New Essay: Knowing Your Own Beliefs

available here. For more than ten years I have been writing about (various aspects of) belief and about (various aspects of) self-knowledge, but I have never before written an essay on self-knowledge specifically of belief. If you read the essay, perhaps you'll see why. My view is an inelegant mess. Hopefully, I have distilled and communicated the core of it, anyhow.

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

Here's the abstract:

To believe is to possess a wide variety of dispositions pertinent to the proposition believed. Among those dispositions are self-ascriptive dispositions. Consequently, being disposed to self-ascribe belief that P is partly constitutive of believing that P. Such self-ascriptive dispositions can be underwritten by any of a variety of mechanisms, acting co-operatively or competitively. But since self-ascriptive dispositions are only partly constitutive of belief, there can be cases in which the self-ascriptive dispositions splinter away from the remaining dispositions. It is then an empirical question how often our self-ascriptive dispositions diverge from the remaining dispositions constitutive of belief. The dispositions will tend to align reliably when possession of the belief in question is normatively neutral, straightforwardly connected to behavior, and most centrally manifested in explicit assertions or judgments. When these three conditions are not met, self-ascription, self-conscious avowal, sincere utterance, and explicit judgment will often diverge from the various other dispositions constitutive of belief. Even self-knowledge of explicit judgment can be problematic when we are attracted to half-empty forms of words or when we are not entirely persuaded of what we are saying.

The External World: Preliminary Experimental Evidence of Its Existence

(collaborative with Alan Moore)

Radical solipsism is the view that nothing exists beyond my own stream of conscious experience. I’ve been wondering: Can I show radical solipsism to be false? (Reader, if you exist, then radical solipsism must be false, but – and I hope you’ll forgive me – it doesn’t follow that I can justifiably reject radical solipsism, nor that you can, with the pronoun re-indexed to your own case.)

The two most famous attempts to prove the existence of the external world are Descartes’ and G.E. Moore’s. Descartes’ crucial move was his inference from the existence of the idea of divine perfection to the conclusion that only God could be the source of such a fabulous idea – a highly dubious inference. G.E. Moore argues from “here is one hand” and “here is another” to the conclusion that “there are external things”, but he doesn’t attempt to prove “here is one hand”. Therefore, Moore starts (as he acknowledges) by taking for granted that at least one thing exists beyond his stream of conscious experience.

Thus, neither author convincingly proves the falsity of radical solipsism. Now maybe I shouldn’t need any proof that the external world exists. Perhaps, indeed, as Wittgenstein suggests, it’s a kind of philosophical sickness to want proof. So be it; I’m sick. Still, can I get what my sick mind wants?

Accepting the task at face value, the most promising approach, I think, is abductive inference or inference to the best explanation: The best explanation of why I have this pattern of conscious experiences is that something exists behind my experience that helps shape it. Maybe that’s reason enough to reject radical solipsism, even if it isn’t strict proof. But: Is the existence of some sort of external world really the best explanation of my stream of experience? I’d prefer not to wave my hands vaguely here. I wonder if I can design an experiment or series of experiments to put solipsism to scientific test.

A fair game needs ground rules. The skeptic’s position is obviously unassailable if I must prove every premise of any potential argument. On the other hand, I shouldn’t, like G.E. Moore, invoke premises that already assume the falsity of radical solipsism. For purposes of this study, then, I’ll allow myself tentatively to accept the following:

• introspective knowledge of sensory experience and other happenings in the stream of experience,
• memories of past experiences from the time of the beginning of the experiment (but not before),
• concepts and categories arrived at I-know-not-how and shorn of any presumption of real grounding in the external world,
• the general tools of reason and scientific evaluation to the extent those don’t build in any assumptions about the things beyond the stream of experience.

Accepting these ground rules, most patterns in my stream of experience don’t, I think, demand explanation by anything beyond my stream of experience. Here’s one kind of pattern: When I have an experience as of deciding to close my eyes, I experience a certain sort of dark field (or colorful Eigenlicht). It needn’t follow that I have real external eyes or am being affected by real changes in visual input. This pattern might simply be a pattern within my stream of experience, reflecting some sort of direct causal relationship between one type of experience (as of eyes closing) and another (as of a dark field). The same holds for the patterns I notice as I seem to shift my eyes around or as I seem to look at an object and then grasp it.

Nor does the randomness or uncontrollability of experience demand explanation by appeal to external things. I might have an experience as of tossing a six-sided die, accompanied by a desire for a six and a feeling of not knowing what the outcome will be, followed by an experience as of seeing a four. I might have the experience of opening a closet and feeling surprised by the contents. Such experiences might simply reflect randomness, unpredictability, and uncontrollability within my stream of experience rather than the shaping of experience by forces beyond.

What evidence, then, might I raise against radical solipsism? Here’s my first experiment. I find the experiment somewhat convincing, though I don’t find it entirely convincing – nor do I expect that you will (even if you replicate it yourself, and assuming you exist). As often in the sciences, follow-up experiments will be required to help undermine alternative possible explanations of the results.

First, I do something that I experience as like opening Microsoft Excel. Next, I do something that seems like programming Excel to generate random numbers between 1000 and 3999, excluding numbers divisible by 2 or 5. Next, I do something that seems like programming Excel to determine whether these numbers are prime, but without actually dragging down the formula to execute the calculation. Next, I briefly examine each number, one by one, and try to guess whether it’s prime. To conclude the experiment, here’s what I will do next (though I haven’t yet done it): I will do what seems like executing the calculation in Excel, then compare my guesses with the apparent Excel results, and then confirm the apparent Excel results by hand calculation.

On the assumption that radical solipsism is true, it’s reasonable to predict that either my guesses will match the apparent Excel outputs or my hand calculations will fail to confirm the accuracy of the apparent Excel outputs. I make this prediction because, if radical solipsism is true and the only thing that exists in the universe is my own stream of conscious experience, there will be no device whose calculating capacity outruns my own calculating capacity (except insofar as that calculating capacity is implicit in the laws governing direct relationships among my experiences – an important caveat that I will address in a minute).

I have generated 20 four-digit numbers as described above. Among those 20 numbers, there are 5 that I have guessed are prime. I then execute the apparent spreadsheet calculation. Excel appears to tell me that 4 of the 20 are prime, only one of which is among the 5 that I had guessed to be prime. Finally, I calculate by hand and confirm the apparent Excel results in every case, using my own mathematical reasoning. Thus, I now know that 13/20 of my guesses were correct, compared to 20/20 from the apparent Excel output. This difference in ratio is statistically significant by Fisher’s exact test (hand calculated), with a one-tailed probability of p = .004. Therefore, I conclude that there exists something in the universe with an ability to mark numbers as prime vs. nonprime that exceeds my own ability to do so, at least insofar as I am constituted wholly by my stream of conscious experience. Radical solipsism appears to be scientifically disconfirmed.

Two caveats:

First, I don’t know what that external thing is. It appears to be a Microsoft Excel program implemented on a laptop computer, but I don’t regard myself as having established that fact. The calculation might even have been executed by a nonconscious part of my own mind, in which case some weak form of solipsism might still be true.

Second, there are, of course – as there always are in scientific research – possible alternative explanations of the results. The ground rules of the current exercise require that I consider these explanations using ordinary scientific standards insofar as those standards can be implemented while bracketing the question of whether an external world exists. Some alternative explanations I hope to rule out in future experiments. But at least one seems worth mentioning right away: I have already granted that there may be laws that relate experiences to each other without implying the existence of anything beyond experience. These laws might in fact have a level of organization beyond what I can consciously appreciate as they unfold. For example, the laws relating the colors of apparent visual stimuli with the complementary colors of the afterimages produced by those apparent visual stimuli may involve regularities that I can’t immediately appreciate. Could there, then, be some similar law of experience relating the four-digit numbers in the relevant Excel column with the marking as prime vs. nonprime in another column?

