Does Studying Economics Make You Selfish?

There's been a lot of discussion in economics circles about how economics training makes people more selfish -- in particular, by teaching people "rational choice theory", the cartoon version of which portrays rationality as a matter of always acting in one's perceived (economic) self interest (for example, by defecting in prisoner's dilemma games and offering very little in ultimatum games). Accordingly, the economics literature contains a few much-cited studies that seem to show that economics students behave more selfishly than other students.

However, virtually all the experiments cited in support of this view are flawed in one of two ways. Either they test students on basically the same sorts of games discussed in economics classes, or they rely on self-report of selfishness. Relying on econ-class games makes generalizing the results very problematic. It's no surprise that after a semester of being told by your professor that defecting (basically, ratting on your accomplice to get less prison time) would be the rational thing to do in a prisoner's dilemma game, when that same professor or one of his colleagues gives you a pencil-and-paper version of the prisoner's dilemma, you're more likely to say you'd defect than you would otherwise have been (even with small real stakes). What relationship this has to actually screwing over acquaintances is another question.

Likewise, relying on self-report of selfishness is problematic for all the reasons self-report is usually problematic in the domain of morality, and in this case there's an obvious additional confound: People exposed to rational choice theory might feel less embarrassed to confess their selfish behavior (since it is, after all, rational according to the theory), and so might show up as more selfish on self-report measures even if they actually behave the same as everyone else.

I've found so far only three real-world studies of the relationship between economics training and selfishness, and none suggest that economics training increases selfishness.

(1.) Though I find their study too problematic to rely much on, Yezer et al. (1996) found that envelopes containing money were more likely to be forwarded with the money still in them if they were dropped in economics classes than other classes.

(2.) Frey and Meier (2003) found that economics majors at University of Zurich were less likely than other majors to opt to give to student charities when registering for classes, but that effect held starting with the very first semester (before any exposure to rational choice theory), and the ratio of economics majors to non-economics majors donating remained about the same over time (all groups declined a bit as their education proceeded).

(3.) Studying professional economists, Laband and Beil (1999) found a majority to pay the highest level of dues to the American Economic Association (dues prorated on self-reported income), though they could without detection or punishment have reported lower income and so paid less. Through an analysis of proportion paying dues in each income category vs. proportion in the profession making income in those categories they found similar rates of cheating in self-reported income among sociologists and political scientists.

I see these findings as the flip side of what I've been finding with ethicists: Just as ethical training doesn't seem to increase rates of actual moral behavior much, if at all, so also being bathed in rational choice theory (if, indeed, this is what economics students are mostly taught) doesn't seem to induce real-world selfishness.

Qi (Ch'i) and Moral Psychology

The term qi (or ch'i) is known to Westerners mainly through martial arts and new age mumbo-jumbo, and is taken to mean something like spiritual and physical vitality, or the mystical medium of that vitality. The word goes back to classical Chinese, where it originally meant "air" or "breath" and then by extension the vital energy connected with breath, working its way into early Chinese medicine and theories of the body.

Robin Wang has recently been exploring the connections between qi and moral psychology in early Chinese thought. Among other things, she notes the importance of caring for the body in the tradition -- both the moral obligation to do it but also, perhaps, the asserted connection between moral goodness and physical health. (One index of the importance of that connection in the ancient Chinese tradition is the frequency with which it is mocked by Zhuangzi.)

Confucius (if the passage is authentic) notes the connection between morality and qi thus:

There are three things the gentleman should guard against. In youth when the blood and qi are still unsettled he should guard against the attraction of feminine beauty. In the prime of life when the blood and qi have become unyielding, he should guard against bellicosity. In old age when the blood and qi have declined, he should guard against acquisitiveness" (16.7, Lau trans.).

Thus, disorders of qi are associated with a propensity toward certain moral failings. Mencius even more famously associates a "flood-like qi" with moral rightness (2A2).

There is something attractive in this view. It's uncontroversial that peace of mind is good for your health, and it's very plausible that health is generally good for your peace of mind. It may be hard to muster up the energy or will to do what's right if one is feeling substantially less than vigorous, and certain types of physical shortcomings may lead us more easily to certain sorts of moral temptations.

Yet at the same time, a concept that intimately connects physical health and moral health strikes me as highly noxious. Is the highest degree of moral propriety impossible from a wheelchair, or from one's deathbed, or from someone with chronic fatigue? It seems to me that physical disability often gives as much to us morally as it takes away (e.g., by increasing our sympathy with others or by broadening our perspective).

What the connection is between physical health and moral behavior is an empirical question, of course, but one that would be very difficult to study well. I've heard of no studies. (And any one study, anyway, would have to be highly limited.) In the meantime, I say down with the concept of qi!

P.S.: For those readers interested in Chinese philosophy who haven't noticed it yet, I recommend Manyul Im's Chinese Philosophy Blog.

"Mama" as an Early Expression of Need?

When we first met Kate, our adoptive Chinese daughter, at 13 months old, she was already babbling, saying "mama(-m)" and "baba(-b)". Surprisingly to me, she seemed to use them differentially -- "mamama" when she was upset or needing something, "bababa" in a playful mood. I had noticed the same thing in my son when he was about 10 months old, although for him the second sort of babbling sounded like "dadada". At the time, I figured Davy's differentiated babbling was due to our parental reinforcements and interpretations -- that when he said "mama" we were more likely to hand him to his mom, and when he said "dada" we were more liked to hand him to dad, and the like. What was striking to me was that, as an orphan, Kate had no mom or dad. (It's not even clear that she had ever seen a man before.)

Since at least the 1960s, linguists have known that a wide range (maybe even of majority) of languages of very different origins use something like the "mama" (or "nana") sound for mother and something like the papa/baba/tata/dada sounds (all related phonologically) for father. For example, in Chinese "mama" and "baba" are baby-ese for mother and father, in Hebrew it's "ima" and "abba", and of course there's Spanish, Italian, etc.

The standard first remark about this is that these words are very easy for babies to say. I wonder if in addition to this, "mamama" goes more naturally with need or distress while the other goes more naturally with fun and exploration -- for example if the "m" phoneme is easier to make with the facial expression of distress (it seems to me that m's are easier with a tight, distressed face, p's and d's easier with an open, relaxed face, but maybe that's just me). That would explain in a way other theories would not why even an orphan would show the sort of differentiation Kate does between those two sounds. Given the different roles mothers and fathers typically play, it's then easy to see why one babble would come to be associated with the mother and the other with the dad.

(Probably some linguist has suggested this before, but for obvious reasons I haven't time right now to do serious reference chasing. Even without the reference chasing, though, I feel comfortable doubting whether anyone has thought to study 12-month-old orphans specifically in this connection.)

Tucson Presentation

On the Underblog I've posted the text of the talk I gave this morning for the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference. Given that the title of the talk predicts the possible demise of consciousness studies, I thought it might be wise to check that the back door was unlocked in case I needed to make a quick escape! (Actually, everyone was very nice.)

The talk basically combined my reflections on the richness or thinness of experience from my 2007 article on the topic, "Do You Have Constant Tactile Experience of Your Feet in Your Shoes?" (advocates of a rich view say yes [and that we also constantly auditorially experience the hum of traffic in the background, etc.], while advocates of a thin view say no), with the pessimistic argument in a recent post that the question is unresolvable -- and, worse, that it's likely impossible to establish a general theory of consciousness without first settling the rich-vs-thin question. Grand conclusion: A general theory of consciousness may be beyond human reach.

