is determined to pursue a career in academia to look at the applying to PhD programs post. This site provides a thoughtful and forthright assessment of the difficulties achieving this goal. I might add that although ES is right to stress the advantages of attending a “top ranked” or “prestigious” PhD program, I think the picture he paints of the alternatives may be overly bleak.

MA program as opposed to a PhD program

Students have various reasons/strategies for applying to MA programs.

1. They do not have sufficient background in philosophy to gain direct admission to a PhD program or to a PhD program that suits their needs.

Comment- Some, including very good, PhD programs will consider non-philosophy majors if they have strong undergraduate records and have background in areas related to philosophy, for example, math, linguistics or psychology. However, even if a PhD program is willing to consider such students, it is often difficult for them to evaluate the student’s philosophical abilities from their undergrad records, letters, etc.

In general, I think it most advisable for students who fall into this first category to consider seriously the MA route. MA programs will be much more willing to take a “gamble” on such students. Attending an MA program will mean that you will not be eliminated by PhD programs on the grounds that you do not have sufficient background in philosophy. Preparation in an MA program may also make it less likely you will feel in over your head or behind your fellow students. Indeed, you have a good chance of being better prepared than others admitted to the program.

2. As a safety school in case they do not get into a PhD program.

Comment- Given the vagaries and long odds of being accepted at one’s first choice(s), it is a good policy to apply to safety schools when applying to either MA or PhD programs. Students, though, should consider in advance if the safety schools are ones they would actually accept if they do not get into a program of their choice. Students should also take into account that admissions into a MA program may be more competitive than at many PhD programs -- more competitive not only in terms of number of applicants but in terms of the strength of records of the applicants. Students who fail to gain admissions into our MA program are often successful in being admitted to PhD programs.

3. To improve their chances of being accepted at better PhD programs.

Comment- This strategy makes sense in some cases, but is not to be relied on. First, MA programs do not get students into PhD programs. A student’s ability, work habits, performance in the program, GRE scores, etc. do. MA programs do help better prepare a student for PhD work and can help with the application process. Second, the top schools are so competitive that one’s chances of being admitted are slim no matter how good a student’s record is. Third, students who apply and are accepted into PhD programs should consider seriously whether it is wise to give up a bird in the hand for the possibility of doing better after attending an MA program.

Before making such a decision I advise students to ask themselves the following: Although the PhD program is not one of your preferred schools, does it look as if it will be able to fulfill your academic needs? Will you have regrets or keep second-guessing your decision to attend the less than “ideal” PhD program? Will you feel the other students in the program are not on your level and thus holding back your education and job prospects? Suppose you attend an MA program and in the end are not admitted to a PhD program better than the one you turned down, will you feel your MA studies were a waste of your time?

PhD programs' views of applicants with MA’s

Until MA programs were developed that focused specifically on preparing students for PhD programs students who took MA’s rather than applying to PhD programs after their undergraduate degree were often looked upon with some skepticism. Things have changed now, but not everywhere. Some PhD programs seem to continue with old assumptions. From my experience at UWM, for example, there are several schools that have not admitted our students no matter how good they are. We have had students who have gotten into many/all of the very top PhD programs and are turned down (not even put on a waiting list) by schools that are ranked lower or much lower. Also some PhD programs are skittish/reluctant to admit students who do not come from a prestigious undergraduate school. Completing a good MA program can reduce their concerns, but the “glow” factor that results from having an undergraduate degree from a prestigious university often does have an influence.

In sum, attending a good MA program will improve your philosophical skills, background and for many students their confidence. Not having PhD students, an MA program can provide much one-on-one attention. This enables the program to better tailor its courses and a student’s course of study to fit his or her individual needs. Moreover, MA programs have a lot of experience guiding students through the admissions process. At UWM the department as a whole, not merely a student’s advisor, plays a role helping students decide where to apply, balancing their application list in terms of admission probabilities, advising them on the choice of writing sample to submit and counseling them in their acceptance decisions. We also provide a good deal of personalized guidance walking a student through the application/admissions process and keeping an eye on problems that may develop along the way.

As the placement records of many MA programs show, students from MA programs are increasingly being admitted to top schools. In the case of UWM the talent and accomplishments of students we have sent to schools has often led these schools to look favorably on our graduates. I think a similar advantage would hold for students attending other MA programs.

MA Completion and Placement Records

Students should try to get information about the program’s completion record; these do vary from program to program. Student should also check the placement records of the MA program, especially how they have performed in recent years. Comparing this data is not always easy as the schools use different methods of counting and provide different information. Some do not break the data down by year; so the record will reflect many years of placement, not the performance in any particular year. Some may be selective in reporting or list not only the school's students attend but all acceptances. Hence if one student was admitted to numerous very good schools it can skew the data.

As mentioned earlier MA programs do not get students into PhD programs; they prepare them to apply. Thus placement records reflect the quality of the students enrolled in the program, and this can vary from year to year. UWM’s success in placing students at top programs is largely due to the strength of the students in the program. Many who apply to UWM do so in the hope that it will enable them to be admitted to a better program. They probably could and some in fact have been admitted to pretty good PhD programs. I have indicated above my thoughts on the pros and cons of gambling that they will be admitted to a better school.

MA Applications and Admissions

Much information is likely to be found on a program’s web site concerning the application process, requirements, the nature of the program and the faculty. Check this for suitability to your needs. At UWM our primary criterion for selecting students is our assessment of the student’s potential for work in philosophy. We do not require students be philosophy majors or have even taken philosophy courses. A good number of students who have been most successful in gaining admission to top PhD programs fall into this category.

Our admission decisions are most influenced by the writing sample and letters of recommendation. The student’s statement of purpose is important, too, in that it provides background information that can help us assess the student’s overall record, as well as determine if the student’s goals, interests and areas of study fit our program. We have no set standards for GRE scores and grades. They play a role only after our overall assessment of a student’s talents. GRE’s tend to play a much greater role in PhD admissions. We urge student who do not have very good GRE’s to retake them before applying to PhD programs. There are, however, quite good US, Canadian and UK schools that do not require GRE scores.

At UWM we do not give much weight per se to the undergraduate school the student has attended, but as in the case of PhD programs it does play some role in assessment. Attending a high-powered school usually means a student has a long standing record of high achievement and her or his general abilities have to some extent been “prescreened”. A school’s status can also affect how letters of recommendation and other materials are evaluated. For example, if a letter writer says the student is in the top 10% of recent graduates it can be harder to evaluate the significance of the fact when the letter comes from a school with little track record as opposed to a school that consistently produces strong philosophy majors. It is also likely members of the admissions committee will know more about the background and standards of the person writing the letter if the person is from a well-known program.

Letters

The better the writer knows you and your work and will take the time to spell it out, the more useful the letter. Since many of our applicants have little formal training in philosophy we recognize that not all the letters may come from philosophers. Informative letters from non-philosophers are reviewed like any others but there often are two problems evaluating them. 1. At times the letters are from a professor who had you in a course that is not readily related to philosophy. 2. The course work is on a more philosophical topic, but the instructor has little background in philosophy and evaluates your work in terms of that are not very informative about your philosophical talents.

Also if a student has, say, had only one philosophy course the letter or the student’s statement of purpose should spell out how this minimal background has led the student to undertake the study of philosophy at the graduate level.

Writing Sample

It is hard to evaluate a student’s philosophical potential if the paper submitted is only tangentially on a philosophical topic or examined from a non-philosophical perspective. Most of the papers submitted to our program were written originally for a course. Do not assume that the paper that received the best grade is the best to send. Grading varies from instructor to instructor and that paper may not best informatively reflect your potential. Speak to your instructor and your undergraduate advisor about the paper you intend to submit and what you may want to do to improve it.

Papers that although good are mainly repeats of course content or simply follow the readings give less indication of the student’s talents than one that shows independent research and an attempt to say something of your own. Similarly papers that largely lay out A’s and B’s position and declare a winner in the debate tend not to make the best case for the student’s philosophical research skills.

Admissions Decisions

Below are the Council of Graduate School guidelines for decision dates that most, but not all, MA and PhD programs go by:

Acceptance of an offer of financial support (such as a graduate scholarship, fellowship, traineeship, or assistantship) for the next academic year by a prospective or enrolled graduate student completes an agreement that both student and graduate school expect to honor. In that context, the conditions affecting such offers and their acceptance must be defined carefully and understood by all parties.