That would seem a strange law for the following reason: The image/afterimage law and other similar laws or patterns of experience, such as the eyes-open/eyes-closed pattern and patterns of relationship between visual appearance and tactile appearance, are laws that relate surface features of one experience with surface features of another, e.g., color of image to color of afterimage, smoothness of visual appearance to smoothness of tactile appearance. In contrast, the proposed experiential law governing my apparent Excel outputs concerns a non-superficial feature of my visual experience – the number represented by the numeral I interpret on the basis of the apparent screen pixels. The posited solipsistic law would relate semantic features of one visual experience to semantic features of another, with the first set of features apparently undetectable by me (and thus by any person, if solipsism is true), though the features were subsequently confirmable by me through laborious calculation. To posit the existence of such a weird semantic law relating two sensory experiences of apparent Excel columns seems like an ad hoc maneuver to save the solipsistic theory, lacking independent motivation, and therefore dubious on scientific grounds.

Boethius on What a Philosopher Is

On my bedstand right now: a textbook on cosmology and Boethius's Consolations of Philosophy (which I'd never properly read through before). Lots of interesting stuff in both, but I thought I'd share a passage from Boethius that jumped out at me:

[A man] had insultingly attacked a man who had falsely assumed the title of philosopher, not for the practice of true virtue but simply from vanity, to increase his own glory; and he added that he would know he was really a philosopher if he bore all the injuries heaped upon him calmly and patiently. The other adopted a patient manner for a time and bore the insults, and then said tauntingly: "Now do you recognize that I am a philosopher?" To which the first very cuttingly replied: "I should have, had you kept silent." (524 CE/1918, trans. Stewart, Rand, and Tester, p. 221).

This characterization of a philosopher as someone who practices virtue and, especially, who patiently bears injury, is not of course unique to Boethius but seems to have been common from the ancient period at least into the Renaissance. Today, however -- at least in the circles I frequent -- "philosopher" means something more like "person who teaches in a philosophy department".

Implicit in Boethius's conception of philosophy is an intimate connection between intellectual reflection of a certain sort and a particular type of lived moral practice. On the contemporary conception, intellectual reflection and personal moral practice are much less tightly linked -- even (one might argue) wholly orthogonal. It's worth considering the merits and demerits of this changing conceptualization of the nature of philosophy.

One wedge into the issue is this: What is it to have a moral belief? Is it just to be disposed to say certain things? Or is it -- as I think -- to be disposed more generally to steer one's life in a particular way? If the latter, a philosopher's moral attitudes and her moral behavior may be less distinct than those philosophers who would prefer not to subject their personal lives to moral scrutiny might like to think.

New Podcast Series: New Books in Philosophy

launched today, and featuring "peer-to-peer discussions with philosophers about their new ideas as expressed in their newly published books" and co-hosted by Carrie Figdor (University of Iowa) and Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt University).

The inaugural episode is on my book Perplexities of Consciousness.

I Am Staying at UCR After All

... rather than going to Australian National University in July, as previously announced.

Hohwy on Phenomenal Variability

In a new article at Mind & Language (free penultimate draft here), Jakob Hohwy argues that I'm wrong in my claim (e.g., here and here) that the enormous variation in people's reports about their stream of experience reflects a pattern of massive error in introspective judgment. Rather, Hohwy suggests, the enormous variability of introspective reports reflects a pattern of enormous variability in the target experiences being reported on -- variability that introspection captures accurately. (Hohwy does allow, however, that there may be massive error in some domains and under some introspective conditions.)

Consider, for example, these differences: Some people say that their visual imagery is as vivid and detailed as ordinary vision, while others say that they have extremely sketchy visual imagery or none at all. And yet self-reported high- and low-imagers seem to perform similarly on cognitive tests that apparently draw on visual imagery, like mental rotation tasks (see here and Ch. 3 of here). Some people say that they experience 30 or more degrees of stable visual clarity with indistinctness only outside that range, while others say that they visually experience only a tiny point of clarity (1-2 degrees) bouncing rapidly around an indistinct background (see here). Could such people all be right in their radically different claims? Hohwy admits that the burden of proof is on him.

Hohwy supports his view in a variety of ways, but I found his cases for the radical variability of imagery and emotion the most interesting. Imagery, he points out, serves a wide variety of cognitive purposes. Some purposes may require detailed imagery (e.g., remembering a scene in order to paint it) while others require only sketchy imagery (e.g., matching two figures in a mental rotation). (These are my examples, not Hohwy's.) The request simply to "form an image" of, say, the front of one's house, as in Francis Galton's questionnaire, and David Marks's, and in my own, is a request without a natural, contextually-given purpose. People may form radically different images when given an introspective questionnaire, images which they accurately report, despite being generally cognitively similar on imagery tasks with more constrained or natural goals. This is an excellent point (which Russ Hurlburt has also emphasized to me), and I agree that I haven't adequately addressed it in my writings on the introspection of imagery. When asked generically to "form an image of your house" some people might paint themselves a detailed two-dimensional scene, some might sequentially drift around thinking about a few visual details of emotional significance, and others might do a minimalist 3D sketch -- even if they all have the same underlying imagery capacities and experiences when in more cognitively constrained contexts.

Let me note two things, though, that I think tilt somewhat back in favor of attributing error rather than radical variability. First, when instructed to form an image in an introspective questionnaire in a context where their image-making capacities are naturally seen as the issue under test (as in Galton's and Marks's questionnaires, I think), most people will probably think that they've been asked to form as vivid and detailed a visual image as possible in a short time frame. The majority of respondents will thus, I'm inclined to think, tend understand the request broadly similarly. If so, it remains unexplained why people should radically differ in their responses unless those differences reflect either radically different imagery capacities (which seems not to be the case judging from behavioral tests) or some sort of inadequacy in respondents' introspective reports. Second, people also make radically different general claims and capacity claims about their imagery (e.g., Berkeley's claim that there is never indeterminacy in the contents of his imagery, contra Locke). Prima facie (though I don't know that this has been well tested) such differences seem unlikely to be mirrored by equally radically different cognitive capacities. Such differences are, I believe, somewhat more straightforwardly explained as due to introspective error (possibly arising from folk theory or psychological theory, overanalogy to outward visual media, or investment in a certain self-conception) than as due to variability in the demands of different cognitive tasks.

[Well, it looks like I won't be able to do justice to Hohwy's even more interesting claims about emotional variability without going overlong. So let me save that for a follow-up post soon.]

Disjunctive Metaphysics

I'm inclined to think that we don't know very well what the fundamental structure of the world is. (I am, I sometimes think, like a flea on a dog's back, watching a hair grow and saying "ah, that's how the world works!") Supposing evolutionary theory is true, there would seem to be little pressure to get fundamental metaphysics right. If mainstream cosmology is correct, we've only seen a small portion of time and space in one of possibly many universes. And thoughtful people have disagreed radically about the nature of the world, even given the similar evidence base of our one small vantage point. Some say that the world is wholly material, some that the world has material and immaterial aspects, others that only minds and their contents exist and there are no material things at all. Plato thought there was a world of perfect forms behind the imperfect world we see. Panpsychists think that ordinary objects have mental lives. David Lewis believed in the real existence of alternative possible worlds. Theists typically believe in an afterlife, which must either transpire somewhere or somehow be realized without transpiring anywhere.

Historically, philosophers have exhibited high confidence in various metaphysical views of this sort -- without, as far as I see, much epistemic warrant. Probably, people who lack unwarranted metaphysical self-confidence generally drop out of philosophy -- or at least avoid metaphysics or occupy the small niche of the skeptic. So metaphysics, at least metaphysics of the grand sweeping sort, tends to be written by people who lack a fully realistic assessment of their (and all of our) epistemic shortcomings in this domain.

Furthermore, it's almost inevitable that a number of highly unintuitive things are true about the fundamental structure of the world. Materialism, for example, is fairly unintuitive (even if contemporary philosophical materialists find themselves able eventually to jettison their anti-materialist intuitions). But so is idealism. And so are the various forms of dualism, when their consequences are explicitly displayed (David Chalmers' 1996 book brings this fact out nicely, I think). And intuitions about the infinite, about space and time, about possibility and the openness of the future, etc., often conflict, both within and between people. It seems unlikely, then, that we have a fully coherent set of metaphysical intuitions. If so, to the extent philosophical methodology relies on metaphysical intuitions, it builds from an inconsistent groundwork, and strange results follow.