The one new thing was this: Ned Block and Michael Tye have recently argued that experience outruns attention (and thus that the thin view can't be right) because one visually experiences at least the gist of the parts of a visual display (for example on a psychologist's computer) to which you don't focally attend -- for example in "change blindness" demonstrations. Or to put it another way: Your visual attention right now might be on a few of the words in this sentence, but surely you also visually experience more of what is before you than just those few words, so (they say) this shows that attention is not required for experience.

The problem with that argument, I think, is that it ignores the (quite reasonable) possibility that attention comes in degrees and can spread beyond just a narrow point. In some sense, one is attending to the whole computer display even if the finest, most focused point of attention is just a few words at a time. What remains open -- and what I'm pessimistic about resolving -- is whether you also simultaneously visually experience the picture on the wall behind the computer and the pressure of the chair against your back. (Of course you experience them now, but did you experience them ten minutes ago when you weren't thinking about it? I think neither objective nor subjective methods to address this question can yield a trustworthy answer.)

Anyway, I enjoyed having the chance to pontificate about this for a while for the people at this conference! With the new book and the plenary talk, people are starting to treat me almost like I'm an established philosopher. (Maybe it helps, too, that I'm going a bit gray at the temples.) I think it would be a good thing not to get too used to that.

Experiential Blanks

I'm on the road, at the biennial consciousness conference in Tucson. Yesterday, Russ Hurlburt and I led a workshop on the use of beepers to explore the stream of experience (the topic of our recent book). As part of the workshop, we "beeped" the audience -- a few random beeps sounded through speakers, interrupting our PowerPoint presentation, and each audience member was to reflect as best she could on her "last undisturbed moment of inner experience" just before each beep. For each beep, we selected a random audience member to describe her experience, and we interviewed her about it, we argued with each other about it, and other members of the audience pitched in, too. Great fun, I thought.

I was especially struck by one of the audience member's reports. He said that, as best as he could tell, he had no inner experience whatsoever, no consciousness, no phenomenology, at the moment just before the beep. He did have an experience a few moments before the beep -- one of feeling his nametag pressing against his chin (he was absent-mindedly playing with it) -- but at the moment of the beep itself, nothing. Russ was talking, but he didn't have any auditory experience. If I understand him correctly, he felt he had no sensory experience of any sort, nor any emotional experience, nor any imagery, nor any conscious thoughts, no experience at all.

People do sometimes say this when they are sampled with beepers, Russ has found in his decades of study. I've also heard a couple of reports of this sort among the forty or so people I've interviewed using Russ's beeper methodology -- but in both of my own cases, the subjects had fallen asleep and the beep had woken them.

Now I confess that I incline toward a rich view of experience -- according to which we generally have constant visual experience, constant auditory experience, constant tactile experience of our feet in our shoes (though peripherally and faintly, of course!), and much else going on with us experientially at any one time. I'm not at all sure that this view is right, but to think that we have waking moments with no experience whatsoever...!

This is one of the cool things about beeper interviews: People say things you'd never expect them to say, they describe their experience in ways you (and even they) might have thought impossible, with all sincerity. It jars me from my complacency.

First Draft to Publication, Fifteen Years

I had hoped to be back to regular posting by now, a week and a half after my return from China, but things are still pretty chaotic!

I posted about a year ago on the Two Envelope Paradox, and my paper with Josh Dever on the topic has finally been published (as of Monday, in Sorites).

In 1993, when Josh and I were both graduate students in Berkeley, he introduced me to the paradox, which is very simple to formulate:

You are presented with the choice between two envelopes, Envelope A and Envelope B. You know that one envelope has half as much money as the other, but you don't know which has more. Arbitrarily, you choose Envelope A. Then you think to yourself, should I switch to Envelope B instead? There's a 50-50 chance it has twice as much money and a 50-50 chance it has half as much money. And since double or nothing is a fair bet, double or half should be more than fair! Using the tools of formal decision theory, you might call "X" the amount of money in Envelope A and then calculate the expectation of switching as (.5)*.5(X) + (.5)*2X = 5/4 X. So you switch. (But of course that's absurd.)

For some reason, the problem completely took hold of me. I found myself waking in the middle of the night and writing equations. Josh and I bothered just about every graduate student at Berkeley and about half the faculty with the problem. It seemed to me, to us, that the core problem was in the use of a variable with different expectations in different terms of the expected value equation (in the first term, where Envelope A has more, the expectation of X, the value in Envelope A, is higher than it is in the second term, which represents the possibility that Envelope A has less). Just about everyone we spoke to was eventually won over by our reasoning on this, and I presented a paper on it at a graduate student conference later that year.

For a while, I flirted with the idea of writing my dissertation on decision theory, but when I decided to work on connections between philosophy and developmental psychology instead, it seemed the practical decision to set the essay aside. (Berkeley had at the time, and maybe still has, a culture of discouraging graduate students from attempting to publish essays based on anything other than a virtually completed dissertation.)

A couple years later, one of our professors, Charles Chihara, published a paper on the problem (in which he generously thanks me) with a solution similar to ours but also in some important ways different -- and not, it seemed to me, very mathematically precise. Other approaches to the problem came out through the mid- and late 1990s, when it was briefly trendy, but all of them seemed to me to miss the point.

In 2002, I had a long conversation about the problem with Terry Horgan, who had published a couple of papers on it, and I felt myself almost convincing him that my solution was better than his own. (He might not agree with this description of our conversation!) He advised that I seek publication again, so I teamed up with Josh and wrote a new version of the essay.

In 2003, we submitted to Mind, which had published other essays on the problem, but which we thought was a longshot. The referee report came back saying that our solution, though correct, was too technical -- although we felt our paper less technical (and maybe, too, of broader general interest, though that's harder to judge) than the other papers Mind had published on the topic. We received the same reply -- with even less justification, we think, from Analysis, which has published more essays on the topic than any other journal. We then sent the essay to Theory and Decision, whose referee gave us the first substantive criticism we had received (a helpful simplication of our proof) but who recommended rejecting our solution as "obvious" -- despite the fact that in ten years no other essay on the topic had offered it! We considered Synthese, but Springer is such a noxious and expensive publisher, that we decided to send it to an open-access journal instead. We chose the Australian Journal of Logic, which, when we received no reply to several queries sent through various media over the course of a year, we decided had folded. (Though now I see they have a 2007 issue. Hm!) So we withdrew the paper from there to send it to another open-access online journal, Sorites, which we also started to worry about when we got no replies over the course of six months. Finally, when we were about to withdraw the article, we received an apologetic email from the editor -- now, after fifteen years! -- and five journals, and only one minor substantive criticism, it's finally in print.

Anyone out there with a more convoluted publication story?

Dongguan Orphanage, Guangdong Province, China

It's not philosophy or psychology, but I thought I'd post a few reflections on the orphanage (technically, "Social Welfare Institute") from which we just adopted our 14-month-old daughter, Kate -- partly for general interest and partly because accurate information about Chinese orphanages is hard to come by.

Let me start with a few pictures. From the outside:



Pretty nice looking -- especially compared to the (by American standards) rundown environment of Dongguan and Guangzhou:


Adoptive parents were led to an elegant reception room:


Note the beveled glass tables, elegant walls, leather couches, gleaming hardwood floor. (Those are not things I can afford in my house or office.) I've blocked out the face of our guide for his privacy; the woman standing in the center is the orphanage director.