Students are under no obligation to respond to offers of financial support prior to April 15; earlier deadlines for acceptance of such offers violate the intent of this Resolution. In those instances in which a student accepts an offer before April 15, and subsequently desires to withdraw that acceptance, the student may submit in writing a resignation of the appointment at any time through April 15. However, an acceptance given or left in force after April 15 commits the student not to accept another offer without first obtaining a written release from the institution to which a commitment has been made. Similarly, an offer by an institution after April 15 is conditional on presentation by the student of the written release from any previously accepted offer. It is further agreed by the institutions and organizations subscribing to the above Resolution that a copy of this Resolution should accompany every scholarship, fellowship, traineeship, and assistantship offer.

Waiting to hear about admission decisions can be very stressful and not all MA and PhD programs do much to alleviate the pressure. To some extent though students frequently expect more or more definite information before a department really knows what to tell the student. Different MA and PhD programs operate on different time schedules. Once a department accepts and offers to support a student she or he has until April 15 to respond. Naturally the student does not want to make a decision until all the facts are in. So if the student is still in the running for a place at a school she or he would prefer they can and most frequently do delay until April 15.

It is also the case that schools have different policies concerning waiting lists. Usually no school gets acceptances from all those admitted. Some admit more than they want assuming that in the end they will have about as many acceptances as they aim for. Other universities only admit the number of students they are aiming for and put others who they think have a good chance of being accepted on a waiting list. Schools also adopt different policies as to the number of students they put on their waiting lists. This may be determined by their past experience as to how far they have usually gone down their list before filling the class. Some MA and PhD programs less certain of the likely percent of acceptances or not wanting to take chances put a very large number of applicants on their waiting list. And they may not let those on the list know their fate or even where they stand until they actually fill the class. In any case departments often do not know how far they will actually go down their waiting list until quite late, since many students do not make their decisions until April 15.

Blogs

There are a number of student blogs that provide useful information about a school’s practices, acceptance policies and also attempt to keep track of who has been accepted, rejected or put on waiting lists. One must be careful depending on this information, as it is not always accurate.

Confessional Philosophy

Usually, philosophy is advocacy. Sometimes it's disruption without a positive position in mind. More rarely, it's confession.

The aim of the confessional philosopher is not the same as that of someone who confesses to a spouse or priest, nor quite the same (though perhaps closer) as that of the confessional poet. It is rather this: To display oneself as a model of a certain sort of thinking, while not necessarily endorsing that style of thinking or the conclusions that flow from it. Confessional philosophy tends to center on skepticism and sin.

Consider, in Augustine's Confessions, the famous discussion of stealing pears, wherein Augustine displays the sinful pattern of his youthful mind. Augustine's aim is not so much, it seems to me, to advocate a certain position (such as that sinful thoughts tend to take such-and-such a form) as to offer the episode for contemplation by others, with no prepackaged conclusion, and perhaps also to induce humility in both the reader and himself. He offers an analysis of his motives -- that he was he was trying to simulate freedom by getting away with something forbidden (which would fit with his general theory of sin, that it involves trying to possess something that can only be given by God) -- but then he undercuts that analysis when he notes that he would definitely not have stolen the pears alone. Was it, then, that he valued the camraderie of his sinful friends? He rejects that explanation also -- "that gang-mentality too was a nothing" -- and after waffling over various possibilities he concludes "It was a seduction of the mind hard to understand.... Who can unravel this most snarled, knotty tangle?" (4th c. CE/1997, p. 72-73).

Descartes's Meditations, especially the first two, are presented as confessional -- perhaps partly to display an actual pattern in his (past) thinking, but perhaps also partly as a pose. Here we see, or seem to see, the struggles and confusions of a man bent of finding a secure foundation for his thought. Hume's skeptical conclusion to Book 1 of the Treatise seems to me more genuinely confessional, when he asks how he can dare to "venture upon such bold enterprizes, when beside those numberless infirmities peculiar to myself, I find so many which are common to human nature?" (1739/1978, p. 265). "The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning.... I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hour's amusement, I wou'd return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther" (p. 268-269). We see how the skeptic writhes. Hume displays his pattern of skeptical thought, but offers no way out, nor chooses between embracing his skeptical arguments and rejecting them. Nonetheless, in Books II and III, he's back in the business of philosophical argumentation.

Generally, it's better to offer a tight, polished exposition or argument than to display one's thoughts, errors, and uncertainties. That partly explains the rarity of confessional philosophy. But sometimes, no model of error or uncertainty will serve better than oneself.

Why All the Children -- I Mean Philosophers -- Are Above Average

You probably -- like most people -- think your intelligence is above average, that you're a better-than-average driver, and that your children are the rockingest. Part of your disagreement about this with other people (that is, those who think you're a reckless idiot with rotten kids) may be your different standards. The home improvement contractor and the absent-minded professor don't agree about what "intelligence" is. People who use and don't use turn signals differ about the importance of turn signals. We come to esteem the domains of our children's success. I wouldn't -- far from it! -- deny that there's considerable illusion and self-deception in all this, but to some extent it can be perfectly rational. People can legitimately disagree in their standards of intelligence, skillful driving, and child behavior, and it shouldn't be surprising if those legitimate differences lead them to shape themselves (and their children) to reflect their standards. We could all perfectly rationally believe we are above average.

It seems to me that this applies especially to philosophy, the one academic field where virtually everything is contentious (even, I'll admit, this very statement). Philosophers can perfectly rationally disagree, and disagree radically, in their views of at least:

* what counts as an important topic,
* what is a good method to address a particular topic,
* the truth of almost any philosophical conclusion,
* the quality of almost any philosophical argument.

Those of them with any sense will then choose, in their own research, to focus on the most important topics, using the best approaches and arguments, wisely defending the truth. By their own standards -- and quite reasonably so -- their work will be the best stuff out there, with the exception probably of a few acknowledged heroes after whom they mold themselves.

Almost inevitably then, almost everyone who does philosophical research will feel that their work is undervalued and underappreciated by the rest of the community (who for their part very reasonably have different standards). Aggravating this will be the usual self-serving biases and positive self-illusions of non-depressed people, and various cognitive and situational facts somewhere between self-deceptive and rational. To exemplify the last point: One's own work is more salient and better remembered than that of others, and so more noticeably missing from reference lists. Positive feedback is more likely to be conveyed than negative feedback, especially as one's power and prestige increase. Like-minded philosophers tend to aggregate in departments, in conferences, in journals, in reference lists -- making those with the highest opinion of you and the most similar values the ones you are most likely to interact with.

Odds are, you're about an order of magnitude worse a philosopher than you think you are. Or, put differently: Sure, you're well above average, by your own reasonable standards, but so is everybody.

Update Sept. 10: Let me add that I think the dynamics for students are a bit different, with a substantial proportion suffering from underconfidence. Or actually, I think more commonly among top students (including in my own case when I was a student), there's a weird, irrational blend of underconfidence and inflated arrogance.

What Is It Like to Feel Sleepy?

Here are three types of conscious experience, or "phenomenology", that it's difficult to deny:

(1.) sensory experience (like the experience of redness produced by looking at a red object, like the taste of saltiness in one's mouth),
(2.) imagery experience (like a picture in one's mind's eye of the Taj Mahal, or a tune or sentence running silently through one's head), and
(3.) emotional experience (the rush of anger, the shock of sudden fear).

Some scholars think one or more of these reduces to or is a variant of another (maybe emotional experience is just sensory experience of the body [as William James says], maybe imagery experience is just a faint version of sensory experience [as David Hume says]). But clearly we have all three types of experience.

It's sometimes argued that we also have other types of experience, but there has never been a consensus on what the other types are. Imageless thought or "cognitive phenomenology" is one suggestion, which has been getting a lot of attention recently (e.g., by Charles Siewert, David Pitt, and Russ Hurlburt) -- the supposed experience we have of thinking something which is not just a matter of having images or emotional experiences of a certain sort, but which has its own irreducible phenomenology. Early in the 20th century, E.B. Titchener argued against the existence of such cognitive phenomenology, suggesting that it mostly reduces to visual images, inner speech (both forms of imagery), and the like. More recently, William Robinson and Jesse Prinz have argued similarly against it.

How about the experience of feeling sleepy? I can't recall any good discussions of this in the philosophical or psychological literature. (If I've missed something, please let me know!) Is that reducible to one or more of those three types of experience?

