A Priori Metaphysical Possibility (by guest blogger Jonathan Ichikawa)

Some philosophers think that we can't know any propositions to be possible a priori. One way to argue that we can't do this might go something like this: at best, you can only know something to be conceptually possible a priori; but conceptual possibility doesn't entail real (metaphysical) possibility, for which armchair investigation isn't enough. This is because, as Kripke demonstrated, some conceptual possibilities are metaphysically impossible.

(Hesperus is not Phosphorus is metaphysically impossible because 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus' refer rigidly to the same object ­something that requires empirical investigation to establish. But it seems in some sense conceivable. We might call this a mere conceptual possibility.)

I agree that not all conceptual possibilities are metaphysical possibilities. But I think that, given a priori access to conceptual possibility and conceptual impossibility, we can get some a priori access to metaphysical possibility. Because I think there is an a priori link between conceptual and metaphysical possibility.

Here's a principle that might be true and a priori:

For any proposition q, if q is conceptually possible but metaphysically impossible, then there is some conceptually possible proposition p such that p -> []~q is conceptually necessary. (That's a material conditional and the box of metaphysical necessity.)

Why believe this principle? For one thing, for any such q, ~q is an a posteriori necessity, and a posteriori necessities follow a priori from empirical facts and concept possession. Since all empirical facts are conceptually possible, this is sufficient to prove the principle.

This principle gives us an a priori test for metaphysical possibility. (I'm assuming a priori conceptual modality.) Take some conceptually possible proposition q. If it is conceptually impossible that some conceptually possible proposition p is such that p conceptually entails necessarily not-q, then q is genuinely metaphysically possible.

For instance, it is conceptually possible for the Bears to have won the 2007 Super Bowl. Furthermore, there is no conceivable proposition p such that it is a priori that if p, then it is metaphysically impossible for the Bears to have won the 2007 Super Bowl. Therefore, it is metaphysically possible for the Bears to have won the 2007 Super Bowl.

If this is right, then one upshot is that it's worth getting clear on what conceptual possibility amounts to, and how it works.

I'd like to thank Eric for the opportunity to guest-blog for the past few weeks, and to thank everyone who's read and offered valuable comments. I hope and believe that this has helped get me back into the habit of philosophical blogging ­ I'll be continuing back at my own blog, There is Some Truth in That. I hope to see some of you there.

[And from Eric: Thanks so much, Jonathan, for your thought-provoking posts!]

Is Philosophy Ever Profound?

I can't recall ever having had the inclination to call a bit of philosophy "profound". I've been wondering recently what's behind attributions of profundity.

The opposite of profound might be "superficial". I do think some philosophy is superficial. For example, if one critiques Descartes's Meditations by complaining that he ignores somatic sensations in the gut, that critique is superficial (unless one draws something interesting and general from that observation). But it doesn't seem to follow that any critique of the Meditations that fails to be superficial is consequently profound.

Is profundity a matter of striking at the core of an issue? Berkeley strikes at the core of our conception of "material objects" in his suggestion that there are none such, but only minds and their experiences, co-ordinated by God. Ayer strikes at the heart of ethics when he says there are no moral facts. Yet these thinkers are not, I believe, the sort often labeled profound. Nor are those who give straightforward responses to their arguments in defense of mainstream opinion. Perhaps their views are too clear and comprehensible to be profound?

A philosopher writes about a matter of considerable importance; it's hard entirely to understand what he is saying, but you get hints and glimmers; any attempt to express it in familiar terms (or in newly-invented but clearly articulated terms) seems to fall short; straightforward objections seem to miss the mark, because they depend on exactly what the text does not provide, a plain interpretation that cannot plausibly be shifted to accommodate difficulties. If you are prone to philosophical trust -- if you believe that there is an elusive truth behind the text that you don't quite understand and that plain-speaking philosophers always (even necessarily?) miss -- then perhaps you will consider the text profound. Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein invite this sort of attitude. In contemporary "analytic" circles, maybe Davidson and McDowell do (among devotees).

If I think no philosophy is profound, then maybe that's because I am not much prone to philosophical trust, and because I am doubtful that there are any important philosophical truths so complex that they cannot be clearly stated in 400 pages.

Or, maybe, emitting evocative hints and glimmers that defy clear interpretation and engender interesting thoughts in others -- maybe that just is profundity?

Dreaming, Belief, and Emotion (by guest blogger Jonathan Ichikawa)

Colin McGinn thinks that we believe what we dream. In his book Mindsight, McGinn raises lots of questions about dreaming and imagination, but only briefly considers the suggestion that we "no more believe our dreams than we believe our daytime reveries." That's my view. He rejects it on the grounds that without invoking belief, we cannot explain our emotional involvement with dreams. Here's a quote:

The sure test that dreams are suffused with belief is their ability to generate emotions that are conditional on belief, such as fear and elation—with which dreams are full. (p. 112)

The problem for the imagination model, then, can be stated thus:

(1) When I dream that p, I experience fear, elation, and other emotions of a certain type.
(2) Emotions like fear and elation, arising from an attitude that p, can only arise from a belief that p. Therefore,
(3) When I dream that p, I believe that p.

This argument strikes me as pretty bad. This parallels a puzzle in the philosophy of literature involving emotional responses to fictions. Fictions arouse emotions in us without causing belief; we seem to be happy that p, even though we do not believe that p. This is what philosophers of literature call the "Paradox of Fiction," and it takes the form of an apparently-inconsistent triad:

(1') When I read in a fiction that p, I experience fear, elation, and other emotions of a certain type.
(2) Emotions like fear and elation, arising from an attitude that p, can only arise from a belief that p. Therefore,
(3') When I read in a fiction that p, I do not believe that p.

It is generally accepted that (3') is true, so philosophers of fiction agree that it is either (1') or (2) that has to go. We may, with Kendall Walton, deny that we really experience fear and elation, but rather experience different, similar states, which he calls quasi-fear and quasi-elation. Or, we may say with Derek Matravers and others that belief isn't really necessary for fear; imagination can also play the role that belief often plays in fear, and likewise for the other emotions. I prefer the latter option, but I think it's obvious that one of these has to be right.

If we take the latter option to solve our puzzle about fiction, then we have also directly avoided the problem for the imagination model by denying the shared premise (2). If, on the other hand, we insist that these emotions include a cognitive element, denying instead that fictions really generate these emotions, then we may very well ask whether dreams really generate them either. It will be, perhaps, more plausible if we qualify our denial of emotional involvement in dreams thus: dreams don't involve emotions, except in the way that fictions do.

Leaving for Yue Today and Arriving Yesterday

Little is known about the ancient Chinese philosopher Huizi (or Hui Tzu, c. 300 BCE), but some of his paradoxes survive in the remoter chapters of the Zhuangzi. It's diverting to consider what reasoning might lie behind them. For example:

* I left for Yue today and arrived yesterday.
* I know the center of the world: It is north of Yen [in the north] and south of Yue [in the south].
* An egg has feathers.
* Wheels never touch the ground.
* No matter how swift the barbed arrow, there are times when it is neither moving nor at rest.
* Take a pole one foot long, cut away half of it every day, and at the end of ten thousand generations there will still be some left.
[Burton Watson, trans., except the first which is mine.]

The last two of these paradoxes are surprisingly close to Zero's famous paradoxes of motion in ancient Greece. (It is highly doubtful there was any influence.)

Consider the first of these: I left for Yue today and arrived yesterday. Is there any way to make sense of it?

Well, the following are plausible principles:
(a.) The last day you are in a locale is the day you left.
(b.) The first day you are in a locale is the day you arrived.
(c.) You are in a locale if at least 50% of your body is in that locale.

Now suppose I crossed over the border of Yue at exactly midnight, so that 50% of my body was in my home state at that instant and 50% was in Yue at that instant. It follows from (c) that:
(d.) I was in my home state both yesterday and today.
(e.) I was in Yue both yesterday and today.

By (a) and (d), I left for Yue today. However, by (b) and (e), I arrived yesterday.

The New Philosophers Carnival Is...

here.

Do We Believe What We Dream? (by guest blogger Jonathan Ichikawa)

I guess it's pretty standard to think that when we dream that p, we believe that p. Why?

To clarify the question: obviously, if I dream that I'm a famous opera singer (when in fact I am not a famous opera singer), it's part of the dream that I believe I'm an opera singer, and it's false that I'm an opera singer. But the question I'm engaging in isn't whether I believe it in the dream; it's whether in fact I believe it during the time that I'm dreaming. (Compare: in the dream I am performing at the Met; in fact, I am in my bed, which is not at the Met.)

If I knew the correct theory of belief, this might not be too hard a question to answer. We'd just see whether my dream state falls under that theory. Unfortunately, I don't know what the right theory of belief is. But it looks to me like most of the candidate theories will make the "you believe what you dream" view problematic. That's good news for me, because I reject that view -- but it also makes me wonder whether I'm missing something, in light of the fact that the dream belief view is so standard.

So are there plausible views about belief on which it turns out that we believe what we dream? Laura is sleeping in bed, dreaming that she is in England. What could make it true that she believes herself to be in England?