The orphanage kindly allowed us to see the infants' area, but forbade us to take pictures, so a verbal description will have to do: Two rooms of dingy old rolling steel cribs, each with a baby lying on her back, completely silent. A washroom for dishes, laundry, and babies -- as far as I could tell, all in the same sink. A "playroom" empty but for some blue pads on the floor and single plastic chair.

How eerie it was to step into an utterly silent room containing 25 babies! I can only think that they learned that crying was useless. All the babies were malnourished. Kate is below the 3rd percentile in weight (even on Chinese charts) and head circumference, with calcium deficiency that shows itself (as is evidently typical in Chinese orphans) in splayed ribs at the bottom of the ribcage -- splayed, I'm guessing, because the top part, where the ribs join in the sterum, is stunted and narrow? For malnourished infants, it may be especially adaptive not to waste energy in useless crying.

I kept wondering how much a little more calcium would cost compared to the statue out front (visible in the first picture) and the elegant grounds and couches. Though we liked the nannies who worked there, especially the one who seemed to have had primary responsibility for Kate -- Kate smiled when she saw her -- I couldn't resist the thought that appearance to the outside world was a higher priority to those running the orphanage than the health of the babies. My wife says I'm being uncharitable: Maybe the elegant grounds and waiting rooms are necessary to attract funding from those who can give it. Universities spend big to wine and dine potential donors. Likely, famine relief organizations get more money if they spend some of their proceeds on indulgences for their contributors (not that donors explicitly want that -- presumably if you asked them they'd advocate sending as much as possible directly to the beneficiaries). If so, there's a morally and psychologically interesting paradox of charity.

Well, it seems I can't avoid thinking about philosophy and psychology after all, even when I try!

The Problem of De in the Analects: Hard and Easy (pt. 2) (by Guest Blogger Hagop Sarkissian)

A noble knight is about to leave on a mission to an inhospitable, barbarian place. Some are skeptical that his mission will be successful. After all, he must deal with petty, uncouth individuals. The knight, however, is not troubled; he has a nifty trick. When he is among petty people or barbarians, their behavior instantly changes. They are literally transformed in his presence, bending to him as sure as grass bends to wind.

The above passage can either be about: a) a Confucian nobleman or b) a jedi knight. That, to me is the hard problem of de in the Analects. Consider the following passages which describe the nobleman's de--a kind of power or force that accrues to morally advanced individuals and has telltale effects on others:

9.14 – The master expressed a desire to go and live among the Nine Yi Barbarian tribes. Someone asked him, “How could you bear with their uncouthness?” The Master replied, “If a nobleman were among them, what uncouthness would there be?”

12.19 –The nobleman's de is wind; petty de is grass. When the wind blows, grass bends.

In the Star Wars movies, a jedi knight can--much like the nobleman above--get other, weak-minded sentient beings to bend or yield to him. This feat, dubbed either "force persuasion" or the "jedi mind trick", is accomplished through ritual gesture and verbal incantation--again, similar to the magical effects associated with the performance of rituals (such as wedding rites or ceremonial forms of greeting) in classical Confucianism.

Now, these effects might seem less impressive than those associated with political de (discussed in a previous post)--where the ruler just sits in a ceremonial position and the whole empire is ordered. Then again, the nobleman lacks many of the perks associated with rulership: a) he's not recognized as the Son of Heaven, b) he lacks all the the ceremonial regalia that comes with being the Son of Heaven, c) is considerably lower on the socio-political ladder, and d) has a pedantic day job preserving traditional rites and ceremonies. Given all this, the passages above seem incredible indeed.

How can we understand this 'force' of the nobleman? What kind of person are the 'little people' and 'barbarians' yielding to? Well, de is frequently linked to practices of self-cultivation (xiu 修 – e.g. 7.3, 12.10, 12.21, 16.1). Perhaps the key to understanding the power of de lies in these practices and the kind of nobleman they were meant to produce. Here is what we find:

The ideal nobleman says the right things at the right times. He's concerned about being a good person and works hard at it. He dresses well (clean and sharp, not flashy). He seems genuine, and has a natural ease about him. He's a good son to his father and a good father to his son, takes care of those close to him and helps others when appropriate. He's got a knack for diffusing disagreements (cleverly alluding to classical poetry and folk songs to convey subtle, delicate points). And if you need advice on wedding gifts or funeral attire, he's a godsend.

There are people I've met who've had many of these qualities, and some of them have a knack for getting along with people. So maybe I can understand how a cultivated nobleman, already enjoying a certain standing in the social hierarchy, can have an attractive, disarming charisma about him and command respect in the community. This much might explain, for example, the bending of the petty people in 12.19.

But the transformation of the foreign barbarians? That's really hard to buy. How is it that they magically behave themselves in the presence of a Confucian knight, but are otherwise 'uncouth'? I don't see how this works.

Welcome, Kate!

We're back from China with a new family member, Katherine Jieying ("Kate")! When we've settled in a little better, I'll post a few reflections about her orphanage. In the meantime, a few pictures.

The day we picked her up:


And in a Buddhist temple:



She's a sweet-tempered girl who likes congee (Chinese rice soup with chicken), playing in the bathtub (with or without water), and cruising around the house and yard holding onto fingers or furniture. The photos don't sufficiently capture her heart-melting smile when she's at full beam.

Objectivism, Relativism, and Squatter's Rights in Metaethics (by Guest Blogger Hagop Sarkissian)

Moral objectivism is the view that moral truth (or justification) is independent of tradition, custom, or social acceptance. Put another way, it's the view that there is an objective fact of the matter whether any given action is morally right or wrong, permissible or impermissible. Moral objectivism is often contrasted with moral relativism, the view that moral truths (or justification) is relative to cultures or other such groups.

To me, moral relativism is just obviously true (as I have argued previously in comments on this blog). But many philosophers have argued that moral relativism does not jibe with ordinary moral discourse. Ordinary moral discourse, they claim, assumes moral objectivism. Philospohers making this claim range from moral realists on the one hand, to moral fictionalists (or 'error theorists') on the other.

Consider J.L. Mackie, who argued that ordinary moral claims purport to describe facts about mind-independent, objective moral values. Mackie denies that such values exist. "Although most people in making moral judgments implicitly claim, among other things, to be pointing to something objectively prescriptive, these claims are all false". Mackie thinks this 'error theory' "goes against assumptions ingrained in our thought and built into some of the ways in which language is used"; and "since it conflicts with what is sometimes called common sense, it needs very solid support. It is not something we can accept lightly or casually and then lightly pass on" (35).

Does common sense morality assume objectivity? According to a recent study by Goodwin and Darley, most folk actually don't believe that their moral judgments are objectively true, except for cases involving stock examples such as gunfire, robbery, and cheating. On many other moral issues, most believe their judgments to be opinion and not fact. Goodwin and Darley sum up one of their experiments as follows:

"Participants generally agreed (on a six-point scale) with the goodness of anonymous donations (5.42), the badness of opening gunfire on a crowd (5.79), or of robbing a bank (5.77), and the wrongness of conscious racial discrimination (5.86) or of cheating on a lifeguard exam (5.72). But they varied considerably in how likely they were to regard these statements as true: 36%, 68%, 61%, 54%, and 58%, respectively. Perhaps more strikingly, although participants generally agreed (albeit not as strongly) with the permissibility of abortion (4.12), assisted death (4.36), and stem cell research (4.58) in the way we described them, they were highly reluctant to assign truth to statements expressing this agreement: 2%, 8%, and 2%, respectively."