BUT: Even if my pessimism is justified, I don't counsel abandoning metaphysical speculation. Rather, I advise that we give it a different role in our philosophical cognition. Rather than trying to settle on the one correct metaphysical picture, we should develop arms of a disjunction. We can improve our sense of what the metaphysical possibilities are. We can sophisticate our understanding of those possibilities and discover new possibilities we hadn't considered. We can reflect on the consequences of the different possibilities. Maybe -- although we should resist pushing too hard on this -- we can cultivate a sense of which possibilities seem relatively more likely and which seem relatively more far-fetched. Disjunctive metaphysics would mostly be an opening of the mind to the numerous (and perhaps at first wacky-seeming) possibilities, rather than a narrowing of the mind upon one.

[Update, June 3: In that last paragraph I mean epistemic possibilities, of course, about what metaphysics is correct, not different ways the world might possibly be given the one right metaphysics.]

Reviews of Perplexities of Consciousness

I've seen now two reviews of my 2011 book Perplexities of Consciousness. Uriah Kriegel offers one here at NDPR. And Peter Hankins offers one here at Conscious Entities. Both reviews are very generous and sensible, though naturally the reviewers articulate points of disagreement with my position.

Joshua Rothman at the Boston Globe also put together this profile and interview.

Amazon is quoting $18.32 for my book and Barnes & Noble is quoting $17.75 -- a good price for an academic hardback (list price is $27.95). Get while the getting's good!

A Half Million Visitors

I didn't notice at the time, but last March the Splintered Mind crossed 500,000 visitors since its launch in April 2006. I suppose there's a five-year anniversary in there somewhere too!

Thanks, everyone, for spending a little time reading some of my passing thoughts. Thanks especially to those of you who contributed some of your own in reaction.

Group Consciousness

I believe that you, dear human reader, have a stream of conscious experience. There is something it is like to be you; you have (as we call it) "phenomenology". Your dog does too. Maybe even the ants in my backyard. But, I have always been inclined to think, the United States does not have phenomenology. Individual people in the U.S. do, of course, but not the country itself. It's not as though there are three hundred million individual American consciousnesses and then one additional consciousness which is the group consciousness of the U.S.

But I find myself wondering: Why am I so sure of that?

Let's start with a thought experiment, adapted from Ned Block. Suppose that whatever functional contribution each of your brain cells makes to your consciousness could be implemented instead by an individually conscious being -- a miniature person, suppose, inside your skull. One by one, we replace your brain cells with miniature people, and by the end we have a "you" with no brain cells but with the same cognitive-functional brain structure you had before the experiment. If we ask this being: Do you still have conscious experience? It will say "yes, of course!" If we drop a rock on its toe, it will jump around and holler. If functionalism is true, then that being will be conscious.

Now let's populate your brain with miniature chairs and beds and kitchenettes for all these miniature folks. Maybe even we can expand your head to the size of a planet and connect it by remote control to the rest of your body. You should still be conscious, right? Now, let's suppose that these brain people can also engage in side-conversations with each other that don't disrupt their functionality as parts of your brain. Will they think you are conscious? Maybe not. Maybe they will say: We're implementing a complex architecture to control this body, and of course we are conscious as individuals, but the overall system is not conscious.

Functionalism is probably the dominant view in philosophy of mind and consciousness studies. And it suggests (if straightforwardly developed) that those brain-people would be wrong: There's a higher-level group consciousness of which they're unaware. Block finds this absurd and thus rejects functionalism -- but we can ride the conditional the other direction. Maybe functionalism is right.

Now of course we U.S. citizens are not implementing the functional architecture of a brain controlling a body. But is our situation really relevantly different? The body, for example, seems unnecessary: Most people think that a brain in a vat could be conscious. We're causally and functionally related to each other in a variety of ways. We talk to each other. We engage in group projects. We pay taxes to support the military. We vote. We pass laws and enforce them. We react to foreign threats. We trade. We explore Antarctica and the moon. Might that connectivity among us be enough to support a group consciousness? -- a real, literal group consciousness, with its own singular stream of experience, as singular and real as the stream of any biological human?

Let's suppose we're liberal about biological consciousness: We think that individual ants probably have a stream of experience -- a stream very different, presumably, from human experience, reflecting the radical difference in their functional architecture. Is the United States, as a functional structure, less complex, less interconnected, less reactive to its environment, less planful than an ant? In what functional respect do we fall short?

Maybe we're not tightly biologically integrated. But why should that matter? Maybe we didn't arise as a naturally selected species. But why should that matter? Maybe the boundaries of membership in the U.S. super-organism are vague. But why should that matter?

Of course it's unintuitive that the United States would be conscious. But why should we think our intuitions are a good guide here? (And in any case, such intuitions might not be stable across cultures.) If one carefully follows through the consequences of any general theory of consciousness, one will find, I think, something highly unintuitive. Functionalism has some seemingly crazy consequences. But so also do all competitor theories: substance dualism, idealism, panpsychism, biological chauvinism, etc. Something that seems crazy must, I think, be true about consciousness. (I call this "crazyism".) Why not this crazy thing rather than some other?

Embodied Introspection

Embodiment is hot these days in philosophy of psychology. Andy Clark, Alva Noe, Rob Wilson, and others have argued that cognition and perception are not processes confined within the brain, but rather transpire in extended brain-body-environment systems. Tactile perception, the argument goes, is not a brain process in response to stimulation of the skin; rather, it is a looping process that includes as a part one's active bodily movement and environmental exploration. Thinking about Scrabble moves can happen perhaps entirely in the brain if one visually imagines shuffling the tiles; but if shuffling the wooden tiles with one's fingers serves a similar functional role, that fingered shuffling is as much a part of Scrabble cognition as is imaginary shuffling.

Introspection, it might seem, is not embodied in the same way. After all, you can just close your eyes and introspect, no body involved, right? Introspection seems to be entirely interior -- a kind of attunement to one's internal stream of experiences, or the activity of the brain's self-monitoring systems.

Yet I think proper appreciation of the tangle of processes that drive introspective judgments points toward treating introspection as embodied. Consider two examples:

(1.) I think about what I am emotionally experiencing right now. That process involves, among other things, attending to my bodily posture and bodily sensations -- a tightness in my throat, a tingle in my cheeks, my rumpled brow. Noticing this bodily stuff contributes crucially to my introspective judgment, say, in this case the judgment that I'm feeling tense about an impending deadline. But this attention to my bodily condition or bodily experience is not merely a passive registering of that condition or experience. I actively explore my bodily condition or experience: I feel an impulse to rub my brow and to breathe deeply. This impulse is not an accidental side occurrence, disconnected from my introspective act. Rubbing my brow and breathing deeply are exploratory activities that directly contribute to the introspective result. If rubbing my brow seems to dissolve the feeling of tension up there as I continue to think about the deadline, that tilts me toward the judgment that I am not really so tense about the deadline, or at least that I am not experiencing that tension in my brow -- maybe it was just a habitual posture or remnant of an earlier but now-past emotion. If my breath catches as I rotate my shoulders back and inhale deeply, that tells me something important about my emotional-bodily condition, which informs my introspective judgment. If perception is an active, looping process that involves the body, rather than just passive reaction to stimulation of the bodily surfaces, so too is emotional introspection.

(2.) I think about how broad the field of clarity is in my vision. Do I experience a broad field (say thirty degrees) of stable visual clarity all at once (as most untutored introspectors seem to think when I first ask them)? Or is does my visual experience really involve a tiny range of clarity (one or two degrees of arc) bouncing very rapidly around an indistinct background (as some cognitive scientists say)? Crucial to reaching this judgment, I think, is prying apart attention and eye movement. First, one holds one's eyes fixed on some point and attends to the visual field outside the point of fixation. Then, one starts allowing one's eyes to move around while still attending away from the points of fixation -- for example, by attending to a region and allowing one's gaze to flit around near it but not in it. Manipulation of eye gaze is, I suggest, best conceived of as part of an integrated, exploratory introspective process rather than just a bodily precondition of introspection.