Some philosophers hold that beliefs necessarily play a certain kind of functional role; that what it is for a mental representation to be a belief is for it to play a distinctive belief-like role in a subject's cognitive economy. But, dream beliefs do not appear to play many of the same functional roles as do prototypical beliefs. Functionalists are of course free to specify which cognitive functions are distinctive of belief, but I am skeptical about there being a satisfactory specification of the functional role of belief that includes Laura's representation I am in England, but excludes obvious non-beliefs, like the representation Laura has when she fantasizes about being in England while awake.

Likewise, if one is tempted by an interpretationalist or dispositionalist theory of belief, one will have difficulty granting belief status to dream beliefs. Let's observe Laura as she's dreaming. On what basis can we ascribe to her the belief that she is in England? She is not behaving as if she is in England – she is not
looking to the right before crossing streets. Neither does she give us utterances that are best interpreted as expressions of the belief that she is in England, so any kind of Davidsonian radical interpretation is out of the question. Indeed, she's exhibiting very little behavior at all, since she is asleep. What is it about Laura in virtue of which she believes she is in England?

Eric, I think, has defended a view relating beliefs to long-term dispositions -- Laura's I'm in England representation definitely isn't one of those. It'll be gone when she wakes up, if not sooner! Maybe Eric can clarify whether I'm interpreting his view right, and how dreaming could fit in.

So, why would anybody think we believe what we dream?

Do Atheists Commit Less Vicious Sexual Crimes?

This article suggests so. From the abstract:

This article examines associations between self-reported religious affiliations and official offense histories among 111 incarcerated adult male sexual offenders. Four categories of religiosity were devised according to self-reported continuities and discontinuities in life-course religious affiliations: atheists, dropouts, converts, and stayers. ANCOVAs indicated that stayers (those who maintained religious involvement from childhood to adulthood) had more sexual offense convictions, more victims, and younger victims, than other groups. Results challenge assumptions that religious involvement should, as with other crimes, serve to deter sexual offending behavior....

One is reminded, of course, of the Catholic church's troubles over the last several years. The average age of the youngest victim of the "stayers" was 9.5 years.

A few caveats: (1.) "Atheists" just means comparatively low reported religiosity, both childhood and present, and may not correspond to full-blown atheism. (2.) One cannot draw the conclusion that atheists are less likely, in general, to commit sex crimes, since rates of atheism and religiosity were not measured in the general population. (3.) The researchers (Donna Eshuys and Stephen Smallbone) seem to overlook the possibility that the "stayers" may come from a sub-population in which sex crimes are less likely to be detected and/or lead to jail time, in which case one might expect only the worst offenders to be incarcerated; or that maybe the more vicious sexual offenders are more likely to exaggerate their religiosity.

The general literature on the relationship between religiosity and crime is mixed and difficult to interpret. If only we could randomly assign religiosity! ;) Unfortunately, the social factors affecting religiosity are entangled with those affecting criminality. Furthermore, the literature may be distorted by the fact that null results are hard to publish and by the prior commitments of the researchers (many are from religiously affiliated institutions, for example).

Why do I care about this issue? Well, if academic moral philosophy has no great positive effect on one's moral character (as I'm inclined to think), then one might hope for religion as a better source. I'm not especially optimistic about that either (though I have some hope that there may be particular religious practices with positive moral effect), but I haven't yet explored the empirical literature as much as I'd like.

Dreaming in Color (by guest blogger Jonathan Ichikawa)

Thanks to everyone for some really interesting discussions about methodology last week. I found them valuable, and will continue to think about them. But for now, I'd like to turn to a discussion of a different issue.

One of my pet theories is the imagination model of dreaming. I used to blog about it on Fake Barn Country (may it rest in peace) a lot. According to the imagination model of dreaming, when we dream, we do not have false beliefs, as Descartes assumed we do. Instead, we imagine things, much the same way we imagine when engaging with fictions or deliberate daydreams. Similarly, on this model, we don't experience percepts -- the kinds of sensory experiences we have while perceiving -- while dreaming. Instead, we have imagery experiences.

My first contact with our Splintered Mind host was through this 2002 paper: Eric Schwitzgebel, "Why Did We Think We Dreamed in Black and White?", Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 33 (2002), 649-660. Eric remarks on a surprising pattern: In the 1950s, just about everybody thought that dreaming was a black and white phenomenon. Dreaming in color was considered a sign of insanity. Today, most of us report that we regularly dream in color. How strange!

Eric theorizes that the explanation may have to do with the predominant film media. People who watch black and white movies describe themselves as dreaming in black and white; nowadays we self-attribute technicolor dreams. He's got some cool data to support this theory.

I think that if this theory is right, it provides support for the imagination model of dreaming. If the sensory-like content of dream experience is pretty much like waking experience, it's very weird that black-and-white movies should make dream experience black and white. Watching black-and-white movies doesn't cause my waking experiences to be black-and-white. The imagination theorist's explanation is much easier. He may say that the familiarity of black-and-white film associates black-and-white imagery with imaginary events; when I tell myself a story while sleeping, I imagine watching it occur, and I do so in black and white, because that's what I'm used to in fictions.

What is "Rationalization"?

Kant concludes Chapter One of the Groundwork suggesting that the value of formal moral philosophy over "common" moral reasoning is this: It serves as a counterweight to our tendency to be led astray in our moral thinking by wishes and inclinations. One might say it helps us guard against rationalizing.

On the other hand, one might worry that moral philosophy actually gives such powerful tools for rationalization that we're better off going with our common-sense gut feelings about right and wrong.

I don't aim to addres that (partly empirical) dispute now. But it does raise the question, What exactly is rationalization, in this pejorative sense? Philosophers haven't discussed this much (though Al Mele has a nice piece in PPQ 1998).

Here are two first approximations:
(1.) A moral conclusion that X is permissible is a rationalization if it flows from a reasoning, or quasi-reasoning, process with the goal (conscious or not) of justifying X. [The "goal" account.]
(2.) A moral conclusion that X is permissible is a rationalization if it flows from a reasoning, or quasi-reasoning, process that was bound to result in the judgment that X is permissible, largely independently of the quality of the reasons for that conclusion, because the reasoner is influenced by non-moral considerations. [The "predetermination" account.]

(1) and (2) are often related: If you aim to justify doing X then you might not be very sensitive to the quality of the reasons in its favor. But the two can come apart.

(A.) Goal without predetermination: I start thinking about whether it would be okay to ask a co-worker out on a date. I think about the question primarily because I want to come to the conclusion that it is okay. And I do come to that conclusion. However, it actually is morally permissible in this case, and had it not been I wouldn't have come to the conclusion that it was.

(B.) Predetermination without goal: I am so enchanted by the idea of a communist revolution that I can't think straight about it. I sincerely want to reject a particular act of communist revolutionizing if it's morally wrong, but I can't give it a fair hearing in my mind; so almost regardless of how poor the reasons, I will endorse it.

It seems to me that (B) is more usefully (and intuitively) thought of as "rationalizing" than (A), thus favoring the predetermination account.

Note by the way that neither account appeals to the quality of the reasons. For example, no matter how sound my justification for the permissibility of the revolutionizing, if my goals and sensitivities in employing that reasoning aren't right, I'm still rationalizing.

(These ideas arose in conversation with UCR grad student Joshua Hollowell and are as much his ideas as my own. I post them here with his permission.)

Why Do People Worry about Whether Intuitions Are Evidence? (by guest blogger Jonathan Ichikawa)

I wanted to say a little more about philosophical methodology and naturalistic challenges to a priori investigation. A key point of dispute between, let's call them, naturalists and rationalists, seems to involve the proper role of intuitions in philosophical methodology.

Again, I'll start by describing a hypothetical disagreement, running the risk of caricaturing the arguments in question. If that's what I'm doing, it will be instructive to see how the real views are different from my presentations of them here.

Archie: Consider twin earth, which is kind of like regular earth, but where there's no H20. Instead, there's this other stuff XYZ, which is not H20, but is superficially very similar to H20. It's clear and quenches thirst, etc. Introspecting, we discover in ourselves the rational intuition that XYZ is not water. Intuitions are good evidence; therefore, XYZ is not water. Therefore, externalism about content is true.

Eddie: It's not rational to blindly treat your so-called "rational intuitions" as evidence. We can't calibrate our intuitions to check their reliability, and it's totally mysterious how it is that they could be reliable. We shouldn't just trust them. We should go administer surveys instead. If we want to know whether XYZ is water, we have to go see how the folk use the word 'water'.

In my last dialogue, I claimed there was no real disagreement, even though they clearly thought there was. This time, I think they're both agreeing to something silly. According to traditional methodology, our intuitions are supposed to be evidence? Why? I think the most attractive position is this one: Experimental Eddie is right that we shouldn't treat our intuitions as evidence, but both he and Armchair Archie are wrong that traditional methodology commits to intuitions as evidence.

When I judge that that stuff on twin earth is not water, how shall we understand the reasoning I run through? Not, I suggest, like Archie said:

(1) I have the intuition that XYZ isn't water. (introspection)
(2) So, XYZ isn't water. (1, principle about intuitions)

(I'm omitting (3) So, content externalism.) Instead, we can understand the reasoning as not involving any premise about intuitions, or based on introspection, at all:

(3) All and only H20 is water.
(4) XYZ isn't H20.
(5) So, XYZ isn't water.