Maybe it's a type of sensory experience? To think clearly about this, we need first to think about what other kinds of experiences are sensory -- for the categories above are clearly incomplete unless we have a fairly broad notion of "sensory", such that pains count as sensory experiences and feelings of muscular tension and limb position and feelings of fullness or discomfort in the alimentary canal. Is feeling sleepy sensory in the same way these other experiences are -- a matter of experiencing how things are going in your body?

As it happens, I'm sleepy right now. (Hence the inspiration for this post.) This slight headache, this feeling that I'm tempted to describe as a heaviness near my eyes -- those seem like sensory experiences. But there's more to sleepiness than that. A lassitude in my limbs? Is that sensory? But could I have this very same heaviness and lassitude and not feel sleepy? Or feel sleepy without this heaviness and lassitude? My guess is -- but it's only a guess -- that there's something more.

Also: Sleepiness is as much a state one one's brain as of one's body. I can understand how detecting the condition of one's body is, in an appropriately broad sense, sensory; but is detecting the condition of one's brain also sensory? That doesn't seem right. The brain does all kinds of self-monitoring and engages in all kinds of feedback loops; would those, too, be "sensory"?

So maybe sleepiness is, experientially, an emotion? It has a valence, like emotion (negative, usually), and perhaps a typical facial posture. But it doesn't appear on most psychologists' lists of emotional states (sadness, happiness, fear, anger, surprise...). It doesn't seem to arise, usually, as a reaction to how things are going for you and those you care about, for example in response to a change for better or worse in one's condition, as emotions typically do. But maybe not all emotions are like that? (Is surprise even like that?) What is an emotion, exactly? Well, we won't solve that question today.

Or is the experience of sleepiness sui generis, just its own unique sort of thing? And if so, then the feeling of being well-rested, too? And who knows what all else? Feeling energetic? Competent? Lusty? Healthy? The boxes in which we're supposed to fit things, the categories of experience -- their borders seem no longer clear, or they won't stand still....

Reconstructive Memory (vs. Storage and Retrieval) and "Experience Sampling"

In both cognitive science and folk psychology, the dominant metaphor for memory – a metaphor that both reflects and reinforces a certain way of thinking about it – is the metaphor of storage and retrieval (often with a search in the middle). There’s one particular aspect of this metaphor I want to highlight in this post: On the storage-and-retrieval picture, memory is a process that, once initiated, can and typically should operate largely independently of other cognitive processes. Other processes like inferring, imagining, and perceiving interfere with pure remembering. To the extent those processes influence one’s final judgment about some remembered fact or event, one isn’t really quite remembering it.

This isn’t to say, of course, that on such a model inferring, imagining, or perceiving couldn’t sometimes be helpful. When something is difficult to recall, they might help one recall it, perhaps by giving clues about where to look in one’s memory stores. (If the clue is specific enough, they might even turn a recall task into a recognition task.) They might appropriately increase or decrease one’s confidence in the results of the retrieval process. But if one’s aim is as purely and cleanly as possible simply to remember, there’s something problematic in allowing such processes to play anything but a secondary role. And one might worry that they’re as likely, perhaps more likely, to distort and corrupt the memory as to enable it.

Bartlett (1932), Neisser (1967), and Roediger (1980) have ably described the various infelicities of this storage-and-retrieval picture. When the task is to remember a complex event or a complex passage (as in Bartlett’s seminal research) the core problem with the retrieval metaphor is more evident than when the task is to recall, say, a list of numbers or nonsense syllables. If I tell you a story about a cricket match and ask you to recall it later, you will not reproduce the story verbatim. Nor will you reproduce gappy but verbatim pieces of the story. Rather, you will produce a new version of the story, in light of your general background knowledge of cricket. This half-inventive process is especially revealed by your plausible mistakes and interpolations, but there’s no reason to suppose that it would only be the mistakes and interpolations that show the heavy influence of background knowledge. Someone, for example, without that background knowledge would not do nearly so well remembering overall (even if certain mistakes are more likely). Nor is this simply a matter of a cricket-knowledgeable person encoding the story better in the first hearing and thus “storing” it differently (though no doubt hearing the story knowledgeably is very important to remembering it well later). Knowledge of cricket is also used to construct or reconstruct the story at the time of recall. If, in the intervening time, new knowledge of cricket is acquired, that will affect the reconstruction, probably for the better if the match was real and typical. (In my own case, I have particularly noticed the profound effect of new knowledge on my reconstructive memory of philosophical works I read as an undergraduate.)

Bartlett writes:

Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude toward a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience, and to a little outstanding detail which commonly appears in image or in language form. It is thus hardly even really exact, even in the most rudimentary cases of role recapitulation, and it is not at all important that it should be so (1932, p. 213).

From the fact that memory is reconstructive in this way – necessarily reconstructive, at least for complex events – it follows that imagination, inference, the application of pre-existing schemata, and other cognitive processes are not separable from the process of remembering but rather an integral part of it. They are not interfering or aiding forces from which an act of “pure” remembering could be isolated.

Let's apply this to an example, from "experience sampling" -- a topic close to my heart.

An event transpires in your stream of experience – an image of warplanes in flight, say – and then a randomly generated beep occurs, signaling that you are to try your best to recall that moment of experience, which is to say the last undisturbed moment of experience before the sampling beep. Russ Hurlburt (or someone else) will interview you about it later, trying to discover in this way the truth about randomly sampled moments of your everyday, lived experience. (Now that's pretty cool, don't you think?) Okay, so what's going to happen?

First, let's note the obvious: That target event is now gone. Furthermore, there’s no reason to think your brain would have stored a detailed and enduring record of that event as it was ongoing. As change blindness experiments have shown, as well as experiments about the forgetting of mundane everyday details (even details frequently seen like the layout of a penny), we almost instantly forget many, perhaps most, major features of the environment (Sanford 1917/1982; Nickerson and Adams 1979; Rensink, O’Regan, and Clark 1997, 2000; Simons and Levin 1998). You may try to retain that image of warplanes over the duration of the beep and the post-beep reflection, using that retained image as a model for the image as it existed the moment before the beep; but surely it’s plausible to suppose that the image might be transformed, elaborated, rendered artificial in the course of retention, and it may be very difficult to detect such changes reliably, accurately accounting for and subtracting them when reaching judgments about the target experience at the moment of the beep.

Or you may try to recreate the image, if it was momentarily lost, which would appear to invite all the same risks if not more.

Or you may try to recall the image without retaining or recreating it (perhaps purely linguistically?), but this too will be a constructive or reconstructive act, involving (for example) one’s knowledge of warplanes, how you take them generally to look, knowledge of the outward event that inspired the image (a passage in a book, say), and probably also one’s general opinions about imagery. It will not be the simple retrieval of a recorded trace, in high or low pixilation, but rather elaborative, constructive, and plausibility- and schemata-grounded, like Bartlett’s subjects’ recollections stories and passages of text.

Then, hours later, you are interviewed, and the reconstructive process begins again, with the target event less fresh, but – perhaps compensatingly – with more available bases for the reconstruction: all the general knowledge (or opinions), schemata, and skills that were available (except literal retention) in the first instance of recollection after the beep; plus also one’s knowledge of, or best recollection of, the judgments and other processes that occurred after the beep; plus one’s written notes; plus cues (maybe subtle) from the interviewer; plus one’s knowledge of the intervening beeps and interviews. From this confluence of forces issues an utterance, “they’re jet planes with a tapered nose and that kind of dark gray steel with a…”, which the interviewer interprets in accord with his own system of schemata and prejudices.

This, I think, is the cognitive process underlying interviews about sampled experiences – both in Hurlburt’s method and in related methods like Petitmengin's. You see, then, why I think there’s plenty of room for error.

The Unreliability of Naive Introspection

... Chapter 7 of my book in draft (provisionally titled Perplexities of Consciousness) is now up on my website. The chapter is independently readable -- a slightly revised version of my 2008 article of the same title -- and it's the argumentative core of the book. Comments and feedback more than welcome.

With this posting, a working draft of the entire book (except preface and references) is now available. Over the next couple of months (hopefully not too much longer) I will be tweaking and revising in light of further reflections, further reading, and the comments and criticisms that many people have kindly given.