The core issue about embodiment is this: Where is it most natural or truest to the phenomena to draw the lines around a cognitive process? If we draw narrow, tight lines, we end up with many short processes with many fast input-output transitions. If we draw broad, inclusive lines, many of what would otherwise be inputs and outputs are reclassified as states within the cognitive process. Friends of embodiment prefer a liberal drawing of the lines and don't treat brain tissue as fundamentally different in kind from other sorts of structures that serve similar functional roles. My thought today is that the same issues arise, in much the same way, for introspective cognition as for other sorts of cognition, and that if we find embodiment arguments persuasive for perception and the like, then similar arguments probably apply to the case of introspection.

Schwitzgebel Kant

What Google autofills when I type in "Schwitzgebel".

Does this mean that people are more interested in my various ill-tempered diatribes against Kant than anything else I've written?

Against Kant on Rationalization

Kant concludes the first section of his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals with a plea for the value of philosophical ethics as a bulwark against the self-serving rationalization of one's immoral inclinations:

Innocence is indeed a glorious thing; but, on the other hand, it is very sad that it cannot well maintain itself, and is easily seduced. On this account even wisdom -- which otherwise consists more in conduct than in knowledge -- still has need to science [i.e., scholarship], not in order to learn from it, but to secure for its precepts admission and permanence. Against all the commands of duty which reason represents to the human being as so deserving of respect, he feels in himself a powerful counterweight in his needs and inclinations.... Hence there arises a natural dialectic, that is, a disposition to argue against these strict laws of duty... and if possible, to make them more compatible with our wishes and inclinations.... Thus is the common human reason compelled to go out of its sphere and to take a step into the field of practical philosophy... in order to attain in it information and clear instruction respecting the source of its principle, and the correct determination of it in opposition to the maxims which are based on wants and inclinations, so that it may escape from the perplexity of opposite claims, and not run the risk of losing all genuine moral principles through the equivocation into which it easily falls (Abbott & Denis, trans., 1785/2005, p. 65-66 [404-405]).

The idea appears to be that without philosophical training, our moral judgments are easily led astray by our "wants and inclinations". We will concoct superficially plausible rationalizations to justify actions or principles that support our (often self-serving) desires. If I want to be able to steal a library book, I will concoct a superficial rationalization to justify that. If I am keen on Donald Trump, I will whip up a breezy story according to which his behavior is admirable. Philosophy, because it taps into the true moral law and has the power to see through bad arguments, can help protect us against those tendencies.

I feel the pull of that thought. Yet I worry that, empirically, things might tend in fact to run the opposite direction on average. Philosophical training might increase the tendency toward self-serving rationalization. It might do so in three ways: (1.) by providing more powerful tools for rationalization (more argument styles and competing principles that can be drawn upon), (2.) by giving rationalization a broader field of play (by tossing more of morality into doubt), and (3.) by providing more psychological occasion for rationalization (by nurturing the tendency to reflect on principles rather than simply take things for granted). Education in moral philosophy might be less a bulwark against rationalization than a training grounds for it.

This sort of claim is hard to test empirically, but I have two small pieces of evidence that seem to support this pessimistic view over the optimistic view of Kant:

First, in work forthcoming in Mind & Language, Fiery Cushman and I found that philosophers, more than other professors and more than non-academics, tended to endorse moral principles in labile ways to match up with psychologically manipulated intuitions about particular cases. (Ethics PhDs showed the largest effect size overall.) Participants in our experiment were presented moral puzzle cases in one of two orders: an order that favored rating the two cases equivalently and an order that favored treating the two cases as different. Later, participants were asked if they endorsed or rejected moral principles that favored treating the cases as different. Philosophers and especially ethicists showed the greatest order effects on their judgments about moral principles, suggesting a greater-than-average predilection for post-hoc rationalization of their order-manipulated judgments about the individual scenarios.

Second, in work under submission, Joshua Rust and I found that professional ethicists, more than professors in other fields, seemed to exhibit self-congratulatory rationalization in their normative attitudes about replying to emails from students. In our study, all groups of professors (ethicists, non-ethicist philosophers, and non-philosophers) were similar in several dimensions: In a survey, they all claimed very high rates of responsiveness to student emails (the majority claimed 100% responsiveness); and the large majority of all groups (84% overall) rated "not consistently responding to student emails" on the bad side of a moral scale; and all groups replied at the same mediocre rate (about 60%) when we actually sent them emails designed to look as though they were from undergraduates. Also, all groups showed the same very weak to non-existent correlation between self-reported behavior and actually measured email responsiveness and between expressed normative attitude and actually measured email responsiveness. Despite all these similarities, however, there was one very large difference between the groups: Ethicists showed by far the largest relationship between normative attitude and self-reported email responsiveness. One natural interpretation of these results, we think, is that professors tend to have very poor self-knowledge of their actual rates of responsiveness to student emails, but that ethicists will, more than other professors, rationalizingly adjust their norms to match their illusions about their behavior. (It's also possible, though, that ethicists were more likely to adjust their self-reports to match their previously expressed normative attitudes, thus exhibiting either more outward deception or more self-deception.)

Interested as Participating as a Subject in Experimental Philosophy?

Then click here. The project hosts 17 different experimental philosophy studies designed by 29 philosophers, and it part of the "experiment month initiative" run by Yale Cognitive Science with a grant from the American Philosophical Association.

Leaving UC Riverside for Australian National University in July

I have accepted ANU's offer of a Professor position in Philosophy. I will be leaving UC Riverside in July. I have spent 14 years at UCR and all my life since age 7 in California. I have fond feelings for the department and the region, but my family and I are excited to be moving forward to a new adventure!

The Splintered Mind will chug along as usual, though there may be a few slow patches during the period of transition.

Does the World Look Upside-Down Through Inverting Lenses, Once You're Used to Them?

For eight days in 1897, psychologist George Stratton saw the world through a pair of glasses that rotated everything 180 degrees so that up was down and left was right. At first, everything looked upside down and backwards and he stumbled about, crashing into things. By the eighth day, he had largely adapted to the inverting lenses and was able to skillfully maneuver through his environment. Although Stratton's experiment is often cited by psychologists and philosophers of perception, few have effectively addressed the question that interests me most: After adaptation, did the world still look upside-down to Stratton, or at some point did it flip rightside up?

Since after adaptation the upside-down look might no longer seem wrong, in posing this question perhaps I should avoid the word "upside-down", with its implication of error or illusion. So maybe the stays-upside-down view is better expressed as follows. Before donning the inverting lenses, let's suppose, the visual field is toovy when Stratton looks at his room (where "toovy" picks out the phenomenal quality ordinarily associated with its looking like the light is hanging down from above, etc.) and after donning the lenses for the first time, the visual field turns teavy instead (where "teavy" picks out the phenomenal quality ordinarily associated with its looking like the light is jutting up from below). Here are two possibilities for what happens during adaptation: (1.) At some point (perhaps unsteadily and fragmentedly) Stratton's visual experience flips from teavy back to toovy. (2.) Stratton's visual experience stays teavy, but he learns to associate that teavy quality with the light's actually being above him.

These seem like very different phenomenal possibilities. But which is correct? Susan Hurley and Alva Noe (2003) say that things go back to looking toovy -- that post-adaptation, Stratton's visual pheomenology is just the same as it was before donning the glasses (minus the feeling of wearing glasses and other incidentals like the narrowing of the field). They say this partly based upon, and in defense of, a controversial general theory of the relationship between skillful action and conscious experience, and partly based upon James Taylor's 1962 reports in his replication of Stratton. But Taylor's reports, too, are situated within a theoretical framework to which he appears deeply committed, and Stratton's original reports are most naturally interpreted as suggesting the opposite. For example, Stratton writes:

The harmonization of the new experience and the suppression or subordination of insistent remnants of the old were always apparent during active operations in the visual surroundings, as has been described for several of the preceding days. While I sat passively the old localization of unseen parts of my body often came back, or perhaps was the usual form in which they appeared. But the instant I began to rock my chair the new position of these parts came prominently forward, and, except in the case of my shoulders and back, readily felt more real than the old. And in walking, when hands and feet rhythmically made their appearance in the visual field, the old representation, except perhaps for some faint inharmonious sensations in the back, was fully expelled without employing any device of will or of attention whatever (1897c, p. 469).