This argument is valid and plausibly represents the reasoning we go through to ourselves. And no premise is based on introspection or a claim about an 'intuition'.

Someone will say: "but the only way you could know (3) is by intuition." Since I don't know what intuitions are, I won't try to evaluate that claim; the point is that (3) is something that everybody should agree we can know, and that therefore its invocation in this judgment about a thought experiment shouldn't be problematic. (Do you doubt that we know (3)? That's to doubt whether we can recognize the possibility of fake water.)

This argument, of course, is a posteriori, because premise (3) is. But there's an a priori version of it, too:

(3') All and only things that are F are water, where 'F' stands for whatever it is that it turns out makes up water.
(4') XYZ is not made up of F.
(5) So, XYZ isn't water.

Whenever possible, we should avoid putting argument in terms of 'intuitions'. I suggest that this is almost always the case.

"Experimental Philosophy" -- Wide and Narrow

I'm a philosopher. For some reason, this hasn't prevented me from running experiments when I've felt they could shine some light on an issue troubling me. (I examined whether people still reported dreaming in black and white in the U.S. and in China, as part of exploring how well we know our own stream of experience; for similar reasons, I've given people beepers and had them report on their sensory experience; I'm also trying various things aimed at discerning whether ethicists behave better than other people.) By 20th-century standards, this is highly unusual behavior for a philosopher!

But as I'm sure you've noticed, this is the 21st century. I must be a man of my times, for I find I have company -- most notably the company of a group who call themselves "Experimental Philosophers" and perceive themselves, self-consciously, as a movement -- with a blog, for example, and bibliographies. As a movement, Experimental Philosophy ("X-Phi"!) has received considerable attention, both positive and negative (e.g., here and here).

The philosophers most central to this movement tend to poll undergraduates regarding their moral intuitions or their intuitions about traditional philosophical examples and puzzles. Tired of hearing one philosopher say something like, "Well, of course, our ordinary intuition in cases like X is such-and-such" and another respond with "Well, I don't have that intuition!", they quite sensibly decided to go out and see what people's intuitions actually were. Only in philosophy would it take sixty years to think of doing this! (I chose sixty years as approximately the beginning of the tendency to take ordinary intuition as the principal court of philosophical appeal; it's salutary to reflect on the brevity of this period relative to the entire history of philosophy.)

One might doubt how much we can learn about the world by polling undergraduate intuition (other than learning what undergraduate intuitions are -- which is actually a pretty important thing), but at a minimum the movement should put to an end cavalier philosophical appeals to ordinary intuition. It's good metaphilosophical conscience.

Construed as such a project, experimental philosophy is relatively fresh, controversial, and coherent as a movement. But here's the strange thing: Such philosophers often characterize "experimental philosophy" as experimental work done by philosophers [caveat: see comments section] to shine light on philosophical disputes (e.g., here). In this broader sense, "experimental philosophy" is much less coherent as a movement, and much older; and much of it is hard to distinguish from the sorts of things psychologists do.

In discussions of "experimental philosophy" I think there's often a problematic ambiguity between these broad and narrow senses, as though, implicitly, the participants assume that polling intuitions is the only kind of experimentation a philosopher could do that would shed light on a genuinely philosophical dispute....

What Do Analytic Philosophers Analyze? (by guest blogger Jonathan Ichikawa)

Hello, Splintered Mind readers! I'm pleased to be guest-blogging, and
thanks to Eric for the invitation. I'm looking forward to some good
discussions over the next couple of weeks.

I thought I'd start off with a question in philosophical methodology.
There's a certain kind of disagreement that sometimes comes up about
how to go about doing philosophy -- it connects to lots of deep
issues, and from the way people talk about it, it sure seems like it's
a big ideological disagreement, but I have a pretty hard time wrapping
my head around just what the disagreement is supposed to be.

The debate I have in mind tends to occur between traditional
philosophers who think that lots of interesting philosophy is a
priori, and philosophers who think that we have to go out and do
empirical investigation to learn anything interesting. Roughly -- and
only roughly -- speaking, some philosophers like thought experiments,
and others like psychological experiments.

Sometimes, I feel debate between these camps goes something like this.
Maybe I'm caricaturing, but I don't think so:

Archie: I'm using a priori investigation to learn about the
nature of knowledge.

Eddie: When you say 'knowledge', are you talking about something out
there in the world? Or are you just studying the concept of
knowledge?

Archie: Oh, I definitely am interested in knowledge out there in
the world. I'm using a priori investigation to learn which
things are instances of knowledge -- that thing out there in
the world.

Eddie: That's hopeless. How can a priori investigation teach
you something about something out there in the world? At best, a
priori investigation could give you insight into which things fall
under the concept knowledge. That's a merely psychological
matter.

Archie: No, it's not just a psychological question -- I agree that
would be uninteresting. I'm learning about the nature of knowledge,
that thing in the world!

You may anticipate my confusion from the way I set up this dialogue.
I can't see what this disagreement is supposed to be about. Here are
the two questions that we're supposed to be contrasting:

(1) Which things are knowledge?
(2) Which things fall under the concept KNOWLEDGE?

But these two questions are identical. Or, at least they're
equivalent. For after all, it is a tautology that all and only things
that are knowledge are things that fall under the concept KNOWLEDGE.

So what is it that this disagreement is supposed to be about? It
can't be that Armchair Archie is illicitly attempting to adjudicate
from the armchair what actual cases of knowledge there are in the
world, because this would be an obvious and ridiculous mistake. It
can't be that Experimental Eddie's question presupposes that
'knowledge' is a natural kind term, because it doesn't; "which things
are trains?" has just the same structure as "which things are
knowledge?", and nobody thinks trains are natural kinds.
(Furthermore, "Which things fall under the concept WATER?" can't be
answered a priori.)

So what gives? Is there a genuine disagreement in the ballpark?

The Parable of the Farmer of Song (Mengzi 2A2)

No, he doesn't harvest music!

One must work at it, but do not aim at it directly. Let the heart not forget, but do not help it grow. Do not be like the man from Song (Sung). Among the people of the state of Song there was one who, concerned lest his grain not grow, pulled on it. Wearily, he returned home, and said to his family, 'Today I am worn out. I helped the grain to grow.' His son rushed out and looked at it. The grain was withered. Those in the world who do not help the grain to grow are few. Those who abandon it, thinking it will not help, are those who do not weed their grain. Those who help it grow are those who pull on the grain. Not only does this not help, but it even harms it.

This parable appears in the middle of a larger fragment, Mengzi (Mencius) 2A2 (Bryan Van Norden, trans.). The standard interpretation these days (e.g. P.J. Ivanhoe) is this. Just as the man of Song harms his grain by trying to force it to grow, so also we can harm our moral development by trying to perform grand acts of morality before we are psychologically ready to do so -- i.e., before we'd feel happy and unresentful doing so.

Two considerations may seem to compel this interpretation. First, Mengzi often uses agricultural metaphors to talk about the cultivation of moral goodness. And second, the sentence preceding the parable is: "Consequently, I say that Gaozi never understood righteousness, because he regarded it as external." Hence, the "it" at the beginning of the parable might naturally be understood as "righteousness".

But here are two problems: First, its plausibility. It seems strange to say that "Those in the world who do not help the grain [i.e. morality] to grow are few." Are people generally as eager to work at becoming more virtuous as this farmer is to help his grain? And furthermore, is trying to force oneself to be virtuous such a bad thing? -- something that generally harms one's moral development?

Second, Mengzi never says, anywhere else, anything like "That would be a morally good thing to do, but you would resent doing it, so you shouldn't do it. Take it slow, instead." On the contrary, Mengzi seems to demand instant moral behavior from everyone and is unsatisfied with half-measures (e.g. 3B8, 7A39, 1A3).

A better interpretation of the parable, I think, comes from looking at 2A2 as a whole. 2A2 begins with long discussion of the "unperturbed heart", the "floodlike qi [breath/vital-energy]", and courage. The kind of courage Mengzi most admires is strength of moral conviction (which seems to be the core of "sageness", e.g., in 5B1) -- not being blown about by the winds of circumstance and drawn away from one's convictions by the temptations of personal advantage. If no circumstance, good or bad, could perturb your heart and interfere with your breath [qi], then you will be unshakeable from morality: This is having a "floodlike qi". Immediately before the parable of the farmer is this:

Gongsun Chou said, "I venture to ask what is meant by 'floodlike qi.'"

Mengzi said, "It is difficult to put into words. It is a qi that is supremely great and supremely unyielding. If one cultivates it with uprightness and does not harm it, it will fill up the space between Heaven and earth. It is a qi that unites righteousness with the Way. Without these, it starves. It is produced by accumulated righteousness. It cannot be obtained by a seizure of righteousness. If some of one's actions leave one's heart unsatisfied, it will starve. Consequently, I say that Gaozi never understood righteousness, because he regarded it as external."

In this broader context, I'd suggest the parable is not about the cultivation of morality or righteousness per se but rather about the cultivation of a floodlike qi -- i.e., steadfastness of character. Plainly this is related to morality for Mengzi, but it is not the same.