If these findings are replicated, they suggest that, contrary to what many moral realists and fictionalists claim, people believe that their moral claims are objectively true only in a narrow range of cases that enjoy widespread agreement, the rest of them being no more 'objectively true' than matters such as one's taste in music (4%), film (9%) or art (4%).

This brings me to "squatter's rights". In a recent paper, Eddy Nahmias and colleagues argue that a philosophical theory x has 'squatter's rights' compared to a competing theory y if, all else being equal, theory x accords with our common sense intuitions while theory y doesn't. If objectivism does not turn out to be the common sense view, I find it hard to see how relativism doesn't have squatter's rights in metaethics. It's consistent with common sense morality, does as good a job as any other theory in explaining moral agreement and disagreement, and seems best able to account for the variety of moral traditions existing in the world.

The Problem of De in the Analects: Hard and Easy (pt. 1) (by Guest Blogger Hagop Sarkissian

There is a concept in the Analects of Confucius that is of patent importance to his teachings but remains obscure. This is the concept of de 德, which refers to the ability of a person to command awe and attention, to have others comply with his wishes without resorting to coercion.

Some passages describing de are frankly startling, and coming to some plausible explanation of them has proven problematic. But I think it may be helpful to distinguish between 'the hard problem of de' and 'the easy problem of de' (obviously following from Chalmers's example concerning consciousness). The easy problem of de is ruler or political de. The hard problem is the nobleman's de. Today, I want to deal with the former, leaving the latter for a subsequent post.

Consider, for example, the following passages describing ruler de:

2.1--The master said, "One who rules by de is comparable to the Pole Star, which remains in its place and receives the homage of the myriad lesser stars."

2.3--The master said, "Guide them with governance, regulate them with punishments, and the people will evade these with no sense of shame. Guide them with de, regulate them through ceremonial propriety, and the people will have a sense of shame and be orderly."

8.18--The master said, "Majestic! Shun and Yu possessed the entire world without managing it."

15.5--The master said, "Someone who ruled without acting (wu-wei 無為)--was this not Shun? What did he do? He made himself reverent and took his proper position facing south, that is all."

These and related passages (e.g. 13.6) describe the de of a ruler (or sage king). On the one hand, they seem pretty impressive, maybe even quixotic or fantastical. (Could Shun really rule by simply sitting on his throne and facing south?) Indeed, some have thought these passages rife with belief in magical powers. Donald Munro called this the 'mana thesis'. On this view, the king must possess some inner / spiritual / psychic power or energy that emanates outward and magically transforms, orders and harmonizes the kingdom. Such an interpretation is understandable because it does seem hard to explain what's going on in these passages. But in the end, I think the problem of 'ruler de' is actually the easy problem.

The reason is simple. Very early on, there were commentators who explicated the ability to rule 'effortlessly' through de as resulting from much prior effort, such as the ruler's a) effectively discharging his roles of setting policy and appointing capable officials, and b) benefitting his subjects (thereby gaining their loyalty, love, and reciprocity).

One of the ruler's most important functions (emphasized by Confucians, Mohists and Legalists alike) was to attract capable individuals to fill administrative and bureaucratic positions to properly manage the kingdom's affairs. The ruler's personal virtue would be a key factor in attracting such individuals and commanding their loyalty. The operations of this larger bureaucracy explain how the ruler could rule 'effortlessly'--by just sitting on the throne (as it were). (Even the incorruptible, wholly sagacious Shun needed the help of ministers to rule--8.20.) Moreover, with the help of capable bureaucrats and officials, the ruler would be able to meet the needs of his subjects, thereby gaining their loyalty as well.

So there's no real mystery here. An efficient bureaucracy, a loyal and loving population, and a broader political philosophy emphasizing deference and loyalty to those above in the hierarchical chain, all seems to explain ruler de rather easily. Indeed, any account of ruler de seems incomplete without these considerations. Am I missing something?

Situationism and the Self-Centeredness of Virtue Ethics (by Guest Blogger Hagop Sarkissian)

As noted in previous posts on this blog, many philosophers of late have been concerned with the implications of situationist social psychology for moral philosophy. Situationism is... well, I'll just use Eric's description from a previous post:

"Recent social psychology has shown that the factors governing human behavior are largely situational rather than characterological. If Robin behaves generously and Sanjay behaves greedily in some particular case, that's more likely to be due to differences in their situation than to differences in their personality."

Think of the Milgram Experiments, the Asch conformity studies, the Princeton Seminary study, etc.

Most philosophers have been concerned whether situationism discredits virtue ethics, a recently popular ethical theory which underscores the importance of character traits to structure guide one's conduct and lead to a flourishing moral life. Situationism, by contrast, claims that character traits are rather inefficacious when compared to the influence of external, situational variables.

I don't really have a horse in this race--i.e. whether Aristotelian virtue ethics rests on an untenable psychology, or whether character traits of a robust sort really *exist* or not. To me, the situationist literature is of concern beyond its implications for such philosophical theories. It seems genuinely troubling that one's own behavior could be shaped so decisively by situational factors, that whether one is virtuous or vicious can hinge on minor perturbations in one's environment.

So, what to do in the face of situationism? Here, we have some practical advice. Many philosophers have endorsed what I call a seek/avoid strategy. These philosophers recognize that situational influence is pervasive and weighty. However, they argue that it remains possible, when one is not caught up in novel or unusual situations, to selectively choose the general types of situations one wants to encounter and structure one's life accordingly. Individuals should seek situations that strengthen or support virtuous behavior, and avoid situations that tend toward vice or moral failure. In choosing situations, one chooses to embrace the behavioral tendencies they elicit.

That seems like sage advice to me. But I find it extremely one-sided. Here's what I mean. The seek/avoid strategy is animated by the thought that our behavior is tightly keyed to our situations--oftentimes, to the behavior of others in our situations. It therefore emphasizes one path of influence: from situations to persons. But if other people in our situations can subtly affect our own behavior, then it seems as though we must return the favor. In other words, from our own (actor's) perspective, situational influence can be responsible for our own behavior, but from another (observer's) perspective, our own behavior constitutes part of the situational influence. So, just as we should mind how others are partly responsible for our own behavior (as those motivating the seek/avoid strategy claim), shouldn't we, too, be mindful of how we are partly responsible for the behavior of others?

To me, the real lesson of situationism lies in how it shows, in striking fashion, that no person is an island--that all our behavior is heavily interconnected, and that what I do really affects what you do, and vice-versa.

You know, I've heard it said that virtue ethics--insofar as it aims for flourishing, eudemonia, or individual happiness--is a selfish or self-centered ethical theory, concerned primarily with one's own person and one's own life prospects. I can't help but think that such a self-centered attitude is pervasive in the existing responses to situationism.

In China

We'll be meeting our new adoptive daughter in about seven hours. But of course I wanted to check my blog first! I can't seem to defeat the Chinese blocks, but since Blogger is open, I can still add posts (as you see). Free speech, censored hearing.

Is It Just Very Different in Iran?

When I was a graduate student at Berkeley, an undergraduate born in Iran told me that the reason he wanted to someday earn a Ph.D. in philosophy was this: Professors are the most respected people in society, and philosophy professors are the most respected of all professors. (A Google search of his name now doesn't seem to return any philosophers.)

Just some food for thought as I prepare to board a big bird to China....