Stratton does not say that the new experience is the same as the old, after adaptation: Rather the new experience is the reverse of the old, and adaptation is the victory of the new in the fight between them.

I don't know which way it goes, but the two possibilities seem to differ, and different observers appear to be giving different reports. The question has implications for the general question of whether skillful action shapes our phenomenology to match the world or whether, instead, phenomenology tends to stay (approximately) the same across the development of skill, only gathering new associations and behavioral contingencies.

I discuss this issue with more everyday examples of mirror reflection in earlier blog posts on the apparent location of mirror images and on the U.S. Department of Transportation's advice that "objects in mirror are closer than they appear".

Similar questions arise, of course, for inverted spectrum cases.

To the Viagra Spammer

Until now, I have kept the comments section on this blog wide open, but you may force me to change that. I know you are not a machine, because you react to the content of the posts you spam. Please stop. You are making my small corner of the world a worse place.

In other news, I am back from Australia and St. Louis. Once my head stops swimming, I'll work up a blog post or two.

To Australia, and Representational Realism

I'm off to Australia with my family for a week (to consider the ANU job offer), then to a conference in St. Louis, so it might be a couple weeks before I'm blogging again.

As a parting thought, it occurred to me to clarify why I'm so interested in mirror images, which I don't think I made explicit in either of my earlier posts on the topic. Such issues might seem merely an amusing irrelevance -- and I do find them (for whatever reason) amusing. But I also have some big game in my (warped, distorted, reflective) sights. If it turns out that the best thing to say about such cases is that (a.) they are veridical, and yet also (b.) our visual experience is different than in the light-straight-to-the-eye case, then I have a hunch that this is a thread I can pull on that might unravel the whole of representational realism -- by which I mean the view that the properties of observed external objects resemble the properties of our experiences of those objects, e.g., that there is something analogously squarish both about an outward square and about our normal visual experience of that square.

No guarantees that's where I arrive after fuller consideration, but that's the snark in the bush.

The Apparent Location of Mirror Images

When I gaze into a mirror, does it look like there's someone a few feet away gazing back at me? (Someone who looks a lot like me, though perhaps a bit older and grumpier.) Or does it look like I'm standing where I in fact am, in the middle of the bathroom? Or does it somehow look both ways? Suppose my son is sneaking up behind me and I see him in the same mirror. Does it look like he is seven feet in front of me, sneaking up behind the dope in the mirror and I only infer that he is actually behind me? Or does he simply look, instead, one foot behind me?

Suppose I'm in a new restaurant and it takes me a moment to notice that one wall is a mirror. Surely, before I notice, the table that I'm looking at in the mirror appears to me to be in a location other than its real location. Right? Now, after I notice that it's a mirror, does the table look to be in a different place than it looked to be a moment ago? I'm inclined to say that in the dominant sense of "apparent location", the apparent location of the table is just the same, but now I'm wise to it and I know its apparent location isn't its real location. On the other hand, though, when I look in the rear-view mirror in my car I want to say that it looks like that Mazda is coming up fast behind me, not that it looks like there is a Mazda up in space somewhere in front of me.

What is the difference between these cases that makes me want to treat them differently? Does it have to do with familiarity and skill? I guess that's what I'm tempted to say. But then it seems to follow that, with enough skill, things will look veridical through all kinds of reflections, refractions, and distortions. Does the oar angling into water really look straight to the skilled punter? With enough skill, could even the image in a carnival mirror look perfectly veridical? Part of me wants to resist at least that last thought, but I'm not sure how to do so and still say all the other things I want to say.

One resolution might be to strip away the specifically sensory, spatial sense of "looks" or "appears", assimilating to cases like "It looks like you're headed for a C" as I gaze over someone's final exam (cases which, in turn, might be assimilated to entirely non-visual cases like "It looks like we might be in Libya a long time" said after hearing a radio broadcast). That maneuver doesn't satisfy me, though: I want, if I can have it, some robustly visuospatial sense in which the Mazda looks like it's behind me and yet the restaurant table looks like it's in front of me.

(See also "Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear".)

The Harvard Humanists, Early 1960s

My father was a graduate student in psychology and education at Harvard in the 1960s. Along with B.F. Skinner and one other graduate student, he founded "The Harvard Humanists". Going through old papers, he recently found the following mimeographed announcement of an "evening of informal discussion and refreshments" as I have reproduced below.

For this particular meeting, attendees included Isaac Asimov, Mary Bunting (president of Radcliffe), Tom Lehrer (yes, that Tom Lehrer), Frederick Mosteller (one of the most eminent statisticians of the 20th century), Nobel physicist Edward Purcell, George Gaylord Simpson (one of the most eminent paleontologists of the 20th century), and of course B. F. Skinner (whom they apparently took for granted and forgot to include in the typed proof).

Ah, Harvard in the 1960s! What a group of have informal discussion and drinks with. Just thought I'd share.

The Instability of Philosophers' Judgments about Hypothetical Moral Scenarios

Non-philosophers' judgments about hypothetical philosophical scenarios are often labile and variable. They are subject, for example, to substantial order effects, and they vary by culture and gender. Question: Are professional philosophers' judgments about such hypothetical scenarios particularly better grounded? Jonathan Weinberg and Stephen Stich say no. Timothy Williamson says maybe yes. At stake, perhaps, is the reliability of "armchair philosophy" as a research method.

Fiery Cushman and I have started to examine the question experimentally. We begin by examining order effects on moral judgment: We presented hypothetical moral scenarios, in varying order, to three sets of respondents: professional philosophers, academic non-philosophers, and non-academics. (The professional philosophers had graduate degrees in philosophy and were mostly drawn from Leiter-ranked PhD-granting departments.) Non-philosophers, we suspected, would respond differently to the scenarios depending upon the order of presentation, a sign of instability and unreliability in judgment. Our question was: Would professional philosophers show smaller order effects and thus more stable judgments?

They did not. In fact, the overall trend across our data (marginally statistically significant) was for philosophers to show less stability their responses. This was true even for the subgroup of 91 respondents reporting a PhD in philosophy and a competence or specialization in ethics.

So, for example, the classic trolley problem comes in two versions. In the switch version, a bystander diverts a runaway trolley onto a sidetrack, killing one person on that sidetrack to save five people on the main track. In the push version, a bystander pushes a heavy person into the path of a runaway trolley, preventing the trolley from killing five people further down the track, but killing the heavy person. Now, whether they think such actions are good or bad, the majority of respondents rank the two actions the same when they are presented side-by-side. But order of presentation influences this result: Respondents are substantially more likely to rank the two actions the same when the push version is presented first than when the switch version is presented first. (Why? Intuitions about switch are unstable, and tend to descend to match push, if push is presented first. Intuitions about push are more stable, shifting around less, and thus often will not rise to match switch when switch is presented first.) Non-academics rated switch and push equivalently 53% of the time when switch was presented first and 68% of the time when push was presented first. For academic non-philosophers, the differential was 55% vs. 71%. For professional philosophers, it was 54% vs. 73%, including 50% vs. 75% for the ethics PhD subgroup -- effect sizes well within statistical chance of each other.

Moral luck scenarios (e.g., drunk driver hitting a tree vs. hitting a girl) and action-omission scenarios (e.g., snatching away a drowning person's life vest vs. failing to offer him a life vest) produced similar results. In each case, the order effects were about the same size for philosophers and non-philosophers. In our aggregate measure, philosophers (including ethics PhDs) trended toward showing slightly larger order effects overall than did the two comparison groups.

For further details, see our manuscript here, forthcoming in Mind & Language.

Australian National University

... has voted me a job offer. It's not fully official yet, but it's official enough that I will be flying my whole family to Australia to check out Canberra early next month.

(If it's on Leiter Reports, it must be true, right?)

Added March 17: I encourage prospective UCR graduate students whose decision would be influenced by my presence or absence from UCR to email me before making their own decision. My family and I will be visiting ANU from March 31 to April 8, and we're hoping to make the decision shortly thereafter -- though I can't guarantee that we will have decided by the April 15 deadline for graduate enrollment decisions.