What is it, then, to try to force one's character to grow, per the farmer of Song? Maybe this: Overestimate one's steadfastness. Allow oneself to be put into situations that bring out the bad in people, thinking that you can resist in a way others can't -- allowing yourself that "one more drink", saying to yourself "I won't yield to temptation this time", or "politics won't corrupt me", or "if I get [money, power, influence, the promotion, etc.] I won't be like those other people". There are few of us who don't overestimate ourselves in that way; and so overestimating ourselves we put ourselves in situations that greatly harm our moral character.

This interpretation, although only subtly different from the standard, is different enough to avoid the latter's difficulties.

Humeschwitzstein

Astronomers know -- or seem to know -- the most remarkable things on the slenderest base of evidence. Largely on the basis of the spectral analysis of light (often supplemented with verbal reports about rare events in very small pieces of the world called physics laboratories), they reach conclusions about the origin and early history of the universe, about unfamiliar events at virtually unimaginable distances, about the destiny of the sun in some billions of years. It could, of course, all have been one giant projection screen overhead that we'd have punctured with our first moon probe.

Why assume that as things happen here, they happen everywhere? -- that as things happen now, they've happened always and will happen forever? Hume compared us (didn't he?) to fleas on the back of a dog, watching a hair grow and saying "ah, that's how the universe works!"

Some days, I feel very much like such a flea. Hume used this idea, or something like it, in defense of atheism, or something like it; but in me it works the other way. Our science does a pretty good job with our local little hair, Earth, and the nearby hairs (Mars, etc.) seem to grow under much the same rules; but should I be so confident there isn't a whole dog somewhere underneath whose operation I haven't even begun to imagine?

Nor can we even remember or keep straight the growth of our little hair. I search for the Hume quote. I can't find it in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, which would have been my guess. I have a sense that I heard my colleague Howie Wettstein attributing the quote to him. So I email Howie and he tells me that the part about the flea on the dog is pure invention on my part but the back half of the quote is accurate; but now he can't find it in Hume either.

Finally we trace it to the source: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part II:

From observing the growth of a hair, can we learn any thing concerning the generation of a man?

(In context, Hume is challenging the assumption implicit in the argument from design that we can transfer what we know about the workings of small, local things to the workings of universe as a whole.)

Howie remarks that it's like that old game "telephone": Hume said it, Howie misremembered it to me, I misremembered it to my students and to you just now. All the more reason for humility, Hume might say.

Philosophers Carnival #42 is...

here.

(Thanks Justin and Garrett!)

Is It Fair to Expect Ethicists to Behave Better?

Suppose I'm right and ethicists don't behave better than anyone else (see these posts). Shall we accuse them of hypocrisy? Consider a concrete example: Kant is remarkably strict in his denunciation of lying (famously saying that you shouldn't even lie to a murderer at the door about the hiding place of his innocent target). Should we hold him to higher standards of truthfulness in his personal behavior than others? Is there something particularly bad about Kant falsifying his tax return?

The obvious and natural answer is yes. Yet I'm struck by this analogy: A doctor goes to a third world country. Every time she takes a day off, ten people die who wouldn't otherwise have died. Suppose she takes a day off to go fishing, knowing that she doesn't need to fish, that a vacation isn't necessary to her continued functioning, that should could have worked that day without any loss to her future efficiency. She just wants to fish, and she thinks she deserves the time off. Shall we accuse her of preferring a day of fishing for herself to the lives of ten other people, and thus fishing at the expense of their lives? In a sense her choice does seem repugnant in that way. Yet also the accusation seems unfair. Had she chosen a pleasant career as a philosophy professor, or a cosmetic surgeon, she could take a day off without deadly repercussions. Her choice to go abroad instead was morally admirable. Surely, she deserves a "me day" at least as much as the rest of us.

I draw the conclusion that we should be careful about requiring people to shoulder an additional moral load because of their choice of profession (setting aside cases in they shoulder such a load to compensate for a wicked profession). Considering myself: I chose to specialize in philosophy of psychology, not ethics. Do I therefore have fewer moral obligations? Is it more permissible for me to lie, disrespect my students, ignore the disadvantaged? To say so seems not only unfair to ethicists but to create a kind of prudential incentive to avoid ethics -- perhaps even to avoid thinking about ethics -- if one wishes to remain (comparatively!) un-blameworthy for one's actions.

(I was brought to this thought reading Richard Posner's comment [in his 1999 book, p. 69] that ethics professors seem just as eager to reduce their teaching loads as anyone else -- and that therefore they must either think their teaching ineffectual or value the cultivation of morality less than they say. At first, this seemed to me a fair and interesting criticism; and maybe it still is....)

Echolocation and Knowledge

Wednesday I argued that you can probably echolocate considerably better than you think you can. Let me amplify on that idea.

First, we not only have the capacity to echolocate, but we do actually use echolocatory information in negotiating through our daily environment. Our sense of the space we're in and the objects that surround us is continually confirmed or altered by echolocatory information. Here's an example Mike Gordon and I used in our 2000 essay on human echolocation: Wenger Corporation's "virtual room" can electronically simulate the acoustics of a very large room within a small space. According to Mike, when unsuspecting listeners walk into such a room, they quickly sense that something is amiss. Typically, they glance upward at the ceiling to see if it is unusually high. Now that I'm attuned to it, I'm struck by the acoustic difference between the typical classroom and a carpeted room with lots of soft furniture. If I'm thinking of it as I walk through a doorway, I notice the acoustic transition between rooms and the echolocatory sense I have of the doorframe as it passes near my ears. Even if I weren't thinking about it, a classroom that sounded like a living room or a doorway that gave me no echolocatory sense of its frame, would likely disconcert me -- you, too, I'd wager, independent of any intellectual apprehension you have, or not, of your capacities for echolocation.

Second, there's something it's like to echolocate. It's not an entirely nonconscious capacity. We have auditory experience of the direction and distance (and maybe also the texture and shape) of silent objects. This experience is both ordinary and pervasive.

Yet, despite the two points above, we have very little apprehension of this experience. For example, in the 18th and 19th centuries, blind people who navigated by echolocation were struck by their remarkable ability to avoid unseen objects in novel environments -- and many of them hypothesized that they did so by feeling pressure on their faces. In fact, the capacity was generally known as "facial vision". Yet, 20th-century researchers established that this was an auditory, not a tactile capacity (for example, by covering their faces and not their ears and vice versa). Most normally sighted subjects who participate in echolocatory experiments (as Mike and Larry and others have noted, and as I have seen informally) are surprised at the results, and many have the impulse to think they are feeling pressure on their faces.

If we assume -- as I think is probably warranted -- that echolocatory information is not generally felt as pressure on the face, then these people have gone wrong about a pervasive and fundamental aspect of their ongoing conscious experience; and most of us, even if not wrong in quite that way, are strikingly ignorant about this aspect of our stream of experience.

We should, I think, turn the epistemology of Locke and Descartes on its head: What we know best and most directly are outward objects (the size of the room, the shape of the desk before me); what we know only partially, tentatively, and after reflection is our sensory experience of that world.

Human Echolocation

Can you echolocate? -- that is, hear the locations and properties of silent objects by noticing how sound reflects off them? Most people say no -- perhaps none more eminently than the philosopher Thomas Nagel in his influential essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”:

bat sonar [echolocation], though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine.

It's clear, though, that we sometimes gain information about things by noticing how sound reflects from them. You can tell the difference in sound when a wall by the freeway suddenly ends, then starts again. We're all familiar with the sound difference between a footfall or shout heard in a large room and one heard in a small room (an auditorium vs. a bathroom, say). In such cases, we detect the distance of silent walls by hearing the sound reflected from them. Larry Rosenblum (a psychologist here at UCR) has tested this more formally with ordinary blindfolded undergraduates. Much to the surprise of most of them, they could distinguish differences in distance between walls 36 to 144 inches away.

Close your eyes and hold your hand in front of your face. Say "shhhh" while moving your hand up and down, forward and back, right and left. Better, get a friend to move her hand around while you do this. You can hear where the hand is, no? Close your eyes and walk toward a wall, saying "hi, hi, hi, hi...". Can't you hear how far the wall is? With a couple of practice trials, most people find it fairly easy to stop within a few inches of the wall without touching it.

Other researchers have found that ordinary people can use echolocation to discriminate the shapes of objects of equal surface area (circle vs. square vs. triangle) and in some cases the texture of objects (fabric, plexiglass, carpet, wood). Apparently, you can hear if that thing in front of you is circular!

(I've replicated some of these last results informally in my office, and I'm not entirely certain that subjects aren't just hearing differences in loudness -- e.g., a triangle with its apex up reflects more sound when you talk at it from a relatively lower position and less sound when you raise your mouth higher, while circles and squares are more symmetrical. On the other hand, sometimes it seems to me that I have an almost instantaneous impression of the shape in these experiments.)

If you're really good -- for example if you're blind and rely upon echolocation as one of your principal means of navigating the world, you might be able to do even this.

Sometime in the next week or so, I'll post on some of the philosophical issues I see arising from these facts....

Philosophy Grad School Applications -- Reflections from the Other Side

Update: I've started an expanded series of reflections on this topic here.

I'm on the admissions committee this year for U.C. Riverside's Philosophy graduate program. Since many readers of this blog are aspiring grad students (or recently were) or sometimes advise students applying to philosophy graduate school, I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on the process.