Judging Others: When It's Bad, It's Worse Than You Think (by Guest Blogger Hagop Sarkissian)

When we meet others we form impressions of them, and they tend to stick. This automatic tendency motivates numerous social practices, such as grooming before a date or rehearsing before a presentation. It can be unfair, of course, to evaluate persons based on their behavior on any one particular occasion, as the behavior may not be representative. Nonetheless, first impressions are easy to form and difficult to overcome.

What's more, there is a well documented asymmetry between the impact of bad first impressions versus good ones. Consider the following: We are quicker to both form and recall bad impressions, and are also more likely to do so. We also tend to be more confident about bad impressions, take less time to arrive at them, and require less information to be convinced of them -- that is, relative to good impressions. Finally, once a bad impression is formed, we seal it away from revision or interference.

'So what?' you might think. Even granting such broad tendencies, it remains an open question whether or not any particular impression is accurate. Moreover, you might think yourself a 'good judge of character', that your initial impressions are routinely confirmed by subsequent data: the initially cold and distant colleague turns out to be just as cold and distant in the end, and those we warm up to tend not to disappoint.

Well, there's room for doubt here. At least two psychological phenomena that might play a role in producing false evidence for our impressions. The first, commonly known as the confirmation bias, is our general tendency to seek or interpret evidence in ways that confirm our previously held hypotheses. Bad first impressions render us more susceptible to noticing future behavior that is bad; behavior that is good is, by contrast, overlooked or discounted. The second is often called behavioral confirmation or self-fulfilling prophecies, and occurs when we treat others in ways reflective of our preexisting beliefs about them, thereby causing them to act in ways that conform to our preexisting beliefs. For example, we might think someone rude, and then treat her accordingly. She picks up on this, feels resentful, and reciprocates in kind, thus confirming our initial hypothesis. What's more, we are often ignorant of our own causal role in this process. In other words, owing to these biases, our initial impressions might be inapt in spite of the fact that they turn out be true!

All this brings me to the virtue of civility. In most philosophical discussions of civility, it is described as the practice of concealing one's negative appraisals so as not to hurt others' feelings, to show outward respect in spite of the fact that others are disagreeable. Here's a nice quote from Cheshire Calhoun:

In social life, there are unending opportunities to find other people boring, disagreeable, repulsive, stupid, sleazy, inept, bigoted, lousy at selecting gifts, bad cooks, infuriatingly slow drivers, disappointing dates, bad philosophers, and so on. The civil person typically conceals these unflattering appraisals, since conveying them may easily suggest that one does not take others' feelings or the fact that they may have different standards to be worth taking into consideration or tolerating. (260)

I agree that there are unending opportunities to make such judgments. I just wonder whether being civil about them goes far enough, and whether we shouldn't instead foster a habit of calling such judgments into question. It seems as though we have good reason to, given the biases above, but then again there may be bad consequences for not being vigilant in our judgments of others.

Traveling to China

Next Friday, my family and I will fly to China for a couple weeks. If everything goes as planned, we'll come back with an adoptive daughter! We've been on the waiting list to adopt since 2005, and the waiting times have grown longer and longer. Originally we thought we'd travel in summer 2006. We've been waiting on tenterhooks ever since, and yesterday we finally got definitive permission to travel.

So we have a week to get ready for a two-week trip to China and for a new baby in the family. With that, and the term still in full swing, I'm afraid the blog will have to languish a bit. I hope to be able to post a couple things from China, but I'm not sure I'll have the opportunity: Last summer a reader told me The Splintered Mind is blocked there.

Is Philosophical Moral Reflection Behaviorally Inert?

Regular readers of this blog will know that I'm interested in the moral behavior of ethics professors -- and why, in particular, it doesn't appear to be any better than that of non-ethicists of similar social background. One possibility is that philosophical moral reflection is behaviorally inert. In conversation, I've found that philosophers are often quick to endorse that idea.

Maybe I haven't done a very good job of articulating what I find unattractive in that view. Let me phrase my concern as a dilemma: Is philosophical reflection about ethics different in this respect from everyday moral deliberation about what to do?

If no, then the view being espoused is dark indeed: Moral deliberation, in general, is behaviorally inert. When we think morally about what we are obliged to do, the resulting judgments must either simply justify what we were going to do anyway, or if they don't match our prior inclinations they must be cast aside as we go ahead and act contrary to them. Of course such things sometimes happen -- maybe even the majority of the time -- but to think that such a result is inevitable undermines the very basis of reflection. We think we reflect morally so that we can figure out what's right and do it (or at least seriously consider doing it); but in fact that project is just a sham. If our aim is to do what's right, there's no point in reflecting about things, no point in trying to figure out what's right. Many of us build our lives as teachers around the falsity of that view.

If yes -- that is, if the philosopher who wants to deny the efficacy of philosophical moral reflection thinks the problem is with philosophical moral reflection specifically, not everyday moral reflection -- then some doubtful claims about philosophical ethics follow. While some parts of philosophical ethics are indeed far removed from everyday decision-making (e.g., abstruse metaethical discussions, puzzle cases about runaway trolleys), other parts are much more closely connected to everyday decision-making. Ethicists debate how much we should feel obliged to give to famine relief or other charities, whether we should eat meat, under what conditions it is permissible to lie, the nature and importance of courage. Even those ethicists who don't publish articles on such topics typically discuss them in undergraduate courses. It would be strange if everyday moral reflection about vegetarianism or charitable donation was causally efficacious but philosophical moral reflection about those same matters was not. It's hard, even, to see what the difference between the two is, other than that the latter may be more formal and detailed.

Maybe some of you can help me out: What's so attractive in the view that philosophical moral reflection is behaviorally inert? Why are so many philosophers seemingly attracted to this view, when confronted with my questions about the morality of ethicists?

Selfless?

Friday and Saturday, the UCR Philosophy Department hosted its annual conference. Eminent scholars traveled from afar to address the conference theme: the self.

Various accounts of "the self" were bruited and attacked; fine discriminations were made; historical texts were deferentially cited. Is the self where consciousness comes together? Is it our subjective location in space and time? Is it created by our personal narratives? Or could it be, as Kierkegaard says:

The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to its own self.

Through it all, I felt unmoored. What is a self really? I'm not sure how we are to go about answering such a question.

I believe it's a great mistake to plunge into metaphysics with intuitions about what it sounds right or wrong to say as one's only guide. First, one needs a sense of why we care. What is the purpose of the account? Do we want to know who to punish after a crime? Do we want to know why we should save for retirement? Do we want to know how an animal knows not to eat its own limbs?

With no practical or empirical grounding, it's all just puffs of fog.

Squaring the Circle, in Malcolm's Dreams

Few works of philosophy are more perverse than Norman Malcolm's (1959) Dreaming, in which he argues that dreams do not occur when one is asleep and contain no feelings, imagery, sensations, or the like. Malcolm's view, rather, is this: When we wake, we're inclined to confabulate stories of a certain sort. Telling such a story is what we call "relating a dream", but there is no sense in which the dream exists independently of or prior to the story we tell about it, and no sense in which such a story can be evaluated as an accurate or inaccurate description of occurrences during sleep.

Malcolm knew about the then-recent REM research that most people think creates serious problems for his view. He cites and dismisses, on what seem to me flimsy grounds, Dement's research suggesting that reported dream duration on waking matches duration of REM sleep and his very suggestive finding that horizontal movements of the eyes during REM sleep correlate with dream reports of horizontally-salient events (such as a tennis match) and vertical movements of the eyes correlate with reports of vertically-salient events (such as climbing a series of ladders, looking up and down them).