The Self-Reported Moral Behavior of Ethics Professors

New essay in draft here, co-authored with Joshua Rust.

Abstract:
We examine the self-reported moral attitudes and moral behavior of 198 ethics professors, 208 non-ethicist philosophers, and 167 professors in departments other than philosophy on eight moral issues: academic society membership, voting, staying in touch with one's mother, vegetarianism, organ and blood donation, responsiveness to student emails, charitable giving, and honesty in responding to survey questionnaires. On some issues we also had direct behavioral measures that we could compare with self-report. Ethicists expressed somewhat more stringent normative attitudes on some issues, such as vegetarianism and charitable donation. However, on no issue did ethicists show significantly better behavior than the two comparison groups. Our findings on attitude-behavior consistency were mixed: Ethicists showed the strongest relationship between behavior and expressed moral attitude regarding voting but the weakest regarding charitable donation.

Warning: This essay is monstrously long -- 70 pages! In earlier (uncirculated) drafts we had tried to keep it to normal journal-article length, but eventually we decided to give up on that. It's a very complicated study, so it just takes some space to lay it all out properly.

Oliver Sacks: Through One Eye, the World Looks Flat; Through Two, The World Has Depth

In his 2010 book, Oliver Sacks writes:

The only way to actually perceive depth -- to see it rather than judge it -- is with binocular stereoscopy (p. 114).

Thus, he reports on a woman ("Stereo Sue") who gains stereo vision and with it, for the first time in her life, real experience of three-dimensional visual depth. And of his own loss of vision in one eye he writes:

Stereo vision, however, now that I am mostly monocular, is quite compromised -- completely missing in the upper half or two-thirds of my visual field, though partly intact at the bottom, where I retain some peripheral vision. So I see the lower halves of people in stereoscopic depth, while their upper halves are completely flat and two-dimensional (p. 173).

With one eye occluded, I have no sensation of distance or depth whatever (p. 157).

Although Sacks acknowledges the possibility of some individual variation, he also objects to contemporary accounts of depth perception that treat binocularity as only one among several depth cues:

Such [multifactorial] views [of depth perception], while wholly consistent with a behavioral or empirical theory of vision, give no weight to the qualitative and subjective aspects of stereoscopy. Here one needs inside narratives, personal accounts of what it is like to suddenly gain stereo vision after a lifetime of stereo blindness... or to suddenly lose it after a lifetime of seeing in stereo [as in Sacks's own case] (p. 140-1, fn 14).

I wonder, though: Why is permanent loss or gain of stereoscopy necessary to the subjective evaluation? Can't the binocular among us at least temporarily mimic monocular experience simply by closing one eye? Does doing so make the world go from three-dimensional to flat?

It doesn't seem that way to me. Nor to most other people I've interviewed. Maybe depth is a little richer and more striking binocularly than monocularly -- but the difference is nothing so radical as the difference between 2-D and 3-D. Some of my interviewees, though, do characterize the monocular-binocular difference as 2-D vs. 3-D; and so do, for example, Ernst Mach (1886/1959) and Brian O'Shaughnessy (2003). Call those who report radically different monocular vs. binocular experience, like Sacks and O'Shaughnessy, the PuffOuters. Call those who report pretty similar monocular vs. binocular experience, like me (see also Chapter 2 of my recent book), the StaySamers.

Question: Is the difference between PuffOuters and StaySamers a real difference in experience? That is, does the world actually seem to puff out and go flat for PuffOuters, depending on whether it is seen monocularly or binocularly, while it varies little for the StaySamers? Or is the group difference mainly a difference in report only, with everyone having pretty much the same monocular vs. binocular experience -- and some people mistaken about or misdescribing their experience (in line with some of my conjectures in Chapter 2)?

We might start to address this question empirically as follows.

Sacks mentions that people differ substantially in how they experience three-dimensionality when presented with stereoscopic pictures -- that is, when presented with slightly offset pictures, one to each eye, producing a three-dimensional effect (like in contemporary 3D movies). For example, when presented with a stereoscopic picture of an impossible M.C. Escher tuning fork, Sacks reports one person saying it looked like the top prong rose about 3-4 centimeters from the plane of the page, while two others reported seeing the prong as 12 cm above the plane and Sacks himself saw it as 5 cm higher still (p. 134-5).

Conjecture: If the PuffOuter-StaySamer difference is a real difference in experience, the PuffOuters should, as a group, report much larger effects of that sort than the StaySamers. That could be tested empirically. Presumably PuffOuters should also better detect subtle stereoscopic effects -- which is even more appealing experimentally because it would permit catch trials to corroborate any differences in subjective report.

Yes, this is totally do-able.

The Popular Persistence of Fading Philosophers

Late last year, Jean-Baptiste Michel and co-authors made public the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which graphically displays the rates at which words appear in the Google Books database over time. So, for example, one might compare Descartes vs. Nietzsche in English (click to enlarge):

or in German:

Pretty cool! We see Nietzsche (red) overtake Descartes (blue) in English. Plato (green) kicks butt in English, but does much more poorly in German while Kant (yellow) kicks butt in German and only recently challenges Plato in English. (Note: Using "Platon" in German. Merging with "Plato" in German raises Plato to almost the level of Nietzsche.)

Now, earlier in 2010, I had run a series of posts on what I call "discussion arcs", using as my measure the rate at which terms appear in keyword searches in the Philosophers Index database, over time. Naturally, it occurred to me to wonder whether the Ngram would deliver similar results.

It does not.

Some obvious differences are Ngram's broader expanse of time and the difference between the whole universe of books as a database vs. just philosophy sources -- especially the potential swamping of philosophy sources with non-philosophy sources. But even if we confine the search terms to names of philosophers that are distinctive enough so that we can assume that the references are mostly to those specific philosophers, there are important differences between the results.

Here's one: In one post, I noticed that most philosophers tend to have peak discussion in the Philosophers Index around age 55-70, while others (like Heidegger and Wittgenstein) seem to break away from the pack, without slumping in discussion. See these two graphs of fading philosophers:

Interestingly to me, these same "fading" philosophers -- at least the ones with canonical first-last name combos of the sort necessary for Ngram searchability -- do not fade appreciably in the Ngram results (again please click for viewability):

My interpretation: Not only is there an understandable delay between when a philosopher earns discussion by peers and when that discussion spreads into the universe of books as a whole, but there is an even more substantial delay between when philosophical discussion fades and when that fading begins to register in the universe of books as a whole. Philosophy of science is much less about Popper now than it was in the 1970s, despite the Ngram graph. And Josiah Royce? Most contemporary philosophers know him only as someone who used to be a famous American philosopher; few could, I suspect, name even one of his works or positions.

[Updated March 7]

Special Journal Issue on My Book with Hurlburt, Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic

... at Journal of Consciousness Studies, available now through Ingenta.  (Presumably also available soon at the Journal of Consciousness Studies contents page.)

Critics' pieces (links are through Ingenta):

• Josh Weisberg: Introduction (p. 7-20)
• Christopher Hill: How to study introspection (p. 21-43)
• Claire Petitmengin: Describing the experience of describing? The blindspot of introspection (p. 44-62)
• Charles Siewert: Socratic introspection and the abundance of experience (p. 63-91)
• Eric Klinger: Response organization of mental imagery, evaluation of Descriptive Experience Sampling, and alternatives (p. 92-101)
• Gualtiero Piccinini: Scientific methods must be public, and Descriptive Experience Sampling qualifies (p. 102-117)
• John Sutton: Time, experience, and Descriptive Experience Sampling (p. 118-129)
• Mark Engelbert and Peter Carruthers: Descriptive Experience Sampling: What is it good for? (p. 130-149)
• Michael J. Kane: Describing, debating, and discovering inner experience (p. 150-164)
• Maja Spener: Using first-person data about consciousness (p. 165-179)
• Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons: Introspection and the phenomenology of free will: Problems and prospects (p. 180-205)

Responses by Russ and me:

• Russell T. Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel: Presuppositions and background assumptions (p. 206-233)
• Russell T. Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel: Little or no experience outside of attention? (p. 234-252)
• Russell T. Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel: Methodological pluralism, armchair introspection, and DES as the epistemic tribunal (p. 252-273)
• Russell T. Hurlburt: Nine clarifications of Descriptive Experience Sampling (p. 274-287)
• Eric Schwitzgebel: The philosophical and psychological context of DES (p. 288-294)
• Russell T. Hurlburt and Neda Raymond: Agency: A case study in bracketing presuppositions (p. 295-305)

I wish I could link you through to open-access penultimate drafts, but JCS didn't seem to be keen on that idea.  Feel free to email me, though, and I can send you PDFs of the work on which I am co-author (for personal use).