Here's an abstract of the chapter:

We are prone to gross error, even in favorable circumstances of extended reflection, about our own ongoing conscious experience, our current phenomenology. Even in this apparently privileged domain, our self-knowledge is faulty and untrustworthy. We are not simply fallible at the margins but broadly inept. Examples highlighted in this chapter include: emotional experience (for example, is it entirely bodily; does joy have a common, distinctive phenomenological core?), peripheral vision (how broad and stable is the region of visual clarity?), and the phenomenology of thought (does it have a distinctive phenomenology, beyond just imagery and feelings?). Cartesian skeptical scenarios undermine knowledge of ongoing conscious experience as well as knowledge of the outside world. Infallible judgments about ongoing mental states are simply banal cases of self-fulfillment. Philosophical foundationalism supposing that we infer an external world from secure knowledge of our own consciousness is almost exactly backward.

A New Experimental Philosophy Page

with links to many articles in the area, is up here.

Philosophers' Honesty in Responding to Questionnaires

Last week, and in various previous posts, I've discussed a questionnaire Josh Rust and I sent to several hundred ethicists and non-ethicist professors (both inside and outside philosophy), soliticiting self-reports of their moral attitudes and moral behavior on a variety of issues, such as vegetarianism and voting. Our guiding question: Do ethicists behave any better, or any more in accord with their espoused principles, than do non-ethicists? Based on our analyses so far, it doesn't look like ethicists' behavior is any better.

You might wonder, though -- as I do -- how honestly our survey respondents are answering our questions. Are those who have behaved (at least by their own lights) less than ideally well really going to report that fact, even in an anonymous survey like ours? Maybe ethicists really do behave better than non-ethicists but don't look that way because they respond more honestly. Josh and I tried to get a handle on this, in part, by asking a few questions whose answers we could verify. Respondents' honesty on these questions might help us estimate the honesty of their responses overall. Since honesty, of course, is also a moral behavior, it merits examination in its own right.

We asked one question whose answer we could directly verify for all philosophy professors: whether they were dues-paying members of the American Philosophical Association. (The APA publishes an annual list of members, which includes people up to 10 months late with their dues.) Among the philosopher respondents, 138 non-ethicists and 128 ethicists were listed by the APA as members. Of the remaining 59 non-ethicist respondents -- that is, those not on the APA membership list -- 23 (39.0%) claimed to be members. Of the remaining 61 ethicist respondents, 27 (44.3%) claimed to be members. In other words, nearly half of the respondents with the arguably immoral behavior (free-riding by not belonging to the APA) denied that behavior.

The APA's list is not perfect, I'm sure, and people's memories are sometimes fallible for reasons entirely innocent, but it seems plausible to me that much of the effect here is due to culpable inaccuracies -- even if not deliberate lying, a blameworthy bias toward misremembering and misportraying oneself in a positive light. (More attributable, probably, to purely innocent error, either by the respondents or the APA, are the 4% of respondents -- 7 ethicists and 8 non-ethicists -- who were on the APA's lists but did not claim to be members.)

Of course, it's disputable whether philosophy professors should, morally speaking, belong to the APA. In the attitudinal part of the survey, a majority of philosophers (64.7%) said it was morally good to "regularly [pay] membership dues to support one's main academic disciplinary society (the APA, the MLA, etc., as appropriate)", but that left a substantial minority who said it was morally neutral (very few said it was bad). Non-members who claimed to be members may have been somewhat more likely to say it is morally good to support the APA through one's membership dues than were the non-members who truly stated that they were non-members, but if so, the trend was modest (62.0% vs. 52.9%), and not statistically significant, given our relatively small sample of APA non-members.

So the answer to our question about how accurately philosophers portrayed their negative behavior in our survey appears to be: not very accurately at all. Nor do ethicists seem any more honest; in fact the trend (not statistically significant) was toward less honesty. This also fits with professors' evident exaggeration, in our survey, of their responsiveness to undergraduate emails (with ethicists appearing just as prone to such exaggeration). Josh and I have some other tests of honesty, too, not all analyzed, which I'll discuss later.

Incidentally, near the the end of the questionnaire we asked about the morality of "responding dishonestly to survey questions such as the ones presented here" and also "Were you dishonest in your answers to any previous questions?" Those who appear to have falsely claimed APA membership trended, if anything, toward being more likely than those who truly stated their non-membership to say it is bad to respond to such questions dishonestly (93.2% vs. 85.3%, chi-square p = .17). Also, 2 of 49 in the first group (4.1%) and 3 of 65 in the second group (4.6%) admitted having answered a survey question dishonestly.

Chapter 4 of Perplexities: Human Echolocation

As you may know, I'm writing a book about the inaccuracy (in my view) of people's judgments about their stream of conscious experience (tentative title: Perplexities of Consciousness). Last winter and spring I posted drafts of six of the eight chapters (available from my academic homepage). In early summer, I got distracted with a trip to Australia and a few other things, but now I'm back in the saddle. So here's Chapter 4, "Human Echolocation", co-authored with psychologist Michael S. Gordon.

Abstract:

Most people, when asked explicitly, will deny that they can detect the properties of silent objects, such as shape, texture, and distance, using echoic information about how sound is reflected or otherwise modified by those objects. They'll deny, that is, that they can echolocate. It turns out, however, that people are surprisingly good at echolocation (if not as good as bats or dolphins). We are mistaken not just about our sensory capacities but also about our sensory experiences. There's "something it's like" to echolocate; echolocation has a kind of auditory phenomenology. You can hear, for example, the proximity of a wall as you approach it eyes closed; you can hear the wadded softness of a blanket as you speak into it; and, generally speaking, though they tend to deny it, people have a pervasive auditory echoic phenomenology of their environments and objects nearby.

Radio Interview: Are Ethicists Ethical?

By Australia's ABC national radio, featuring Simon Longstaff and me, here.

In Recruiting Members, the APA Doesn't Appeal As Effectively to Self-Interest As Do Other Academic Disciplinary Societies

Or so it seems, from the data I'm looking at here.

As discussed on this blog several times previously, last spring Josh Rust and I conducted a survey of the moral attitudes and moral behavior of philosophers (including ethicists) and other professors. Part I of the survey solicited attitudes about the morality or immorality of various actions -- eating meat, donating to charity, etc. -- using a nine-point scale from "very morally bad" to "very morally good", with "morally neutral" in the middle. Part II asked respondents to report their own behavior in such matters.

We asked two questions about membership in academic societies. In Part I, we asked about the morality or immorality of "regularly paying membership dues to support one's main academic disciplinary society (the APA, the MLA, etc., as appropriate)". In Part II, we asked "Are you currently a dues-paying member of your discipline's main academic society?

Philosophers' attitudes toward the American Philosophical Association seemed about the same as other professors' attitudes. Philosophers were just as likely as non-philosophers to say it was good to pay membership dues to support their main academic disciplinary society, with 67.7% rating that action somewhere on the "morally good" side of the scale, compared to 64.7% of non-philosophers, a difference well within the range of the survey's sampling error (chi-squared, p = .48).

(I should mention, as a caveat, that among respondents who rated membership as morally good, philosophers rated it, on average, less good than did non-philosophers -- 6.89 vs. 7.53 on the 9-point scale [t-test, p < .001]. However, I believe this simply reflects philosophers' greater tendency to avoid the extreme ends of the scale. For every single one of the nine rated actions, philosophers' responses, when they were not neutral, were closer to neutral than were non-philosophers' responses -- an occupational hazard, perhaps, of philosophers' frequent reflection on unusual and extreme cases.)

However, philosophers were less likely than were other professors to report being members of their disciplinary societies: 78.0% of philosopher respondents were members, vs. 86.7% of the respondents from other disciplines (chi-square, p = .02). The difference is almost entirely driven by respondents who expressed the view that membership is morally neutral. Among those who said that membership was morally good, philosophers and non-philosophers differed little in their membership rates (82.6% vs. 87.9%, within chance, chi-square p = .21). But among professors who said they saw membership in their discipline's main society as morally neutral -- professors presumably motivated mainly by self-interest in their decision whether or not to be members -- philosophers' membership rates were considerably lower (68.0% vs. 84.5%, p = .02).

Put a bit differently, non-philosophers' membership rates hardly differed between those who saw membership as morally good and those who did not, suggesting that there are excellent prudential reasons for most professors in other disciplines to be members, while this was is not as true for philosophers.

Perhaps the APA should take note.

(Incidentally, ethicists and non-ethicist philosophers didn't appear to differ in any of these respects, which is why I've combined them in the analyses here.)

Now I should say that all this concerns self-reported membership only. For the philosophers, I happen to have data about the actual membership rates of our survey respondents -- which, as you might expect, are somewhat lower than self-reported membership rates. I'll get to this in the next post. Unfortunately, for the comparison to non-philosophers, self-report is all we have to go on.