So I don't recommend trusting Malcolm on dreams. But here is an interesting remark of his:

In a dream I can do the impossible in every sense of the word. I can climb Everest without oxygen and I can square the circle (p. 57).

So here's my question: What does it mean to say one can "square the circle" in dreams?

Surely Malcolm doesn't mean that the dreamer can actually coherently conceive of a square circle. That, I take it, is straightforwardly impossible. Somewhat differently, can one violate the laws of math and logic in fiction? Can I coherently tell a story in which 2 + 2 equals 5 (like I can coherently tell a story in which pigs fly)? I'm not particularly well read in the metaphysics of fiction, but my impression is that few philosophers of fiction would grant that -- though if we do grant it, we might be able to use it (with some additional assumptions) to give sense to the idea of squaring a circle in a dream.

More likely, Malcolm is expressing the idea that we can reach incredibly stupid judgments in our dreams, even baldly contradictory judgments. I have also long thought this (see section v. of this essay).

If we accept this view, it gives more juice to the dream skeptic than she is usually accorded. For if this right now might be a dream, then mightn't also my thinking be so baldly contradictory that I can't even trust my simplest-seeming judgments? The dream possibility calls, then, not only sense experience but also reasoning into doubt. If we allow ourselves the assumption that a faculty frequently unreliable is not to be trusted, there would be no hope that I can rely on my reason to establish the hypothesis that I actually am awake, or indeed anything else.

More on Admissions

[This post has been removed due to objections by some members of the UCR philosophy department.]

Admissions (and Sleep)

I'm working hard today on graduate admissions and preparing for seminar. No time for my usual Friday post! But maybe I can take this occasion to remind prospective graduate students about my advice for what to do once you hear back.

(And by the way, I've been wondering if sleeping more makes you a better philosopher. I used to think, in grad school, that getting lots of sleep gave me a fresh, creative energy -- but now I'm not so sure it didn't just make me more contented and sanguine instead.)

Now if you don't think the parenthetical paragraph is related to the first paragraph, you've never had a stack of 100 graduate applications, each containing a 20-page essay, to evaluate.

When Will Ethicists Behave Better and When Worse?

Suppose we accept that philosophical moral reflection is bivalent -- that sometimes it leads us toward morality and sometimes away from it. It would be nice to have a theory about when it will do one and when the other.

Here's a first thought. Suppose philosophical moral reflection simply introduces an element of randomness into one's ethical principles. Suppose that to a first approximation it's just a random walk away from pre-reflective standards. When conventional, thoughtless, ordinary behavior is morally good (returning one's library books, not pursuing elaborate schemes to evade taxes, waiting one's turn in line), whatever introduces randomness into that behavior is likely to lead away from the good; and thus we might predict that people who do a lot of philosophical moral reflection, such as ethics professors, will actually behave worse in such matters.

In other cases, ordinary, conventional, thoughtless behavior might have serious moral shortcomings, such as in the vast overuse of resources by Americans, not donating much to charity, regularly eating meat. In these cases, deviation from the norm might be more likely to be deviation toward the good than away from it. So in these cases, we might predict that people prone to philosophical moral reflection will on average behave better than others.

Risky predictions from a simple theory! -- a theory too simple to be true, I'm sure. Can we test it? I've already done the books study and it fits. I've looked a little at charity, but my data are pretty limited and ambiguous. What else can we test? Hm, ethicists cutting in line -- that might be do-able....

The Bivalence of Moral Reflection

As I continue to reflect on the moral behavior of ethics professors and others prone to moral reflection, I find myself increasingly attracted to the idea that moral reflection is bivalent. Ethicists behave no better than others, on average, not because they don't engage in real moral reflection, and not because moral reflection is inert, but rather because moral reflection has the power both to lead one toward and to lead one away from moral behavior.

I have long thought this about religion. Religion is not a behaviorally inert superstructure we weave over what we would do anyway, but rather a powerful cause of behavior -- both good behavior (such as charity) and immoral behavior (such as religious wars, close-mindedness, denigration of others). In the end, the good and the bad seem to me roughly to balance out across people (as the empirical evidence also suggests), though for any particular individual religion may work mainly toward good or evil. (I doubt many people have good self-knowledge about which way it works for them, though!)

Moral reflection (in either a religious or a secular framework) can work toward good by increasing one's attunement to the moral dimensions of one's actions; by undermining cheap rationalizations; by helping one see better what morality (or at least one's own value system) requires; and (as Nussbaum and Hume and Mencius have stressed) through imaginatively extending one's sympathy and understanding. However, moral reflection is also a tool of rationalization -- and the more skilled one is at moral argumentation, the more readily one can find rationalizations for what one wants to do.

Suppose you unintentionally walk out of a library with a book, forgetting to check it out. You're not caught. Months later, you vaguely consider whether you should return the book, or whether you should just keep hanging on to it. Any philosopher worth her salt could construct a bevy of rationalizations. Conventional thinking seems to demand returning the book. (In fact, I've found that ethics books are more likely to be missing from academic libraries than other books.) Conventionally, one should not engage in sexual relationships with one's students, or outside one's marriage. A danger of independent moral thinking is that it invites self-serving rationalizations for setting aside convention in one's own case. (I'm reading a biography of Einstein, who complacently justifies his extramarital affairs, painful to his wives, with a theory of the natural non-monogamy of men.) Of course, not reflecting morally has its moral dangers, too! Whether reflection or its absence is more apt to lead us astray is an unsettled empirical question. My sense, both from personal experience and from empirical research, is that it's roughly a tie.

Suppose we grant all this. The question then becomes: Under what conditions, or with what supports, does moral reflection promote rather than impede moral behavior?

On "Steep" Learning Curves (Or: Hackling at Tilted Petards)

Okay, time to tilt against the windmills -- actually just one small, stupid windmill. But it's a windmill that particularly raises my hackles because it brings together my distaste for ignorant distortions of stock phrases with my interest in the history of psychology.

(You can bet that I double-checked the OED, after saying this, to confirm my use of "tilting" at windmills and raising "hackles". I don't want to be hoisted by my own petard. [Yep, double-checked that too.] Shouldn't we know what we are saying? -- what tilting and hackles and petards are?)

Here's a picture of a typical learning curve (from Stroop 1935):

(This curve charts the increasing speed with which subjects can name the colors of words on a list of color words printed in colors different from those named by the word [e.g., saying "blue" when seeing the word "red" printed in blue ink]. But the particular nature of the task is irrelevant to my point.)

Now consider this: If the curve were steeper, would that mean subjects were learning more quickly -- i.e., that the task was easier to learn -- or would it mean that the subjects were learning less quickly and the task was harder?

Next time you hear someone talk about a "steep learning curve" to mean the opposite of its proper meaning, tell her you're going to hackle her tilted petard!

Does the Sun Look One Foot Wide?

Aristotle says that the sun looks one foot wide (De Anima 428b, On Dreams 458b). Writers in later antiquity repeat this claim without challenging it (e.g. Cleomedes II.1), though they are troubled to explain how it can look one foot wide given how far away it must be -- hundreds of meters at least! Their assumption seems to be that there is some illusion or trick of optics at work.

Does the sun look one foot wide?

Do stars look tiny? Do people look no bigger than ants when you stare down at them from twenty stories up?