Letters of recommendation (advice for letter writers): Reading hundreds of letters of recommendation, things become something of a blur. Most letters say "outstanding student" or "I'm delighted to recommend X" or "I'm confident X will succeed in graduate school in philosophy". It would be strange not to say something of this sort, but still -- my eyes start to glaze over. I suspect that trying to detect nuanced differences in such phrases is pointless, since I doubt such nuances closely track applicant quality. More helpful: (1.) Comparative evaluations like: "best philosophy major in this year's graduating class"; or "though only an undergraduate, one of three students, among 9, to earn an 'A' in my graduate seminar"; or "her GPA of 3.87 is second-highest among philosophy majors". (2.) Descriptions of concrete accomplishments: "Won the department's prize in 2005 for best undergraduate essay in philosophy"; or "President of the Philosophy Club".

Regarding those little checkboxes on the cover sheet ("top 5%, top 10%" etc.): My impression is that letter writers vary in their conscientiousness about such numbers and have different comparison groups in mind, so I tend to discount them unless backed up by specific comparison assessments in the letter.

Letters of recommendation (advice for applicants): Three strong letters makes a better impression than three strong letters and one mediocre letter. We can forgive applicants for not having the full three letters in on time, since we know professors are often flaky -- but still a gentle email reminder to your letter-writers around the time of the deadline might help. Also, it's a little strange when a letter-writer's description of your interests diverges from your own. So show your them at least your statement of purpose (preferably your whole application). You might also offer the letter writers a "brag sheet" describing any concrete accomplishments you have or specific hardships you've overcome (though be judicious about the latter).

Lists of awards, resumes, etc.: Long lists of minor accomplishments tend to blur before my eyes. Of course you made honor roll!

GRE scores: UCR requires them. I don't take them that seriously, but some others do. High GRE scores can help applicants win extra fellowship money. We certainly admit some students with mediocre GRE scores. At UCR I'd say below 1250 is a strike against an applicant, above 1400 is a bonus.

Writing sample: I skim the whole sample of every plausible applicant and try to read a few pages in the middle carefully. First, the sample must be clearly written and show a certain amount of philosophical maturity. (I can't say much about how to achieve these things other than to be a good writer and philosophically mature; I think they're hard to fake.) Second, what I look for in the middle is that the essay gets into the nitty-gritty somehow. In an analytic essay, that might be very detailed analysis of the pros and cons of an argument, or of its non-obvious implications, or of its structure. In a historical essay, that might be a very close reading of a passage or a close look at textual evidence that decides between two competing interpretations. Many otherwise nicely written essays stay largely at the surface, simply summarizing an author's work or presenting fairly obvious criticisms at a relatively superficial level. Applicants should be sure to have at least one professor look over the sample, critiquing it specifically for its suitability in an application.

Transcripts: Overall GPA matters, but even more so one's upper-division grades in philosophy. We like to see mostly A's. A few A-'s or lower grades are okay. It also depends on the institution: A 3.8 average in philosophy from Stanford looks different from a 3.8 average from a Cal State. Unfortunately, master's programs, small liberal arts schools, and foreign universities vary widely in how rigorously they grade, making transcripts hard to assess. Guidance from the letter writers (e.g., this is the highest GPA among graduating seniors) can help considerably here.

Statements of Purpose: These are hard to write well. Many are somewhat, or even painfully, corny: "Ever since I was seven years old, I've puzzled over the timeless problems of philosophy." Others seem phony; others seem arrogant or like a sales pitch. Fortunately for candidates, we're used to it. The best statements, to my mind, simply describe the applicant's areas of interest in philosophy, with perhaps some description of particular sub-issues of special interest. We then ask ourselves: Do the applicant's interests fit with what we can teach?

Personal Contact or Connections: Such things don't help much, I suspect, unless they bring substative new information. If a professor at UCR at some point in the past had a good substantive, philosophical conversation with an applicant and mentions that to us, that might help a bit. But seeking out professors for such purposes could backfire if it seems like brown-nosing, or if the applicant seems immature, arrogant, or not particularly philosophically astute.

New Blog for Florida Philosophy Students...

here. (Welcome to the blogosphere!)

Evil and Failure to Reflect

Today I'd like to consider a view somewhat in tension with my series of posts on what I call the "problem of the ethics professors" -- the problem being that they don't seem to be any more virtuous than the rest of us. (Empirical data here and here.)

It's tempting, perhaps, to suppose in light of ethicists' remarkably ordinary blend of virtue and vice, that philosophical moral reflection is of no use to moral development. But that conclusion is troublingly cynical. If philosophical reflection about ethics -- which is, really, often nothing more than just thoughtful consideration of what's right and wrong -- yields no moral benefit, what's the point? Just to know better our wickedness? It's pretty darkly pessimistic to suppose that reflection, and consideration of the best historical and contemporary writing on virtue, duty, and justice, is powerless to produce moral improvement.

It's appealingly worldly, perhaps, to think poorly of the morality of ethicists; but then, I think, you owe yourself a story about how and why philosophical reflection fails. And I doubt the easiest stories here ("the problem with ethicists is that they ignore the Bible" or "philosophical ethics suppresses moral emotion") will work, at least not without considerable supplementation.

Here are two further thoughts that incline me not to dismiss the value of moral reflection so lightly.

First, there's the remarkable lack of moral reflection common among the perpetrators of great crimes. I'm struck by this, especially, in reading Holocaust literature. It's a famous theme, of course, in Hannah Arendt's portrayal of Eichmann, an expert in the logistics of shipping Jews to death. Albert Speer's well-known book Inside the Third Reich -- conceived while serving prison time for his role as an architect in Hitler's inner circle -- is to my mind amazingly unreflective about the moral dimensions of his activity, focusing instead on such issues as Hitler's movie-watching habits and how the Allies should have attacked ball-bearing factories. I can't help but wonder whether more morally reflective people would be less likely to be swept up in such evil. (Of course, there's the case of Heidegger....)

And second: In the famous Milgram experiment, subjects are persuaded to shock (they think) a screaming, protesting (and eventually eerily silent) man in an adjoining room for the sake of an experiment on learning. They begin by giving a mild shock as "punishment" for a wrong answer, with instructions to increase the level of shock with each wrong answer. Eventually, they believe they are delivering shocks of 300 and even 450 volts (marked "danger" and "xxx" on the instrumentation) to the victim. When subjects protest, they are placidly told, by a man in a lab coat, that they are to continue and that the shocks cause no permanent tissue damage. It's hard to know for sure, but I suspect that most subjects who paused for a while to genuinely reflect, in a philosophical way (why am I shocking this man? do we have any right to keep him here despite his protests? might there be some real risk to his life or health that his experiment doesn't justify?), would refuse to continue to shock the victim. No?

Philosophical moral reflection, powerless to improve behavior? We should not adopt that view lightly. But then we're left again with the problem of the ethics professors.

Liberating On Liberty (from the Library)

Whew! I got some good linkage from my last post on ethicists stealing books, lifting this blog into the rarefied territory of almost thousand visitors a day -- peanuts for the likes of kottke.org and ordinary for Cognitive Daily -- but virtually a populist revolution for me.

The previous post about missing ethics books focused entirely on books first published in 1960 and later. I promised a separate analysis of classic, older texts. Here it is.

I looked at 10 classic (pre-1900) texts outside of ethics and 12 classic ethics texts. Selection criteria were a bit complicated; but please let me know, readers, if you think there are classic philosophy books I should have included on the lists below but did not include that are: (a.) influential, (b.) widely checked out, (c.) either clearly in ethics or clearly outside of ethics (not a blend), and (d.) generally published under separate cover (not as part of a general anthology including both ethics and nonethics texts by that author). The libraries I looked at were: UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC Riverside, UC San Diego, UC Santa Cruz, Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, Columbia, Princeton, Michigan, and Texas.

I looked at missing books both as a percentage of books off-shelf (where "off shelf" means either checked out or missing/lost) and as a percentage of holdings. Data were collected over winter break so as to minimize effects due to texts being assigned for a particular class. (I will collect comparison mid-term check-out data in a month or so.)

The results, then, by book:
(Author, Title, Missing as % of off shelf, Missing as % of holdings)
Ethics:
Aquinas....Summa Theologica.......8.1%....1.2%
Aristotle..Nichomachean Ethics...11.6%....1.9%
Bentham....Principles of Morals..14.3%....1.4%
Hobbes.....Leviathan.............22.4%....3.6%
Kant.......Groundwork............22.0%....2.2%
Kant.......Metaphysics of Morals.12.5%....1.7%
Kant.......Second Critique.......12.9%....1.7%
Locke......Treatise of Gov't.....19.3%....2.3%
Mill.......On Liberty............30.4%....5.0%
Mill.......Utilitarianism........27.6%....2.2%
Plato......Republic..............19.7%....2.9%
Rousseau...Social Contract.......30.0%....3.4%
Total Ethics.....................19.4%....2.6%

Non-Ethics:
Bacon......New Organon.............3.3%...0.6%
Berkeley...Principles.............11.1%...1.0%
Brentano...Psychology Empirical....0.0%...0.0%
Descartes..Meditations.............6.1%...0.7%
Frege......Grundlagen.............29.4%...6.9%
Frege......Geach & Black trans.....0.0%...0.0%
James......Principles of Psych.....6.3%...1.7%
Kant.......First Critique.........10.1%...1.8%
Kant.......Third Critique..........3.6%...0.9%
Locke......Essay Concerning Human.16.3%...1.6%
Total Non-Ethics..................8.7%....1.4%

In sum, the classic ethics texts were about twice as likely to be missing, overall, than the non-ethics texts (p < .001; one-proportion tests, two-tailed).