Has Anyone Ever Pushed the Fat Man off the Footbridge?

In the famous "trolley problems" (developed by contemporary philosophers such as Phillipa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thompson), a hypothetical observer is faced with several similar-seeming scenarios involving runaway trolleys or the like where there's a choice between letting five people die (if you do not intervene) and doing something that causes one other person to die, in order to save the five. The fun bit is this: Although many of the dilemmas seem similar, our moral intuitons tend to split on them, raising the question of what's driving the intuitions. Although discussion of these sorts of problems began in philosophy, with philosophers relying on their armchair intuitions, psychologists such as Marc Hauser have recently started to look at the psychology of this more systematically.

Two of the most famous scenarios are the "side track" and the "footbridge" scenarios.

In the side track scenario, you see a runaway trolley headed toward five people who will certainly die if you do nothing. You are standing next to a switch that would allow you to divert the trolley to a side track, saving the five people. Unfortunately, there is one person on the side track, who will certainly die if you divert the trolley. Question: Is it morally permissible (or even good) to divert the trolley?

The footbridge scenario is similar except that you're standing on a footbridge above the track. The only way to save the five people is to block the trolley with a sufficiently heavy object. The only sufficiently heavy object you can reach in time is a fat man (alternatively, perhaps more politely, a hiker with a heavy backpack) who is standing next to you. You could push him off the footbridge and the trolley would grind to a halt on his body, killing him but saving the five. You yourself are insufficiently heavy to stop the trolley with your own body. Queston: Is it morally permissible (or even good) to push the fat man?

Most people seem to have the intuition that it is morally permissible to flip the switch to divert the trolley but that it's not morally permissible to push the fat man. Why, exactly, is a very interesting question that I won't go into here. All I want to ask is this: Are there any real life scenarios in which someone has done something like pushing the fat man? Given that there is a non-trivial minority of people who do think it's okay (or even good) to do so, you might think one of them would have been faced with such an opportunity and done the thing. Of course, I'm not asking just about runaway trolleys but about any scenario with a similar structure, in which one kills an innocent person through an act of direct personal violence in order to save several others. I exclude abstract decision making involving administrative balancing the costs of lives against each other in times of war and emergency, such as deciding to reroute life-saving supplies from one place to another or asking one platoon to charge into the fire to save the battalion. What I'm asking about is archetypal violence -- murder, by a civilian in no position of authority, of an innocent bystander -- to save other people's lives.

In other words: Do people ever put their life-counting consequentialism into action? If so, you'd think it would make the news. In the 1980s Bernard Goetz made big headlines when he shot some muggers in a New York subway (and there's even a Wikipedia entry about it). You'd think pushing the fat man would be even bigger news. And although fat-man like scenarios are surely very rare, in this world of billions they must sometimes arise.

(HT: Jeanette Kennett for forcefully posing this issue to me.)

Professors on the Morality of Voting

Professors appear to think that voting regularly in public elections is about as morally good as donating 10% of one's income to charity. This seems, anyway, to be suggested by the results of a survey Josh Rust and I sent earlier this year to hundreds of U.S. professors, ethicists and non-ethicists, both inside and outside of philosophy. (The survey is also described in a couple of previous posts.)

In one part of the survey, we asked professors to rate various actions on a nine point scale from "very morally bad" through "morally neutral" to "very morally good". Although some actions we expected to be rated negatively (e.g., "not consistently responding to student emails"), there were three we expected to be rated positively by most respondents: "regularly voting in public elections", "regularly donating blood", and "donating 10% of one's income to charity". Later in the survey, we asked related questions about the professors' own behavior, allowing us to compare expressed normative attitudes with self-described behavior. (In some cases we also have direct measures of behavior to compare with the self-reports.)

Looking at the data today, I found it striking how strongly the respondents seemed to feel about voting. Overall, 87.9% of the professors characterized voting in public elections as morally good. Only 12.0% said voting was morally neutral, and a lonely single professor (1 of the 569 respondents or 0.2%) characterized it as morally bad. That's a pretty strong consensus. Political philosophers were no more cynical about voting than the others, with 84.5% responding on the positive side of the scale (a difference well within the range of statistical chance variation). But I was struck, even more than by the percentage who responded on the morally good side of our scale, by the high value they seemed to put on voting. To appreciate this, we need to compare the voting question with the two other questions I mentioned.

On our 1 to 9 scale (with 5 "morally neutral" and 9 "very morally good"), the mean rating of "regularly donating blood" was 6.81, and the mean rating of "donating 10% of one's income to charity" was 7.36. "Regularly voting in public elections" came in just a smidgen above the second of those, at 7.37 (the difference being within statistical chance, of course).

I think we can assume that most people think it's fairly praiseworthy to donate 10% of one's income to charity (for the average professor, this would be about $8,000). Professors seem to be saying that voting is just about equally good. Someone who regularly donates blood can probably count at least one saved life to her credit; voting seems to be rated considerably better than that. (Of course, donating 10% of one's income to charity as a regular matter probably entails saving even more lives, if one gives to life-saving type charities, so it makes a kind of utilitarian sense to rate the money donation as better than the blood donation.)

Another measure of the importance professors seem to invest in voting is the rate at which they report doing it. Among professors who described themselves as U.S. citizens eligible to vote, fully 97.8% said they had voted in the Nov. 2008, U.S. Presidential election. (Whether this claim of near-perfect participation is true remains to be seen. We hope to get some data on this shortly.)

Now is it just crazy to say that voting is as morally good as giving 10% of one's income to charity? That was my first reaction. Giving that much to charity seems uncommon to me and highly admirable, while voting... yeah, it's good to do, of course, but not that good. One thought, however -- adapted from Derek Parfit -- gives me pause about that easy assessment. In the U.S. 2008 Presidential election, I'd have said the world would be in the ballpark of $10 trillion better off with one of the candidates than the other. (Just consider the financial and human costs at stake in the Iraq war and the U.S. bank bailouts, for starters.) Although my vote, being only one of about 100,000,000 cast, probably had only about a 1/100,000,000 chance of tilting the election, multiplying that tiny probability by a round trillion leaves a $10,000 expected public benefit from my voting -- not so far from 10% of my salary.

Of course, that calculation is incredibly problematic in any number of ways. I don't stand behind it, but it helps loosen the grip of my previous intuition that of course it's morally better to donate 10% to charity than to vote.

Update July 29:
As Neil points out in the comments, in this post I seem to have abandoned my usual caution in inferring attitudes from expressions of attitudes. Right: Maybe professors don't think this at all. But I found it a striking result, taken at face value. If it's not to be taken at face value, we might ask: Why would so many professors, who really think donating 10% of income is morally better than voting, mark a bubble more toward the "very morally good" end of the scale in response to the voting question than in response to the donation question? Moral self-defensiveness, perhaps, on the assumption (borne out elsewhere in the data) that few of them themselves donate 10%...?

On Relying on Self-Report: Happiness and Charity

To get published in a top venue in sociology or social or personality psychology, one must be careful about many things -- but not about the accuracy of self-report as a measure of behavior or personality. Concerns about the accuracy of self-report tend to receive merely a token nod, after which they are completely ignored. This drives me nuts.

(Before I go further, let me emphasize that the problem here -- what I see as a problem -- is not universal: Some social psychologists -- Timothy Wilson, Oliver John, and Simine Vazire for example -- are appropriately wary of self-report.)

Although the problem is by no means confined to popular books, two popular books have been irking me acutely in this regard: The How of Happiness, by my UC Riverside colleague Sonja Lyubomirsky, and Who Really Cares, by Arthur Brooks (who has a named chair in Business and Government Policy at Syracuse).

The typical -- but not universal -- methodology in work by Lyubomirsky and those she cites is this: (A1.) Ask some people how happy (or satisfied, etc.) they are. (A2.) Try some intervention. (A3.) Ask them again how happy they are. Or: (B1.) Randomly assign some people to two or three groups, one of which receives the key intervention. (B2.) Ask the people in the different groups how happy they are. If people report greater happiness in A3 than in A1, conclude that the intervention increases happiness. If people in the intervention group report greater happiness in B2 than people in the other groups, likewise conclude that the intervention increases happiness.