People say these sorts of things, but how literally should we take them? Maybe the people below look normal-sized, but only very far away -- far away enough that there's something unusual about how they look that tempts us to say they look tiny, though really that's not quite the right way to describe how they look.

Or consider skyscrapers in the distance: Do they look small, or do they look huge? I find myself doubtful of both those ways of putting it. Alva Noe might say they look huge in looking small (but not tiny?) given how far away they look. But I'm not sure I understand that. One problem: Don't they look small because they look like they're less far away than they actually are? (In which case, they don't look so far away at all and consequently they don't look huge in virtue of looking very far away.)

If we say simply that the skyscrapers look like large things far away, then I wonder two things: (a.) Why are we tempted to say they look small? (This temptation manifests itself cross-culturally, e.g., in the ancient Chinese philosopher Xunzi); and (b.) What do we do about outright illusions?

Look at Poggendorff's illusion:

You know the line is straight, but it still looks crooked. Right? Likewise, could it be that although I know the skyscrapers are large they still look small? Surely it's too purist to say things never look other than how you know them to be.

There are outright illusions with distance -- things looking smaller, in an illusory way, than they actually are. (This is part of why we often badly misjudge the speed of large, far away things.) Such illusions should have a different effect on the visual experience of size than does the non-illusory visual experience of "smallness" with great distance, if the advocate of the view that skyscrapers look like large things far away is right. But I'm I can't seem to find in myself the required difference in visual experience.

Should I then simply get on board with saying that distant objects look small? Among other things, I worry that the geometry of that view will lead us ultimately to say that things far away look simply flat (or concave) -- with the unpleasant consequence that a far-away road receding to the horizon looks like it goes straight up. That couldn't be right, could it?

(And don't get me started on painters.)

The Phenomenology of a Memory Whiz

UC Riverside philosophy grad student Alan Moore pointed out these YouTube videos to me, of a fellow (Daniel Tammet) who recites pi from memory to more than 20,000 places without error. The videos also show him doing multiplication in his head into the hundreds of millions.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five

Oddly, the eminent neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, whom Tammet travels to San Diego to visit, does fairly little with him. (His student gets more air time.) Ramachandran could just have been too busy, but I'd have thought he'd have more to say. Hmmm....

The videos are fun and suggestive, but I'm also struck at how creduluous the researchers (Ramachandran less than others, maybe) seem to be about Tammet's phenomenological reports of how he does such incredible calculations -- by fitting together imaginary shapes in his head. Is it even topologically possible to model multiplication in this way? That's not obvious. And the direction of causation is open to question -- do the images lead to the answers or do the answers lead to images?

All that said, this is the kind of radically different capacity that gives some credibility to claims of radically different phenomenology, unlike most of the time when people claim radically different phenomenology (no imagery vs. tons of it, for example) with no behavioral differences to show for it....

H.H. Price on the Apparent Size of Very Nearby Objects

Today I was struck anew by a passage in H.H. Price's classic book Perception (1932). After endorsing the idea that outside the "zone of perfect stereoscopic vision" (about six inches to a few feet, in his estimation), things look smaller the farther away they are (maybe I'll discuss that issue next week!), Price goes on to say:

And if we come inside the zone of perfect stereoscopic vision [i.e., closer than about six inches] (a region too little explored by philosophers) we find that there is indeed a correlation between depth and sensible size, but it is the other way about; the smaller the depth, the smaller the size. Thus if I bring a match-box up to the end of my nose, the top surface is manifested by a trapeziform expanse having its longer side at a greater depth than its shorter one: the box has rather the appearance of a wedge, whose 'thin end' is directed towards me.

A surprising claim, and not one I recall reading elsewhere! I'd be interested to hear if the readers of this blog share Price's sense of this.

Suppose we call "visual arc subtended" the amount of the visual field some object occupies, defined geometrically by how much surface area the object would occupy if projected onto a sphere centered at the eye. As an object approaches the bridge of my nose, the visual arc subtended increases dramatically as it moves from about twelve to six inches; but in the last two inches or so, there's not much increase.

I don't think that can be Price's point, though: First, there's a simple geometrical explanation for the fact about visual arc. Within the last two inches, bringing the object closer to my nose does not actually bring it much closer to either eye. If I instead bring the object close to the pupil of my dominant eye, there is no slowdown in the increase in visual arc subtended. And second, Price emphatically does not think that apparent size changes when objects move around within the zone of perfect stereoscopic vision -- such as from twelve to six inches -- though the visual arc subtended obviously does increase. So what Price is after here is not, I think, a matter of visual arc.

Is there some other sense, then, in which the nearer end of the matchbox almost touching my nose looks smaller than the farther end? I can almost feel the pull of that....

The Richness of Experience and the Collapse of Consciousness Studies

Many people have looked foolish by claiming a scientific question insoluble that was not so. Yet I wonder if the following question will prove ultimately intractible: Is conscious experience rich or thin?

To say that consciousness is rich is to say that our phenomenology or stream of experience contains many things at once, in different modalities -- that as I sit here typing for example, I consciously experience not just what I'm attending to most focally, but also much else in a peripheral way: the sound of traffic in the background and of click of the keys on the keyboard, the feeling of my fingers typing and of my feet in my shoes and of my back against the seat, a whole broad visual field fuzzy outside the focal region, and possibly also feelings, images, inner speech, and the like. To say that consciousness is thin is to say that most of what we don't attend to we don't experience. The feeling of my feet in my shoes and the sound of traffic in the backgroud are not actually experienced by me, not even in a peripheral way, when I'm not thinking about such matters.

Philosophers' and ordinary folks' intuitions on this question appear to be divided; and I also got mixed results when I gave people random beepers set at long intervals and asked them to go about their ordinary day, noticing when the beep went off whether they had (for example) tactile experience in their left foot in the last undisturbed moment before the beep.

The refrigerator light illusion frustrates any attempt to address this question through concurrent introspection: Thinking about whether you have conscious experience of your feet in your shoes will normally create that experience whether it was there before the question occurred to you or not.

So it seems that the question must be studied retrospectively (as I attempted with the help of the beeper). But any retrospective study will raise the issue of memory error. Change blindness studies, for example, suggest that we retain very little memory of what we're not attending to, even over the tiniest intervals. Experience could be massively rich but all that detail might be instantly forgotten. (Why, after all, would we retain it?) Some people may still recall a general impression of richness; but evidently others do not. Who's to say which of them is right? Furthermore, someone might mistakenly report sensory details as experienced that were not experienced, but only called to mind as a result of the beep, details brought into awareness as a result of the person's focus a moment later, though not experienced at the targeted time -- a kind of retrospective refrigerator light error. I worry that such introspective difficulties are intractable.

So could we do without introspective report? Could we just look at the brain, for example? No, not that either. We have no good theory right now of what makes a brain state conscious; and we never will have a good theory until we know, broadly speaking, which brain states are the conscious ones; and we will never know, not even broadly speaking, which brain states are the conscious ones until we figure out whether that hum of traffic processed ever so lightly in the auditory cortex is consciously experienced.

So is the question simply intractible? If so, that could lead to the collapse of consciousness studies. The question is so central and important to our understanding of consciousness that it's not clear how much progress we can make on any general account of consciousness without resolving it.

"Toys R Us". Are They Us?

Four-year-olds can communicate somewhat complex ideas, but their minds are still alien; their language hasn't quite settled down into adult patterns; and they're flying by the seat of their pants socially. I'd love to see a site devoted simply to the interesting things they say!