A few books were outliers, with substantially higher checkout numbers (Plato [132] and Aristotle [95]) or substantially lower (Berkeley [18], Brentano [6], Frege [17 and 7], Bentham [21], and Kant Metaphysics of Morals [16]). (Instability due to small sample size may explain the highly variable results on some of the latter books, esp. Frege.) Excluding these books left short lists of books with very comparable holdings and checkout rates, and large enough holdings and checkouts for some statistical stability. Ethics books were still about twice as likely to be missing. (The odds ratios actually went up a bit.)

Looking by book, excluding those books with fewer than 25 off shelf, almost all the books with above-average missing rates are ethics books; almost all those with below-average rates are non-ethics. This effect was so pronounced that even with such a small sample of books (6 non-ethics, 10 ethics), the difference in the mean percentage missing was statistically detectable (7.6% vs. 20.4%, p = .001; 1.2% vs. 2.6% p = .005).

P.S.: I should add that due to the different types of courses classic ethics and non-ethics books are typically assigned for, and due to the high -- and perhaps not comparable -- rates of checkout by undergraduates, I think these data are not as revealing as the data described in my earlier post, which focused on a larger set of more comparable books, likely to be checked out only by professors and advanced students.

Philosophy Graduate Students Say the Most Peculiar Things

In the holiday spirit, I thought I'd post a few of the more memorable utterances of my fellow graduate students when I was a Berkeley in the 1990s. To give credit where credit is due, I'll use their names. I don't think they'll be embarrassed -- they shouldn't be! -- and I hope they'll forgive me if they are. (I'll remove their names from this post if they request it.)

David Barton, sitting in his usual spot on the couch in the graduate student lounge (a place he occupied sometimes for long stretches): "Work, schmerk. Kant, Schmant. For all x, schmex."

Josh Dever, sitting in a hottub, holding up the chlorinator: "This is the name I'll give to my first child." Someone else: "You'll name her 'chlorinator'?" Josh: "No, her name will be this object. If you want to refer to her, you'll have to include this chlorinator in your sentence." (Josh never did follow through with this intention, though.)

An undergraduate had written a paper on Kierkegaard including the following sentence: "Being a knight of faith is like falling off a never-ending cliff into water, hitting various flying things along the way." What can a T.A. do with that? John Holbo struck upon the perfect solution: He circled "flying things" and wrote in the margin "do you mean birds?", then photocopied the page and put it on a corkboard in the graduate student lounge.

Do Ethicists Behave Better Than the Rest of Us? Peer Opinion

Do you think that ethicists, in general, behave morally better, worse, or about the same non-ethicists? I've often posed this question to other philosophers in informal conversation. Most of my interlocutors say "about the same" or "worse"; only a few say that ethicists behave overall better (which would seem to comport with my findings that ethicists steal more books).

Josh Rust and I distributed a questionnaire on this issue at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association a few weeks ago. Josh sat at a table near the book exhibit and offered people snacks in exchange for filling out a questionnaire. The questionnaire came in two versions. Version A asked respondents to compare the moral behavior of the ethics professors they knew first to the behavior of non-ethicists in philosophy and second to that of non-academics of similar socio-economic background. Version B asked similar questions about the moral behavior of the specific ethicist in their department whose name comes next in alphabetical order after theirs (looping from Z to A if necessary). All questions used a scale of 1 to 7, from substantially morally better (1) to about the same (4) to substantially morally worse (7).

54 respondents completed Version A. The mean result on Question 1 (ethicists vs. non-ethicists in philosophy) was exactly 4 ("about the same"). On Question 2 (ethicists vs. non-academics of similar social background) the mean result was 3.9 -- which was not statistically different from 4, given the relatively small sample size. In other words, philosophers when asked their general opinion about ethicists, thought they behaved about the same as non-ethicists.

One interesting trend in the data had to do with academic rank: Undergraduates and distinguished professors were the most sanguine about the behavior of ethicists, assistant professors the least sanguine. Here are the mean responses to Question 1, divided by rank (the means for Question 2 are very similar):

Undergraduate: 3
Graduate student: 3.8
Adjunct instructor, lecturer, or post-doc (non-tenure track): 4.1
Assistant professor (tenure track): 4.6
Associate professor: 4.3
Full professor: 4.3
Distinguished professor: 3.3

Given the small sample, though, it's hard to know whether the appearance of a trend here (with the grimmest views around tenure-time!) is simply chance.

On Version B, the results looked better for the ethicists, with means of 3.4 (Question 1) and 3.2 (Question 2), both statistically different from 4.0. In other words, philosophers thought, on average, that the ethicist next after them in the department roster behaved both better than the rest of the department and than non-academics of similar social background.

So which is it? Do ethicists behave better or not? Which version of the questionnaire better reflects real philosophical opinion? An argument can be made either way. Version A might be misleading due to something like what psychologists call a saliency or availability effect: When asked to think about the moral behavior of ethicists, perhaps the first cases to come to your mind will be cases of particularly nasty ethicists. Version B attempts to control for that, but people may be overly charitable to individuals when asked to compare them to a group -- it may be easier or more comfortable to attribute below-average moral behavior to a group than to a particular individual you know.

Josh and I hope to sort some of these issues out with a longer questionnaire to be distributed at another meeting -- if we can get permission!

Doubts about (One Kind of) "Purkinje Afterimage"

The eminent 19th century physiologist and vision scientist Johann Purkinje wrote:

Often I have been surprised that blinking the eyes does not disturb sight, assuming that during the blink complete darkness must occur. On closer observation however, I found that the visual field of the open eye, with all its lights and images for a short time remains before the mind, after the eyelids are closed. The more attentively I comprehend a single not very extensive image, the longer I am able to hold it with closed eyes before the mind. This afterimage is precisely to be distinguished from dazzling images [Blendungsbilde; afterimages caused by bright light?]. The afterimage can only be held longer by free activity and disappears as soon as the will diminishes, though it can by the same action be called back again; dazzling images float automatically before the mind, disappearing and appearing again for objective reasons.

[Translations of other related passages are posted in the Underblog here.]

Later psychologists in the introspective tradition (right through Brown's 1965 influential review of the literature on afterimages) often took for granted that such momentary positive images exist, though Purkinje's remarks about the the involvement of the will and the distinction from "Blendungsbilde" were largely neglected.

Close your eyes. Blink a few times. What do you think? Are there "Purkinje afterimages" of this sort?

I think I sometimes experience a positively colored "dazzling image" that quickly fades -- for example, if I look for five seconds at the flourescent light overhead, I seem to experience an afterimage of its bright bars for a fraction of a second after I close my eyes, and before the usual "flight of colors" sets in. Maybe I also have the experience after staring at my computer screen awhile. But I can't find such a momentary image when I'm looking in ordinary conditions at ordinary reflective surfaces -- my bookcase, for example.

I wonder how much Purkinje, in this passage, is driven by a perceived need to explain the lack of interruption in the blink. To the extent that's what's driving him, I'm suspicious -- partly because I think it possible that a blink does momentarily disturb visual experience, and partly because Dennett has convinced me (in his marvellous book Consciousness Explained) that often we don't notice even fairly large gaps and lacunae in our visual experience (temporal gaps, blind spots, impoverished information from the periphery) if there's no particular epistemic need that's going unfulfilled.

There are also temporal issues. Brown describes the "first positive phase" of the afterimage as starting after about 50 milliseconds and continuing for about 50 milliseconds. That's pretty fast! Given the speed of neural processing, our experience in general probably runs some tens of milliseconds behind environmental input (at least unexpected input). So there are issues, at least, about how one draws the line between ordinary visual experience, possibily slightly delayed relative to a brief and unexpected stimulus, and "afterimages", conceived as something distinct from that.

I also worry that once the existence of such images was admitted into the introspective literature, later authors would be reluctant to deny their existence, from fear of being seen as less introspectively expert than those who make such fine judgments about their afterimages: "Well Purkinje saw it, and I see it. If you don't, maybe you're just not well enough attuned to your own experiences, well enough practiced at introspection!"

Philosophers Carnival #41 is...

here!

(Thanks to Westminster Wisdom!)

Still More Data on the Theft of Ethics Books

Last month, I noted that ethics books are more likely to be stolen than non-ethics books in philosophy (looking at a large sample of recent ethics and non-ethics books from leading academic libraries). Missing books as a percentage of those off shelf were 8.7% for ethics, 6.9% for non-ethics, for an odds ratio of 1.25 to 1. However, I noted three concerns about these data that required further analysis. I've now done the further analysis.

Here are the concerns:

(1.) Older books are more likely to be missing, and the ethics books were on average a couple years older than the non-ethics books.