This makes me pull out my hair. (Sorry, Sonja!) What is clear is that, in a context in which people know they are being studied, the intervention increases reports of happiness. Whether it actually increases happiness is a completely different matter. If the intervention is obviously intended to increase happiness, participants may well report more happiness post-intervention simply to conform to their own expectations, or because they endorse a theory on which the intervention should increase happiness, or because they've invested time in the intervention procedure and they'd prefer not to think of their time as wasted, or for any of a number of other reasons. Participants might think something like, "I reported a happiness level of 3 before, and now that I've done this intervention I should report 4" -- not necessarily in so many words.

As Dan Haybron has emphasized, the vast majority of the U.S. population describe themselves as happy (despite our high rate of depression and anger problems), and self-reports of happiness are probably driven less by accurate perception of one's level of happiness than by factors like the need to see and to portray oneself as a happy person (otherwise, isn't one something of a failure?). My own background assumption, in looking at people's self-reports of happiness, life-satisfaction, and the like, is that those reports are driven primarily by the need to perceive oneself a certain way, by image management, by contextual factors, by one's own theories of happiness, and by pressure to conform to perceived experimenter expectations. Perhaps there's a little something real underneath, too -- but not nearly enough, I think, to justify conclusions about the positive effects of interventions from facts about differences in self-report.

In Who Really Cares? Brooks aims to determine what sorts of people give the most to charity. Brooks bases his conclusions almost (but not quite) entirely on self-reports of charitable giving in large survey studies. His main finding is that self-described political conservatives report giving more to charity (even excluding religious charities) than do self-described political liberals. What he concludes -- as though this were unproblematically the same thing -- is that conservatives give more to charity than do liberals. Now maybe they do; it wouldn't be entirely surprising, and he has a little bit of non-self-report evidence that seems to support that conclusion (though how assiduously he looked for counterevidence is another question). But I doubt that people have any especially accurate sense of how much they really give to charity (even after filling out IRS forms, for the minority who itemize charitable deductions), and even if they did have such a sense I doubt that would be accurately reflected in self-report on survey studies.

As with happiness, I suspect self-reports of charitable donation are driven at least as much by the need to perceive oneself, and to have others perceive one, a particular way as by real rates of charitable giving. Rather than assuming, as Brooks seems to, that political conservatives and political liberals are equally subject to such distortional demands in their self-reports and thus attributing differences in self-reported charity to actual differences in giving, it seems to me just as justified -- that is to say, hardly justified at all -- to assume that the real rates of charitable giving are the same and thus attribute differences in reported charity to differences in the degree of distortion in the self-descriptive statements of political conservatives and political liberals.

Underneath sociologists' and social and personality psychologists' tendency to ignore the sources of distortion in self-report is this, I suspect: It's hard to get accurate, real-life measures of things like happiness and overall charitable giving. Such real-life measures will almost always themselves be only flawed and partial. In the face of an array of flawed options, it's tempting to choose the easiest of those options. Both the individual researcher and the research community as a whole then become invested in downplaying the shortcomings of the selected methods.

The Smallish Difference Between Belief and Desire

In the usual taxonomy of mental states (usual, that is, among contemporary analytic philosophers of mind) belief is one thing, desire quite another. They play very different roles in the economy of the mind: Desires determine our goals, and beliefs determine the perceived means to achieve them, with action generally requiring the activation of a matched belief-desire pair (e.g., the belief that there is beer in the fridge plus the desire for beer). I confess I’m not much enamored of this picture.

Surely this much at least is true: The belief that P is the case (say, that my illness is gone) and the desire that P be the case are very different mental states -- the possession of one without the other explaining much human dissatisfaction. Less cleanly distinct, however, are the desire that P (or for X) and the belief that P (or having X) would be good.

I don't insist that the desires and believings-good are utterly inseparable. Maybe we sometimes believe that things are good apathetically, without desiring them; surely we sometimes desire things that we don’t believe are, all things considered, good. But I’m suspicious of the existence of utter apathy. And if believing good requires believing good all things considered, perhaps we should think genuine desiring, too, is desiring all things considered; or conversely if we allow for conflicting and competing desires that pick up on individual desirable aspects of a thing or state of affairs then perhaps also we should allow for conflicting and competing believings good that also track individual aspects – believing that the desired object has a certain good quality (the very quality in virtue of which it is desired). With these considerations in mind, there may be no clear and indisputable case in which desiring and believing good come cleanly apart.

If the mind works by the manipulation of discrete representations with discrete functional roles – inner sentences, say, in the language of thought, with specific linguistic contents – then the desire that P and the belief that P would be good are surely different representational states, despite whatever difficulty there may be in prizing them apart. (Perhaps they’re closely causally related.) But if the best ontology of belief and desire, as I think, treats as basic the dispositional profiles associated with those states – that is, if mental states are best individuated in terms of how the people possessing those states are prone to act and react in various situations – and if dispositional profiles can overlap and be partly fulfilled, then there may be no sharp distinction between the desire that P and the belief that P would be good. The person who believes that Obama’s winning would be good and the person who wants Obama to win act and react – behaviorally, cognitively, emotionally – very similarly: Their dispositional profiles are much the same. The patterns of action and reaction characteristic of the two states largely overlap, even if they don’t do so completely.

This point of view casts in a very different light a variety of issues in philosophy of mind and action, such as the debate about whether beliefs can, by themselves, motivate action or whether they must be accompanied by desires; characterizations of belief and desire as having neatly different "directions of fit"; and functional architectures of the mind that turn centrally on the distinction between representations in the "belief box" and those in the "desire box".

On Debunking V: The Final Chapter

(by guest blogger Tamler Sommers)


First, let me offer my thanks to Eric for giving me this opportunity and to everyone who commented on my posts. This was fun.

Since my latest post on debunking I came across a paper called “Evolutionary Debunking Arguments” by Guy Kahane. (Forthcoming in Nous, you can find it on Philpapers.org.) Kahane mounts some careful and compelling criticisms of selective (“targeted”) debunking strategies and global debunking strategies in metaethics, and I strongly recommend this article to anyone interested in the topic. For my last post, want to focus on a claim from Kahane’s paper that isn’t central to his broader thesis but relates to my earlier posts. Kahane argues that evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs) implicitly assume an “objectivist account of evaluative discourse.” EDAs cannot apply to subjectivist theories because: subjectivist views claim that our ultimate evaluative concerns are the source of values; they are not themselves answerable to any independent evaluative facts. But if there is no attitude-independent truth for our attitudes to track, how could it make sense to worry whether these attitudes have their distal origins in a truth-tracking process?” (11)

I don’t think Kahane is right about this. Learning about the evolutionary or historical origins of our evaluative judgments can have an effect on those judgments—even for subjectivists. But we need to revise the description of EDAs as follows. Rather than ask whether the origins of our attitudes or intuitions have their origins in a truth-tracking process, we need to ask whether they have their origins in a process that we (subjectively) feel ought to bear on the judgments they are influencing.

Consider judgments about art. Imagine that Jack is a subjectivist about aesthetic evaluation. Ultimately, he think, there is no fact of the matter about whether a painting is beautiful. He sees a painting by an unknown artist and finds it magnificent. Later he learns that the painter skillfully employs a series of phallic symbols that trigger cognitive mechanisms which cause him to experience aesthetic appreciation. Would knowing this alter his judgment about the quality of the work? I can see two ways in which it might. First, his more general subjectivist ideas about the right way to evaluate works of art may rebel against cheap tricks like this to augment appreciation. He doesn’t feel that mechanisms that draw him unconsciously to phallic symbols ought to bear on his evaluation of a work of art. Second, learning this fact may have an effect on his visceral appreciation of the painting. (Now he sees a bunch of penises instead of a mountainous landscape.) In a real sense, then, his initial appreciation of the painting has been debunked.

So how might this work in moral case? Imagine Jill is an ethical subjectivist who is about to vote on a new law that would legalize consensual incest relationships between siblings as long they don’t produce children. Jill’s intuition is that incest is wrong. However, she has recently read articles that trace our intuitions about the wrongness of incest to disgust mechanisms that evolved in hominids to prevent genetic disorders. She knows that genetic disorders are not an issue in these kinds of cases, since the law stipulates that preventive measures must be taken. Her disgust, and therefore her intuition, are aimed at something that does not apply in this context. She feels, then, that her intuitions ought not to bear on her final judgment. And so she discounts the intuition and defers to other values that permit consensual relationships that do not harm anyone else.

The general point here is that evolutionary or historical explanations of our intuitions can have an effect on our all-things-considered evaluative judgments even if we think those judgments are ultimately subjective. Knowing the origins and mechanisms behind our attitudes can result in judgments that more accurately reflect our core values. This seems like a proper goal of philosophical inquiry in areas where no objectivist analysis is available.