Call for Papers: Philosophy of Mind, Consciousness, etc., Graduate Student Conference in St. Louis

I will be delivering the keynote address at a graduate conference in St. Louis next month. The title of my talk is "The Problem of Known Illusion and the Problem of Unreportable Illusion".

Here's the call for papers. I will be hanging out for the duration of the conference and would of course be happy to chat with any conference participants.

Call for Papers/Abstracts: PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, CONSCIOUSNESS, etc.
6th Annual Gateway Graduate Conference April 8-10, 2011, U.S. St. Louis, MO

The Philosophers’ Forum at the University of Missouri, St. Louis invites submissions of high quality graduate student abstracts or papers to our 6th annual Gateway conference. This year’s topic will be on the topic of Introspection, broadly construed. Possible areas relevant to this topic include philosophy of mind, cognitive science, philosophy of science, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of religion.

Keynote Speaker: Eric Schwitzgebel (UC-Riverside)
Extended Submission Deadline: March 20, 2011

Submission Guidelines:
Please prepare your abstract or paper for blind review by sending to 2011UMSLGRAD@GMAIL.COM:
Papers should include two attachments:

First attachment, the cover letter:
author’s name
title of paper
institutional affiliation
contact information (email, phone number, mailing address)
word count
an abstract of the paper (less than 500 words)

Second attachment, the paper:
Suitable for a 25-30 minute presentation (less than 4,500 words)
Should not contain any personal information

Does Thinking about Applied Ethics Generate Mainly Remorse Rather Than Behavior Change?

That's what Randy Cohen seems to be saying in his farewell column on ethics for the New York Times Magazine:

Writing the column has not made me even slightly more virtuous. And I didn’t have to be: it was in my contract. O.K., it wasn’t. But it should have been. I wasn’t hired to personify virtue, to be a role model for the kids, but to write about virtue in a way readers might find engaging. Consider sports writers: not 2 in 20 can hit the curveball, and why should they? They’re meant to report on athletes, not be athletes. And that’s the self-serving rationalization I’d have clung to had the cops hauled me off in handcuffs.

What spending my workday thinking about ethics did do was make me acutely conscious of my own transgressions, of the times I fell short. It is deeply demoralizing. I presume it qualifies me for some sort of workers’ comp. This was a particular hazard of my job, but it is also something every adult endures — every self-aware adult — as was noted by my great hero, Samuel Johnson, the person I most quoted in the column: “He that in the latter part of his life too strictly inquires what he has done, can very seldom receive from his own heart such an account as will give him satisfaction.” To grow old is to grow remorseful, both on and off duty.

Consider Cohen's sports-writer analogy. Often when I present my work on the moral behavior of ethicists, people (not a majority, but maybe a majority of ethicists) will respond by tossing out half-baked analogies: Should we expect basketball coaches to be better at basketball? Epistemologists to have more knowledge? Sociology professors to be popular with their peers? The thought behind such analogies appears to be: obviously no, and so also not in the analogous ethics professors case.

First: Is it so obviously no? I wouldn't expect sports writers to out-hit professional baseball players, but that's not the issue. The issue is whether writing about sports has *any* relationship to one's sports skills -- and it's not obvious that it wouldn't: We learn sports skills in part by watching; thinking about strategy is not entirely useless; and sports writers might have and sustain an interest in sports that has positive consequences for behavior. The relevant question isn't: Should we expect sports writers to be baseball stars, but rather should we expect sports writers to be a little bit better at sports, on average, than non-sports writers? Analogously, the question I have posed about ethicists, and that Cohen seems to be posing to himself is not: Should we expect ethicists to be saints -- the major-league sluggers of morality -- but rather should we expect them to be a little morally better behaved than others of similar social background, or (not entirely equivalently, of course) than they would have been had they not studied ethics.

Understood properly, this question is, I think, neither obvious nor trivial. And Cohen notes that his use of the sports-writer analogy is a rationalization -- suggesting, perhaps, that he thinks it might have been reasonable to expect some change for the better in him as a result of his reflections, a change that failed to materialize.

Cohen says his reflections have mainly left him feeling bad about himself. His tone here seems to me to be oddly defeatist. Johnson, in the passage Cohen cites, is expressing the inevitability of remorse about the past, which (being past) is unchangeable. But ethical reflection happens midstream. It is as though Cohen is saying that the only effect of reflecting ethically and discovering that one has done some bad thing is to feel bad about oneself, that it's not realistic to expect actual changes in one's behavior as a result of such reflections. Now, while it might not be realistic to expect Cohen-style applied ethical reflection in ordinary life to transform one overnight into a saint, perhaps we might hope that it would at least nudge one a little bit toward avoiding, in the future, the sort of behavior about which one now feels remorseful. To abandon such hope, to think that such reflection is necessarily behaviorally ineffectual -- isn't that quite a dark view of the relationship between moral reflection and moral behavior?

The Wason Selection Task and the Limits of Human Philosophical Cognition

The famous Wason Selection Task runs like this: You are to imagine four cards, each with a number on one side and a letter on the other side. Of two cards, you see only the letter side and you don't know what's on the number side. Of the other two cards, you see only the number side and don't know what's on the letter side. Imagine the four cards laid out as follows:

(image from: http://www.psypress.com/groome/figures/)

Here's the question: What card or cards do you need to turn over to test the rule "If there is a K on one side there is a 2 on the other", to see if it is violated? The large majority of undergraduates (and of almost every group tested) gets this question wrong. One common answer: the K and the 2. The correct answer is the K and the 7.

That K and 7 is the correct answer is much more intuitively evident when we put the task in a context of social cognition or cheating detection rather than in an abstract context. Imagine that instead of numbers and letters the cards featured beverages and ages and the rule in question was "If there is an alcoholic beverage on one side, there is an age of 21 or greater on the other". Then the cards would look like this: sprite, gin, 32 years old, 17 years old. The large majority of people will correctly say that to check for violations of the rule you need to turn over the gin card and the 17-year-old card. But that's exactly the same logical structure as the much more difficult letter-number task.

Psychologists have discussed at length the cognitive mechanisms and what makes some versions of the task easier than others, but the lesson I want to draw is metaphilosophical: We humans stink at abstract thought. Logically speaking, the Wason selection task is incredibly simple. But still it's hard, even for well educated people -- and even logic teachers familiar with the task need to stop and think a minute, slow down to get it right; they don't find it intuitive. Compare this to how intuitively we negotiate the immense complexities of language and visual perception.

Nor is it just the Wason selection task we are horribly bad at, but all kinds of abstract reasoning. I used to write questions for the Law School Admissions Test. One formula I had for a difficult question was just a question with several options expressed in ordinary language with a conditional and a negation and no intuitive support. The poor victim of one of my questions would first read a paragraph about the economics of Peru (for example). Then I would ask which of the following must be true if everything in the paragraph is true: (a.) Unless crop subsidies are increased, the exchange rate will decline, (b.) The exchange rate will rise only if crop subsidies are not decreased, (c.) If crop subsidies are decreased, the exchange rate will not rise, etc. My own mind would melt trying to figure out which of the options is correct (or whether, even, some might be equivalent), and all we're talking about is a very simple conditional and negation! So yes, you have me to blame for your less-than-perfect LSAT score if you took the exam in the late 1990s. Sorry!

Okay, now consider... Hegel. Or even something as structurally simple as the Sleeping Beauty Problem.