I addressed this concern by eliminating from the sample all books published prior to 1985. This brought the average age of the books to the same year (1992.9 for ethics, 1992.7 for non-ethics). On these reduced data, the ethics books were still more likely to be missing: 7.7% to 5.7%, for an odds ratio of 1.35 to 1 (p = .015).

(2.) Ethics books are more likely to be checked out than non-ethics books in philosophy, and there is a tendency for books that are more checked out to have a higher percentage of the off-shelf books missing -- not just a higher percentage of the holdings missing, but a higher ratio of missing to off-shelf-but-not-missing.

I addressed this concern by further reducing the sample, eliminating all the "popular" ethics and non-ethics books -- those cited at least 5 times in the relevant entries of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (This left only fairly obscure books, presumably known to and borrowed by only professors and advanced students in the field.) This actually seems to have increased the effect: 8.5% to 5.7%, for an odds ratio of 1.48 to 1 (p = .026).

(3.) Finally, some people were concerned that maybe law students were driving the effect. Therefore, finally, I eliminated from analysis all "law" books, defined as those books for which at least 10% of the U.S. holdings were in the four law libraries included in the analysis (UCLA, Harvard, Stanford, and Cornell law). This had little effect: 8.3% to 5.7%, odds ratio 1.46 to 1 (p = .044). Also, the percentage of ethics books missing from the four US law libraries was only 7.0%, versus 8.3% for the US non-law libraries.

So it's not (supposedly vicious) law students. And it's not a bunch of (supposedly conscience-impaired) undergraduates stealing Rawls. The effect is large, and statistically significant, just looking at books likely to be borrowed only by professional ethicists and students with a serious scholarly concern with ethics.

Based on these data, it seems indeed that ethicists do steal more books!

Coming soon: I did a similar analysis of the thefts of "classic" texts in ethics and non-ethics -- e.g., Mill's On Liberty vs. Descartes' Meditations. Any predictions?

Online Journal Psyche Seeks New Editors

The online journal Psyche seeks two new editors in chief (one philosophical, one empirical) to replace Timothy Bayne. A copy of the advertisement is here in the Underblog. If you're an established scholar with an interest in shaping a major journal and a new scholarly medium, please consider applying!

Directional Olfaction?

Philosophers tend to take it for granted that our sense of smell is directional or spatial only in a very attenuated sense: We can infer where a scent is coming from (using background knowledge), or we can piece it together by moving about and noticing if the smell is getting stronger or weaker, but at any particular instant a smell is either here or not here, to some degree of intensity. Scents are not fundamentally and intrinsically experienced as coming from a particular direction. (This view goes back at least to Condillac, in his famous example of the statue endowed only with a sense of smell.)

An interesting article, by Jess Porter and others, in the current issue of Nature Neuroscience challenges this view. Subjects were blindfolded, equipped with noise-blocking earmuffs, and given knee- and elbow-pads and workgloves, then asked to track an olfactory trail that bent across a lawn (produced by a string that had been soaked in diluted odorant). They crawled on hands and knees, noses near the ground. Most could in fact follow the trail. (Woof!)

Each nostril draws smell from slightly different regions of space (a fact Porter and colleagues presented as "contrary to the common notion" but which at least used to be widely known among research psychologists -- as discussed, e.g., in Titchener's [1901-1905] Experimental Psychology). This raises the possibility of directional, "stereo" smelling -- discerning the directionality of a scent by the difference between its strength in the two nostrils.

To support this idea, Porter and her colleagues had subjects perform the task with one nostril closed or wearing a "nasal prism device" intended to mask the stereo effect by creating one "virtual nostril". As predicted, these manipulations significantly impaired performance on the scent-tracking task.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that those last results might be explainable by supposing a general decrease in olfactory sensation, rather than a specific cancelling of the stereo effect, since it's not clear that the researchers tested sufficiently whether having one nostril closed or wearing the "nasal prism" impaired olfactory ability generally.

(Thanks to Paul Hoffman, by the way, for the pointer to the Porter article.)

Harvard's Collection in Klingon

I recently noticed that Harvard lists "Klingon" among the languages in its book collection -- languages you can use to limit your search in its electronic catalog. Unfortunately, limiting my search for "Kritik der Reinen Vernunft" (Critique of Pure Reason) to Klingon yielded no results. Neither did I have any success with "Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft" (Critique of Practical Reason).

Why this distressing lack of attention to Kant among the Klingons?

The University of California, by the way, does not list Klingon among its languages in its online library catalog, Melvyl. I should send a note to the collection development people here at UC Riverside. We can't have Harvard showing us up like this now, can we?

Brief Hiatus

I'll be off skiing with my family at Mammoth Mountain next week -- so definitely no blogging for me Sunday-Wednesday. I might be able to squeeze a little in next Thursday or Friday, or I might not! (I'll try at least to respond to comments.) Then the week after, too, I'll be in and out of town, so I won't be back on my regular schedule until the new year.

My mother (67 years old) is a maniac skier, and used to sometimes race Super G in the 55+ category. When I was a kid, she did a lot of part-time ski patrol in the mountains near L.A., and I'd tag along. By the time I was 17, the only people better than me were professionals. I had a particular affection for cutting new lines through the crud between the trees -- the steeper the better (Alta, with its weird traverses, was great for this). I haven't skied much since then, but if my son (now seven) takes to it, maybe I will!

A Sampled Experience: Beep 1.1

Regular readers may know that Russ Hurlburt and I have a book forthcoming with MIT Press. Russ and I interviewed a woman -- "Melanie" -- about randomly sampled moments of her experience while wearing a beeper. The book centers on lightly edited transcripts of those interviews. The reader can see what Melanie says about her experience, how Russ and I, in our different ways, question her further about it, and -- both in the dialogue and in side boxes -- how Russ and I disagree about how far to believe her and how to connnect what she says with existing literature in philosophy and psychology.

I'm thinking that periodically, I may feature one of the "beeped" experiences on this blog. Today: Beep 1.1. Melanie says that she has an episode of inner speech or inner hearing paced faster than normal speech, but not rushed; and she says she experiences the humorousness of that thought (the one expressed by the inner speech/hearing) as a kind of "rosy-yellow glow" surrounding her. Two of the interesting questions -- interesting to me at least -- that arise from this sample are:

* Does inner speech normally transpire at the same rate as outer speech, or does it often go faster?

* Do normal (non synaesthetic) people often experience color with their emotions -- like "seeing red" when angry? Or should we take attributions of color to emotions more metaphorically?

Let me invite you to read the transcript for yourself. Comments welcome!

A Curious Effect of Vibrating Phones

Sometimes -- not often, actually -- I set my cell phone on vibrate. I keep it in my left front pocket. Now, it seems to me that I feel vibrations at the top of my left leg periodically, even when the phone is not vibrating, even when the phone is not in my pocket at all. I was reminded of this a few days ago when a colleague remarked on a similar experience.

My question is: What's going on here?

Here's one possibility. Primed to feel subtle vibration against that part of my leg, I sometimes misjudge whether there is vibration. Well, maybe! But here are my qualms. On the one hand, if the judgment here is supposed to about the vibration of an external object against my leg, I don't think I'm actually (or at least not usually) making that judgment. Rather, I'm judging that there's a vibrating feeling resembling the feeling when an object vibrates against my leg. But -- and this is the "other hand" -- if the judgment is just about my experience, it seems at least a little strange to say that I'm wrong in that judgment, i.e., wrong that I am experiencing a buzzing feeling of a certain sort -- though maybe!

Here's another possibility: My body is constantly -- or frequently -- abuzz with vibrations, or vibration-feelings, of various sorts, but I rarely notice them. Having the cell phone has attuned me especially to vibrations at the top front of my left leg, so now I notice them there, whereas I didn't before. Quite possibly so! But that's a pretty rich view of experience. It doesn't seem now, as I've been sitting here typing, thinking about buzzing feelings, and even pausing occasionally to reflect on whether anything is buzzing, that my bodily experience is so rich with sensation. On the other hand, it has only been about 20 minutes. If I feel five hundred buzzes a day, and one -- the one I notice -- is in that exact location on my leg (which I'd estimate to be about 1/500 of my body surface), then I should expect a buzz only about... well, doing the math (assuming 16 waking hours), actually about every two minutes! Hm!

Or maybe the buzzing is a new experience, arising somehow from the fact that I have a readiness to feel buzzing in the location, and accurately apprehended as an experience when it occurs. I do now occasionally "buzz" at the top of my leg, as a result of carrying that phone in my pocket, whereas I didn't before. Though this also seems slightly strange, it is perhaps the most appealing possibility -- intellectually appealing I mean! At another level, I'm not sure I like the idea that I've added a buzz to my stream of somatic experience....

When Do You Know You're Speaking to Yourself?

Here's an issue Al Mele and I discussed last week during his visit to UCR: Let's say you're talking silently to yourself and you are aware of the fact that you are doing so. Are the inner speech and the awareness of it strictly simultaneous? Or might there be a delay, on the order of some tens of milliseconds, between the phenomenology of inner speech -- the subjective experience of speaking -- and the knowledge or judgment that you are innerly speaking?