The Mystery of the Chiming Bell

We've all had this experience: The clock tower starts chiming. At first, you're paying no attention, but about three or four chimes in, you suddenly notice. In memory, you can count back those first few chimes.

Here's the question: Did you have auditory experience of those chimes before you started thinking about them? Were they part of your stream of conscious experience, part of your phenomenology, part of "what it was like to be you", during those first few inattentive seconds? Or, until you started attending to the matter, were the chimes no part at all of your conscious experience, not even a secondary and peripheral part? Were they, that is, only part of an at-the-time nonconscious but after-the-fact recoverable "sensory store"?

Similarly: Suppose you suddenly notice, for the first time, that you have a mild headache. Was the pain a small, background part of your stream of experience before you first noticed it? Or did you not really experience the pain until you actually directed attention to the state of your head? Is having an enduring pain a matter of constantly experiencing painfulness, in the background or foreground depending on your state of attention; or is it more a matter of having occasional spurts of felt pain, arising from an enduring nonconscious disposition for such spurts to shoot annoyingly and against your will into consciousness?

Philosophers, psychologists, and ordinary folks seem to have different opinions about these questions. One group may be wrong and the other right; or everyone may be right about their own experiences, wrong to the extent they generalize to others. Is there a good way to determine where the truth lies? I'm inclined to think not -- at least not in the short term. Introspection can only reveal consciousness as attended at the moment, not whatever experience there is, or is not, without attention. Immediate memory is corrupted both by our typical quick forgetting of things outside attention and the potential confusion of actual experiences with the recovery, from the sensory store, of previously unexperienced traces (if such a thing is possible; and we can't assume it's not possible without begging the question). Third-person methods like brain imaging require, to be interpretable as revealing facts about consciousness, a prior commitment to the very issue at hand and thus are inescapably circular.

You may or you may not think you experienced that chiming bell before you attended to it. I can't see, though, how you could have any secure ground for that opinion.

Friends of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is to date the most visible and successful experiment in "open-access" -- that is, free -- academic philosophy. (This isn't to say there aren't also other excellent open-access resources like Philosophers' Imprint and various archiving projects.) Fans of open access who loathe the finacial abuse of academic libraries at the hands of companies like Springer might consider paying the modest fee to support the Stanford Encyclopedia: $5 per year for students, $10 or $25 for others. Who'd've thought you could buy friendship so cheaply?

The SEP is trying to entice people to join by offering their "friends" access to handsome PDFs of SEP entries. Maybe that kind of thing appeals to you, but for me it's just a matter of supporting a cause I care about.

Avowing Dream Skepticism in a Dream

Last night I dreamt I was giving a talk -- a talk I am due to give next week in Australia. The talk wasn't going so well, and I suggested to the audience that maybe, just maybe, I was actually dreaming giving the talk. My evidence was that I remembered having planned to polish things up in the remaining few days before the talk but now I couldn't remember those days having occurred.

Alex Byrne, in the back of the room, looked highly skeptical and a bit dyspeptic. Dave Chalmers looked mildly amused. Dan Dennett stood up and said, "I very much doubt that you are dreaming, but I agree that your talk is nightmarishly bad."

Of course, it turns out that I was right and they were wrong. So there!

Are Ethicists Any More Responsive to Undergraduate Emails Than Are Other Professors?

As regular readers know, Joshua Rust and I are interested in the moral behavior of ethics professors -- namely, do they behave any better? Pending the invention of the moralometer, though, it's a bit tricky to measure actual ethicists' actual moral behavior. Josh and I are forced to be a little creative. Here's one of our ideas: Assuming it's morally better, generally speaking, to respond to undergraduate emails than to ignore them, we can look at the rate at which ethicists respond to undergraduate emails, compared to other professors.

Thus inspired, Josh and I sent phony emails to several hundred professors -- emails designed to look like they came from an undergraduate. (Yes, we got human subjects ethics approval first; and yes we're aware that in spamming philosophers we are perhaps coming uncomfortably close to being a test case for our own thesis.) One of our emails asked about the professors' office hours; another expressed interest in declaring a major and asked for the name of the undergraduate advisor. Research question: Would ethicists be more likely than the other groups to respond to the emails?

No, it turns out. Here are the response rates:

Group: 1stemail , 2ndemail
Ethicists: 59.0% , 53.6%
Non-ethicist philosophers: 58.0% , 49.8%
Non-philosophers: 54.6% , 54.1%

This variation is well within chance (chi-squared, p = .51, .60).

Interesting enough, perhaps, as confirmation of our general finding (so far) that ethicists behave no better than non-ethicists. But this study had an additional twist: Many of these same professors also completed a survey we sent them -- a survey asking them, among other things, to rate the morality of "not consistently responding to student emails" on a nine point scale from "very morally bad" through "neutral" to "very morally good". We also asked: "About what percentage of student emails do you respond to?" followed by a blank for them to enter a percentage. Thus, we could compare normative attitude, self-described behavior, and actual behavior. (We hasten to add, here, that all identifying information was removed for analysis: We are not interested in the responses of particular individuals but only of groups.)

Our survey respondents said they nearly always responded to undergraduate emails. More than half estimated that they responded to 100% of undergraduate emails. More than 90% estimated that they responded to 90% or more of undergraduate emails. On the face of it, these appear to be gross overestimates -- I'm tempted even to say, in the aggregrate, borderline delusional (though I don't doubt that there are a few very conscientious email responders out there). When I reported these numbers recently in a talk to undergraduates, they laughed out loud. Ethicists reported neither more nor less responsiveness than did the other groups.

Those who reported responding to 100% of undergraduate emails were indeed somewhat more likely to respond to both emails: 47.2% versus 29.0% for those who claimed less than 100% responsiveness (chi square, p = .003).

Oddly, however, we found no relationship whatsoever between professors' expressed attitudes about the morality of consistently responding to undergraduate emails and their actual behavior. 83.0% of professors said it was morally bad not consistently to respond to undergraduate emails, but these professors were no more likely to respond to our emails than were the 17.0% who said it was morally okay not to respond. In fact, 65.5% of those who said it was okay not to respond consistently to undergraduate emails responded to our second email, compared to only 55.3% of those who said it was bad not to respond. (This was within the range of chance variation given the smallish numbers involved in this particular set of conditions, but the 95% confidence interval for the difference in response rates tops out at a 3.2% advantage for those who think it is morally bad not to respond -- so at best they're responding at practically the same rate.)

On none of these measures did ethicists appear to respond or behave any differently, or any more or less self-consistently, than the non-ethicist philosophers or the comparison group of non-philosophers.

Alternatives to the Burning Armchair

(by guest blogger Tamler Sommers)

There has been some discussion lately about whether the burning armchair is too combative and aggressive to serve as an appropriate symbol for the experimental philosophy movement. My first thought when I came across the controversy was that people need to lighten up a little. But then I realized that a slow burning is possibly the worst way to go and I began to see the critics’ point. So, inspired by Obama’s Cairo speech, I’d like to offer some alternative symbols for the X-Phi movement in hopes of reconciling the two feuding factions.

1. A beautiful day in Compton, CA, sounds of children playing in the background. An armchair sits on a corner enjoying the sunshine. Out of nowhere, the sound of screeching tires fills the air. A Chevy Suburban tears down the block. As it passes, we see Josh Knobe hanging out the window of the Suburban with an AK 47 yelling “caught you slippin’, caught you slippin’!” and filling the armchair up with holes.

2. An armchair sits in a deep black pit with only a bucket beside it. Thomas Nadelhoffer appears at the top of the pit with a small bisson frise. He calls down to the armchair:
“It rubs the Scotchguard on its upholstery…it does this whenever it’s told.”
Silence.
“It rubs the Scotchguard on its upholstery or else it gets the hose again.”
Silence.
“Now it places the Scotchguard in the basket….”

3. An armchair is taken prisoner by an unknown captor and placed in a small hotel room for fifteen years with no contact to the outside world other than a television and a small serving of dumplings that are pushed under the door every evening. The armchair has no idea why it is there.

4. A fleet of AH-64A Apache helicopters approach the shore of a small village of armchairs. In the cockpit, Shaun Nichols hits a button and Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries” blare from the helicopter speakers. Bullets from automatic weapons rain down on the helpless armchairs. “Run Lazy-boy! Run!” shouts Eddy Nahmias from one of the Apache open doors.