Most of our philosophical ambitions are far beyond ordinary human cognitive capacity. Our philosophical opinions are thus much more likely to be driven by sociological and psychological factors that have little to do with the real merit of the arguments for and against. This partly explains why we make so little philosophical progress over the centuries. If we are succeeded by a species (biological or robotic) with greater cognitive capacities, a species that finds the Wason selection task and abstractly combining conditionals and negations to be intuitively simple, they will laugh at our struggles with Sleeping Beauty, with Kant's Transcendental Deduction, with paradoxes of self-reference, etc., in the same way that we, once we are fully briefed and armed on the Wason Selection Task, are tempted to (but shouldn't) laugh at all the undergraduates who fail it.

My New Book, Perplexities of Consciousness

... is now out, here at Amazon and here at Barnes & Noble.

German and English Philosophers in 1914: "World War Is a Wonderful Idea!"

I was struck by the following passage, reading Decline of the German Mandarins (Fritz Ringer, 1969):

Early in August of 1914, the war finally came. One imagines that at least a few educated Germans had private moments of horror at the slaughter which was about to commence. In public, however, German academics of all political persuasions spoke almost exclusively of their optimism and enthusiasm. Indeed, they greeted the war with a sense of relief. Party differences and class antagonisms seemed to evaporate at the call of national duty.... intellectuals rejoiced at the apparent rebirth of "idealism" in Germany. They celebrated the death of politics, the triumph of ultimate, apolitical objectives over short-range interests, and the resurgence of those moral and irrational sources of social cohesion that had been threatened by the "materialistic" calculation of Wilhelmian modernity.

On August 2, the day after the German mobilization order, the modernist Ernst Troeltsch spoke at a public rally. Early in his address, he hinted that "criminal elements" might try to attack property and order, now that the army had been moved from the German cities to the front. This is the only overt reference to fear of social disturbance that I have been able to discover in the academic literature of the years 1914-1916.... the German university professors sang hymns of praise to the "voluntary submission of all individuals and social groups to this army." They were almost grateful that the outbreak of war had given them the chance to experience the national enthusiasm of those heady weeks in August. (p. 180-181)

With the notable exception of Bertrand Russell (who lost his academic position and was imprisoned for his pacifism), philosophers in England appear to have been similarly enthusiastic. Wittgenstein never did anything so cheerily, it seems, as head off to fight for Austria. Alfred North Whitehead rebuked his friend and co-author Russell for his pacifism and eagerly sent off to war his sons North and Eric. (Eric Whitehead died.)

If there is anything that seems, in retrospect, not to have been a wonderful idea it was World War I, which destroyed millions of lives to no purpose. (At best, it should have been viewed as a regrettable necessity in the face of foreign aggression; but that was rarely the attitude in 1914, from what I have read.) Philosophers at the time, evidently, were no more capable of seeing the (seemingly immensely obvious) downsides of world war than was anyone else.

You might ask: Why should philosophers have been more capable of seeing what was wrong with World War I? Isn't it entirely unsurprising that they should be just as enthusiastic as the rest of their compatriots?

Here's a model of philosophical reflection on which philosophers' enthusiasm for World War I is unsurprising: Philosophers -- and everyone -- possess their views on the big questions of life for emotional and sociological reasons that have nothing to do with their philosophical theories and philosophical readings. They recruit Kant, Mill, Locke, Rousseau, Aristotle, etc., only after the fact to justify what they would have believed anyway. Moral and political philosophy is nothing but post-hoc rationalization.

Here's a model of philosophical reflection on which philosophers' enthusiasm for World War I is, in contrast, surprising: Reading Kant, Mill, Locke, Rousseau, Aristotle, etc., helps give one a broadly humanitarian view, helps one see that people everywhere deserve respect, pushes one toward a more encompassing and cosmopolitan worldview, helps one gain a little critical perspective on the political currents of one's own time, helps one better see through the rhetoric of demagogues and narrow politicians.

Which vision of philosophy do you prefer?

Imagery in Front of One's Forehead

I posted briefly on this in 2006, but I continue to be struck by the following fact: When I interview people about their imagery they often report their images as seeming to be located in front of their foreheads. Often when people say this, they give me a slightly embarrassed look, as though this report surprises them too. Only a minority of subjects report imagery in front of their forehead, but it's a pretty healthy minority (rough estimate: 25%).

I don't think that I am forcing this report on subjects: At first, such reports surprised me, too. Antecedently, I would have thought the most likely possibilities to be: (1.) the image occurs nowhere in egocentric space, not seeming to be subjectively located at all; (2.) the image is subjectively experienced as inside the head; (3.) the image is subjectively experienced as before the eyes. Subjects do sometimes report (1)-(3), though not appreciably more often than in front of the forehead.

As far as I know, there is no serious study of the subjectively experienced location of imagery, including its conditions and variations. Some questions that arise:

(1.) Do people's differences in report about the subjective location of their imagery reflect real differences between people in how they experience imagery, or is the subjective location of imagery, or lack of subjective location, more or less the same for everyone but for some reason difficult to report accurately?

(2.) Can one control the subjective location of imagery? Suppose I am imagining Napoleon vanquished at Waterloo, and it seems to me that that imagery is transpiring inside my head. Can I take that very same imagery and make it transpire, instead, in front of my forehead? (Obviously, I am not talking about where the brain processes occur, but where it seems to me, subjectively, that the imagery is happening, if it seems to me that it is happening somewhere.) Can I make the image transpire down by my right toe? Can I move it over into the next room? Across town? Is there some limit to this?

(3.) Is there a difference between visually imagining an object as being some place relative to you and having one's image of that object transpiring in a particular subjective location? Getting clear on this distinction (if it is a valid distinction) seems essential to answering (2) accurately. So, for example, can I have an image in my head, or an image unlocated in subjective space, of someone sitting in the empty chair that I am (really) looking at across the room? If this distinction is hard to conceptualize, consider pictures as an analogy: I can have a picture *in my hand* of myself sitting *in that chair over there*. The picture is located in my hand; its representational content is that I am sitting in that chair over there. Is the same kind of split possible for imagery? I can imagine a mini-Napoleon engaged in a battle near my right toe, while I gaze down at my foot, but that is rather different -- isn't it? -- than having an ordinary image of Napoleon's defeat that is experientially located as transpiring by my right toe. If my imagery is experienced as inside of my head, it's not like I am imagining that little mini-Napoleon having climbed into my head, I think.

(4.) Is there interference between visual perception of outward objects from some location and the subjective location of one's imagery? So, for example, if your image is subjectively experienced as in the upper right quadrant of your visual field, are you less likely to detect an object that subtly appears in that location? (I have a vague feeling that someone has tested this, though maybe not with the distinction I articulate at (3) clearly in mind. Reminders/references appreciated. [I don't just mean Perky 1910, though that seems relevant.])

(5.) Why would in front of the forehead be a more common location in subjective space than, say, down by the cheeks? Does this reflect some cultural supposition about where images must be? (But if so, where in the culture?) Does it reflect some real phenomenon, perhaps some cognitive efficiency gained, by representing one's imagery experiences as positioned there?

Ethicists' Courtesy at Philosophy Conferences

In 2008 and 2009, my collaborators and I stalked philosophy conferences noting instances of courteous and discourteous behavior. Our aim was to collect evidence about whether ethicists behave any more courteously, on average, than do other philosophers. We used three measures of courtesy:

* talking audibly while the speaker is talking (vs. remaining silent);

* allowing the door to slam shut while entering or exiting mid-session (vs. attempting to close the door quietly);

* leaving behind clutter at the end of a session (vs. leaving one’s seat tidy).

Ethicists did not behave detectably differently by any of the three measures, thereby proving that they are not Confucian sages. (In fact, there was a session on neo-Confucianism among the coded sessions.)

We assume that disruptively yakking, littering, and slamming doors tends neither to advance the greatest good, to flow from universalizable maxims, nor to display morally virtuous character traits. Thus, these results fit with Josh Rust's and my overall finding, across several studies, that ethicists behave no morally better, on average, than do other people of similar social background.

We did find, however, that audiences in environmental ethics sessions tended to litter less.

Full details here.