Why do I care about this? Well, the question is diagnostic of more general views about consciousness and self-knowledge. For example, if you think -- as I am inclined to think -- that our phenomenology, or subjective experience, is one thing and our judgments about that phenomenology or experience are quite another -- then you might assume that there must be some sort of causal process, and hence delay, between inner speech and the knowledge of it. On the other hand, if you think that phenomenology or subjective experience essentially involves self-awareness, then you'll probably reject the possibility of any delay between the felt experience and the judgment or knowledge that one is feeling the experience. (I think the latter assumption was implicit in Mele's talk, which is how we got started talking about it.)

More complicated views are possible, too. For example, one might draw a distinction between "dispositional" knowledge (a mere readiness to reach the right judgment about your inner speech, say) and "occurrent" judgment (an actually occuring thought about your inner speech), and say the first is simultaneous with the inner speech, the second slightly delayed. Or one might think that the felt experience of innerly speaking is part of the judgment that one is innerly speaking (a la Shoemaker); and then the exact causal and temporal relationships might be hard to tease out. Or like Dennett, you might resist the idea that there are temporal facts this precise about consciousness.

Another complication is that if the inner speech is intentionally excuted, you have a kind of ongoing knowledge of it as it is occuring as a result of the fact that you know you are (or are about to) put your intention into action. Correspondingly, if I plan to type a word, I know that I am doing it as I am doing it not entirely by virtue of seeing it spelled out on the page. But given my propensity for typos, it's probably true to say that I don't really know that I've typed a word until I actually see it correctly on the page; so the knowledge is delayed, after all. Likewise, perhaps, if we don't always execute the inner speech we plan to -- and that itself is an interesting question: can we, and if so how often do we, err in executing our inner speech intentions? -- the knowledge might not come until after we have, as it were, innerly heard our inner speech. On the other hand, there's something weird -- too many moving parts? -- in the idea that we have to innerly hear (or the like) our inner speech to know that we've said something to ourselves....

Do Ethicists Steal More Books? More Data

I've finished collecting data relevant to the question of whether ethics books are more likely to be missing from libraries than non-ethics books in philosophy. You might think ethics books would vanish at a lower rate, if the people interested in them were influenced by the contents! (See this post for some earlier discussion.)

I was led to gather these data by what I call The Problem of the Ethics Professors -- the fact, or apparent fact, that ethics professors seem to behave no better than the rest of us. This is perhaps one small, imperfect way of assessing the presupposition behind that question. If I'm wrong, and ethicists really do behave better than the rest of us, perhaps this will reveal itself in their library habits?

It doesn't. For this analysis, I constructed a list of ethics books in philosophy and a comparison list of non-ethics books. The ethics list was derived from all the ethics books reviewed in Philosophical Review from 1990-2001 -- mostly technical work in philosophy principally of interest to advanced graduate students and professors -- combined with all the books originally published after 1959 that appear it at least five different bibliographies in the ethics entries in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (including political philosophy, legal philosophy, and history of ethics, but excluding philosophy of action and moral psychology). The comparison list was composed of about 1/3 of the non-ethics books from the same issues of Phil Review (randomly selected, and excluding philosophy of action, moral psychology, and philosophy of religion), combined with books appearing in at least five different SEP entries on philosophy of mind or language (excluding philosophy of action and moral psychology).

I then looked at the holdings of these books at the libraries in UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC Riverside, UC San Diego, UC Santa Cruz, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, Michigan, and Texas, as well as all the COPAC libraries in Britian, which includes all the major university libraries. (I won't get into the principles of library selection.) A paid research assistant helped me with some of this!

I sorted the information into five categories: On shelf; checked out but not overdue; overdue one year or less; "missing" or more than one year overdue (which I will interpret as also missing); uninterpretable (e.g., "record unavailable").

Here are the uninterpreted numbers:
Ethics books:
Total holdings: 14,551
Total out or missing: 3,708
Total overdue or missing: 780
Total missing: 305

Non-ethics books:
Total holdings: 9,584
Total out or missing: 1,764
Total overdue or missing: 176
Total missing: 113

Obviously more ethics books are overdue and missing, but of course more are also held and checked out. The most interesting figures, I think, are these:

Overdue or missing, as a percentage of those off shelf:
Ethics: 21.0%
Non-ethics: 10.0%

Missing, as a percentage of those off shelf:
Ethics: 8.2%
Non-ethics: 6.4%

An ethics book is more than twice as likely to be overdue, given that it is off the shelf, and about 25% more likely to be missing!

The first difference is statistically significant at p < .001, the second at p = .02, using a simple one-proportion test (two-tailed, of course!).

Now obviously there are confounds. I'm trying to work on straightening those out, and I'll hopefully report more on them next week. I'd be interested to hear suggestions for further analyses.

Here are three worries I have:
(1.) Ethics books are more checked out than non-ethics books, and there is a correlation in the data between number checked out and percentage of those off shelf that are missing or overdue.
(2.) Older books are more likely to be missing than more recent books, and the weighted average age of the ethics books (weighted by number of checkouts) is about two years earlier than that of non-ethics books (1989 vs. 1991).
(3.) It might be those pesky law students! How will things look if I exclude philosophy of law texts or exclude results from law schools?

As far as I can tell from preliminary analysis, controlling for (2) or (3) slightly reduces the effect, but a statistically significant difference remains. Controlling for (1) seems to eliminate the second effect, but not the first.

Ethics Books More Popular in Britain

I've been crunching numbers all day in service of my inquiry into whether ethicists steal more books. I was hoping to post results on the blog today, but it looks like it will have to wait 'til Friday. Now I have to dash off to dinner with Al Mele, who just gave a very interesting talk criticizing Libet's work on the timing of decisions and what that has to say about free will.

But here's a tidbit to reflect on in the meantime. In a sample of British academic libraries (those showing checkout information in COPAC -- virtually all the major universities in Britain), major ethics books are about 2.5 times more likely to be checked out than non-ethics books. This applies across the board, from major texts (like Theory of Justice) to texts primarily of interest to a narrow group of specialists. In the United States (looking at the UC's, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, Michigan, and Texas), ethics books are still more likely to be checked out than non-ethics books (about 1.6 times), but that difference pretty much vanishes if one excludes a handful of exceptional texts with interdisciplinary appeal in law and women's studies.

Is this a sign that British academics take ethics more seriously than those in the U.S.?

Chalmers on "Modal Rationalism"

In my undergraduate/graduate seminar this quarter, we read David Chalmers's influential book, The Conscious Mind, and now we’re reading some of the subsequent criticism and discussion of it, and Chalmers’s replies.  A common theme in many replies -- and my sense, too, is that there’s something fishy about reflecting from the armchair about what we can conceive and reaching conclusions on that basis about the fundamental structure of the universe.

Chalmers’s response to this (in Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, 1999, p. 490; see also "Does Conceivability Entail Possibility?") is interesting. He insists -- correctly, I think -- that either you’re doing empirical exploration or you’re engaged in a “rationalist” enterprise centering on ideas such as “consistency, entailment, and ideal conceivability” -- that either you're doing scientific research or you’re exploring our concepts. In particular, he attacks the idea that something might be conceptually possible but still metaphysically impossible: Metaphysics just is about our conceptual space. This is hard for what Chalmers calls “Type B materialists” to swallow: They want to embrace materialism as a “metaphysical” thesis and at the same time allow that it’s conceivable that materialism is false, that it's conceivable (for example) that “zombies” -- beings physically identical to us but with no conscious experience -- exist.

As I said, I’m inclined to agree with Chalmers about this and disagree with the majority of his critics. But I think this only raises even more sharply the fundamental concern that seems to me to be driving them.  If Chalmers’s (and all of our) “metaphysics” is just exploration of our concepts, how can we claim to discover anything about the fundamental structure of the universe thereby -- anything about anything other than our concepts? Metaphysics seems then to become a branch of psychology.

Now, actually, I’m quite happy with that, but I’m not sure Chalmers should be, and it isn’t the tenor of The Conscious Mind as I read it. And if materialism is true, then I’d say it’s not -- or shouldn’t be -- construed as a metaphysical thesis at all, but rather as a scientific thesis, a claim only about the “laws of nature”, and not a claim about Kripkean “a posteriori metaphysical necessity” or the like.

New Book: Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic -- Now Online

here! (forthcoming with MIT Press in 2007)

Russ Hurlburt, a psychologist at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and I got together and jointly interviewed a subject, "Melanie", about randomly sampled moments of her "inner experience" while she was wearing a beeper. Russ has been using this methodology for decades to discover, he thinks, all kinds of interesting facts about people's inner lives. I've published a number of essays skeptical of our capacity accurately to introspect our experience, even under favorable conditions. At the center of the book is a lightly edited transcript of our six days of interviewing Melanie about 18 experiences.

In this book, Russ and I confront each other's views in the context of concrete, unselected reports by a particular person, Melanie. You get to see what Melanie says about her experience, how Russ tries to bring out what's accurate in her reports, and the sources of my doubts and criticisms. In side boxes, we continue our debates and connect what we say to contemporary and historical literature in philosophy and psychology. We've also written separate introductory and concluding chapters, each from our own point of view.

Right now I'm thinking I might present readers of the blog with one "beep" at a time every Friday, assuming people might be interested in that. Although Melanie’s experiences are in certain respects quite ordinary, we think the reader will find at least some of her descriptions surprising, intriguing, and suggestive -- even independently of Russ's and my disputes about how far to believe them.