Other suggestions welcome.

The Human Pseudopod: Michotte on Bodily Phenomenology

Albert Michotte was famous for his work on the perception of causality, especially on the conditions under which one ball is visually interpreted as launching another. Less well known are his remarks on the experience of embodiment, which I just came across and can't resist sharing.

[W]here the body is motionless... there is an almost complete adaptation of the receptor organs, and the result is that the body simply disappears from the phenomenal world. This is indeed what seems to happen to a very high degree in the practice of certain oriental sects, where those who are expert are able, by remaining motionless, to achieve an extreme state of apparent "spiritualisation". Movement appears to be essential to the phenomenal existence of the body, and it is probable that we are aware of our bodily states only in so far as they are terminal phases of movements. In our ordinary waking life, of course, our bodies are motionless only to a relative extent; there is nearly always movement, if only as a result of respiration.

Whether it is temporarily motionless or whether it is moving, the body appears as a somewhat shapeless mass or volume. there is very little by way of internal organisation or connexion between the parts. There is no clear marking off of the head, trunk, and limbs by precise lines of demarcation.... Instead of any precise line of demarcation we find a number of regions with extensive connexions between them gradually merging into one another.

We can with some justification look on the body as a sort of kinaesthethic amoeba, a perpetually changing mass with loose connexions between the parts, and with the limbs constituting the pseudopodia.... The "volume" of which it consists is not limited by a clearly defined surface, and there is no "contour".... The limit of the body is more like the limit of the visual field -- an imprecise frontier which has no line of demarcation, and indeed which cannot without absurdity be imagined to have one (1946/1964, p. 203-204).

Close your eyes, refrain as much as possible from touching anything. Do your pseudopodia grow and shrink as you move or refrain from moving them?

The Moral Behavior of Ethicists: Peer Opinion

(with Josh Rust) is now forthcoming in Mind.

Thanks to all the folks at the 2007 Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association who stopped by to express their views on the behavior of ethicists!

Wundt on Self-Observation and Inner Perception

Wilhelm Wundt was a founding father of laboratory psychology and a grand visionary of psychology as a discipline -- of how it fit among the sciences, of the structure of its object (the mind), of its methods, most centrally introspection -- and also an author so vastly prolific that most of his work remains untranslated despite his importance. Among those untranslated works is his essay "Selbstbeobachtung und innere Wahrnehmung" [Self-Observation and Inner Perception"] (1888), with which I've been struggling. The essay is key to Wundt's view of "introspection" -- the usual English translation of the German Selbstbeobachtung -- since here he contrasts it with the seemingly related process of "inner perception". And unfortunately, the secondary sources are all over the map on this. I can find no good treatments.

To understand Wundt's distinction, it helps to know two bits of historical context. One is August Comte's influential criticism of the introspective method of psychology:

But as for observing in the same way intellectual phenomena at the time of their actual presence, that is a manifest impossibility. The thinker cannot divide himself into two, of whom one reasons whilst the other observes him reason. The organ observed and the organ observing being, in this case, identical, how could observation take place? The pretended method is then radically null and void (1830, using James's translation of 1890/1981, p. 188).

The other is Franz Brentano's (1874/1973) distinction between "inner observation" [innere Beobachtung] and "inner perception" [innere Wahrnehmung]. Brentano asserts that inner observation involves attending to conscious psychological processes as they transpire. This, he says with Comte, is impossible, or at least fails as a psychological method, because the act of attending to the process inevitably destroys or at least objectionably alters the target process. In "inner perception", in contrast, psychological processes are noticed while one's attention is dedicated to something else. They are noticed only "incidentally" [nebenbei], and thus undisturbed.

Wundt agrees with Brentano and Comte that observation necessarily involves attention and so normally interferes with the process to be observed, if that process is an inner, psychological one. Contra Brentano however, Wundt does not envision scientific knowledge of mental processes arising without attention of some sort, including planful and controlled variation -- attentive planned exploration, if not of the process as it occurs, then at least to a reproduction of that process as a "memory image" [Erinnerungsbild]. No science by sideways glances for Wundt. The psychological method of "inner perception" is, for Wundt, the method of holding and attentively manipulating a memory image of a psychological process. This method, he thinks, has two crucial shortcomings: First, one can only work with what one remembers of the process in question -- the manipulation of a memory-image cannot discover new elements. And second, new elements may be unintentionally introduced through association -- one might confuse one's memory of a process with one's memory of another associated process or object.

Therefore, Wundt suggests, the science of psychology must depend upon the attentive observation of mental processes as they occur. He argues that those who think attention necessarily distorts the target mental process are too pessimistic. A subclass of mental processes is relatively undisturbed by attentive observation -- specifically the basic mental processes, especially of perception. The experience of seeing red is more or less the same, Wundt suggests, whether or not one is aware of the psychological fact that one is experiencing redness. Wundt also thinks the basic processes of memory, emotion, and volition are largely undisturbed by introspective attention. These alone, he thinks, can be studied by introspective psychology. More complicated processes, in contrast, must be studied non-introspectively -- through the obsevation of language, history, culture, and human and animal development, for example.

Wundt's students tended to disregard his admonition to restrict introspective observation to such basic processes. E.B. Titchener, for example, held that practiced introspectors could observe even their "higher" cognitive processes without disturbing them. Arguably, the eventual fall of introspective psychology in favor of behaviorism (focusing only on outward stimuli and behavioral response, nothing "inner" at all) was hastened by the ambitious attempts of Wundt's students to extend introspective method to such higher cognitive processes, about which methodological and substantive disputes proved intractable.

On Debunking IV: Non-Selective Debunking

(by guest blogger Tamler Sommers)

So far I have considered whether evolutionary explanations undermine love and whether they can be used to debunk non-consequentialist moral intuitions while leaving the consequentialist one intact. In this post, I want to bring these thoughts together to examine a debunking strategy in metaethics I’ve defended in the past: the attempt explain away objective moral values in general.

Here’s a rough outline of the strategy. The explanandum, the thing to be explained, is our moral intuitions—intuitions like “burning cats is wrong!” Moral skeptics and moral realists offer competing explanations for the explanandum, and the debate hangs on which of the explanations is more plausible. The objectivist claims that this intuition is picking up on real moral properties, out there in the world—the wrongness of burning a cat. But the skeptic points out that our biological/cultural evolutionary processes account for these intuitions, and so we would have them whether or not they referred to anything real. So with a clean slice from Occam’s razor we can banish objective moral values from our ontology.

As I said, this has always sounded plausible to me. But consider this strategy when applied to love for one’s children. The explanandum is my deep feelings of attachment for my daughter Eliza. Kin selection theory shows that I would have these feelings whether or not I really loved her. So with a clean slice from Occam’s razor we can banish love from our ontology.

Now the strategy seems completely misguided! Why? Because as Manuel and other commentators point out, my love for Eliza is constituted, at least in part, by the feelings of attachment.

The skeptic will object that unlike love, moral values are not supposed to be constituted by feelings or intuitions that arise from an evolutionary process. Love is subjective. Morality is objective. Fair enough. But what about colors? We don’t say that it’s false that snow is white because evolution designed us to view snow in this fashion.

At this point, the skeptic can respond in two quite different (and perhaps incompatible) ways. The first is to say that there is universal agreement about the whiteness of snow. But there is no universal agreement about morality. And that is why we should reject moral realism.

The second is to say that morality has essential features that are incompatible with these naturalistic explanations, features like its categorical nature or “bindingness.” Since these features cannot fit within a naturalistic ontology, even if there were universal agreement under normal conditions about certain moral judgments—perhaps due to our common evolutionary history—it would still not vindicate moral realism. (These two replies, of course, parallel Mackie’s arguments from relativity and queerness.)

I’ll talk about both responses in more detail in my next post. But for now, let me conclude with an observation about the latter reply. Ashley, in my first post, thought that real love was essentially incompatible with an evolutionary/neuroscientific account of its origin. As some commentators pointed out, one option available to Ashley upon learning of this account is to revise her concept of love accordingly. She could say: love doesn’t quite have the status and history that I thought it had, but it’s still real love, I still love my son. Would anyone begrudge her this revision? Would anyone accuse her of “changing the subject” about love and putting something bogus in its place? Similarly, even if we thought morality had certain features that we now realize are inconsistent with a naturalistic account of its sources, why couldn’t we just revise our concept of morality accordingly? If we allow that Ashley truly loves her son, why can’t we say it’s truly wrong to burn that poor cat?