Those interesting things are so easy to forget. Our memories tend to reshape and adultify in retelling; we can't hang on to the weirdness. I wish Pauline and I had done a better job capturing Davy's interesting remarks as a four-year-old; but we do have a few (what we think of as) gems. I hope readers will contribute their own in the comments if they have any!

In a restaurant: "It smells like a rainbow of things to eat" (4 yrs, 0 months).

"Mommy, you're evil, so I taked away your shoe" (4 yrs, 0 months).

Davy's great grandmother died. We took him to see the body. He wanted to touch it to see "if she's still squishy but doesn't move" (4-0).

"I wasn't being bossy. I was being right" (4-1).

At bathtime: "I hate to hide from you, but it's just a special occasion" (4-1).

"Is it today or tonight?" (4-2).

Of a new toy truck: "It springed my heart with love, I like it so much" (4-2).

Arguing about who has the better mommy:
Mary Travis: My mommy can help anyone!
Davy: My mommy can help anyone!
Mary Travis: My mommy can talk to anyone!
Davy: My mommy can talk to anyone!
Evidently this is what mommies do: help and talk (4-4).

Daddy: Are you fine?
Davy: I'm so fine I could burst a porcupine! (4-4)

Davy: Jesus didn't have a crib.
Daddy: What? Oh, right. "No crib for a bed."
Davy: I don't have a crib.
Daddy: So you're Jesus.
Davy: Yes. No! (4-4)

"Maybe they call it 'Christmas' because you MISS it and... and... and it's Chris" (4-5).

"My race car is fun-fastic!" (4-5).

To Mommy: "I said 'Wonka Nerds' because my brain took a peek at it before I did. My brain is very smart because it looks at things before I do and it discovers things before I do and that's why I'm smarter than you" (4-6).

Davy punches Mommy.
Mommy: Don't do that. That hurt!
Davy: Did it sting?
Mommy: I'm not saying.
Davy: Did it sting?
Mommy: I'm not telling you so you can enjoy it.
Davy: I enjoy punching people.
Mommy: Well I hope no one punches you and enjoys it.
Davy: I like to be punched. I didn't like it when I was a baby but I absent-mindedly got used to it (4-6).

Davy sneezes. Mommy usually says "bless you", but she's on the phone and ignores it. Davy says, "bless myself" (4-7).

Davy: I don't need a diaper. I just insulated myself for sleep.
Mommy: Insulated yourself?
Davy pulls up his shirt to reveal wads of toilet paper stuffed into his pants (4-7).

"All my ideas live here [points to tummy]. Then they come up to my brain and I think them" (4-8).

Davy: Maybe this is a dream.
Daddy: This, right now?
Davy: Well, maybe. If this hurts. [He pulls on Daddy's earlobes.] (4-11)

Davy: Mom, what's smaller than the smallest thing in the whole world?
Mommy: What? No, there can't be anything smaller than the smallest thing in the whole world.
Davy: No, I don't know what it is, but it's the smallest thing in the whole galaxy! (4-11)

Well, I can't quite resist going a bit into the fives:

"You know why I win [marbles] all the time? Because my blood cells have little actions spirits ready to win" (5-0).

Daddy: Nothing goes faster than light.
Davy: No, something does.
Daddy: What?
Davy: Something that doesn't exist (5-0).

Daddy: If I spin a 3 [in Chutes and Ladders] I win!
Davy: You're not going to spin a 3!
Daddy: How do you know? Precognition? Psychic powers?
Davy: Extra strong brain! (5-0)

"You can't grab afterimages. When you grab them you just get air. Nothing made me think of that. It just popped into my brain" (5-0).

Seeing our brand-new minivan for the first time: "Hubcaps shiny as the sun! Tires as sticky as a sticky-frog!" (5-2).

Looking at the toy store sign: "'Toys R Us'. Are they us?" (5-2).

Consciousness While Reading -- Is It Visual? Imagistic? Auditory?

Some people say they speak silently to themselves when they read; others say they don't do that, but do entertain visual imagery. Others claim to do neither but rather only to see the page and take it in. Melanie, whom Russ Hurlburt and I interviewed at length in our recent book about conscious experience, reports no visual experience of the written page at all; rather, she experiences only the images, thoughts, and emotions that the text creates in her. (No visual experience of the page whatsoever? Wow, that's hard for me to imagine!)

Maybe people are very different in how they experience reading. If so, I know of no systematic studies. (Of course there are plenty of studies of differences in reading skill, in the use of the eyes on the page, on the sorts of errors people make, etc., but that's quite different.) If there is such variation, it could potentially be very useful to reading teachers (and poets?) to take advantage of it.

Or maybe people differ mainly in their reports about how they read, while their experiences are all very broadly speaking the same. (We do have, I think, false general impressions about our stream of experience quite often.) So it would be neat, before going too far out on a limb here, to get some external corroboration for the reports.

It's easy to think up cute experiments:

* People who speak silently to themselves while reading would tend, I'd think, to have strong impressions about how to pronounce unusual names they find in the text (it's GOLL-um, dammit, not GOAL-um!); people who are more strictly imagers may not. Experimenters could pronounce a name in an unusual way and measure (a) likelihood of being corrected by the subject, (b) skin conductance (a measure of stress), or (c) attentional blink (poor performance on an immediately subsequent task).

* People who say they hear the text aloud sometimes claim to hear it mostly in their own voice; others claim to hear the author's (imagined) voice or the characters' voices. The latter sort of reader, but not the former, may show additional facility or impairment when an external voice or sound is presented that matches or mismatches the characteristics of the author's or characters' voices.

* People who visually experience the page may have better memory for visual details of the text than people who do not.

Etc.

If the results of such measures align neatly with people's self-reports, great! There may really be a phenomenon here worth studying.

So many experiments, so little time!

Bertrand Russell on the Philosopher's Temperament

The curmudgeonly essays Bertrand Russell wrote late in life generally get little attention from philosophers -- strikingly little, really, given that he was such a famous philosopher. For example, in the (admittedly limited) ISI Web of Knowledge citation database, I see only nine citations since 2000 of Russell's book Unpopular Essays, and none in mainstream philosophy journals.

I, however, am enjoying the essays, at least in my present also somewhat curmudgeonly mood -- though they do sometimes display the intellectual laziness common to grand old men who know they won't have to fight their way through unsympathetic referees to find print. (Hm, come to think of it, blogs are a little like that, too!)

One passage that particularly struck me, given my growing interest in the psychology of philosophy, was this:

Philosophy has been defined as "an unusually obstinate attempt to think clearly"; I should define it rather an "an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously". The philosopher's temperament is rare, because it has to combine two somewhat conflicting characteristics: on the one hand a strong desire to believe some general proposition about the universe or human life; on the other hand, inability to believe contentedly except on what appear to be intellectual grounds. The more profound the philosopher, the more intricate and subtle must his fallacies be in order to produce in him the desired state of intellectual acquiescence. That is why philosophy is obscure.

Russell illustrates this point very plausibly with the Descartes of the later Meditations, where Descartes attempts to reason his way out of his skeptical quandary by proving the existence of God. Russell also offers Berkeley, Kant, and Hegel as examples, though Russell's treatment of the latter two especially will strike any sympathetic historian of philosophy as irritatingly simplistic. Being myself generally an unsympathetic historian of philosophy, though, I wonder if Russell hasn't simply cut through the bullshit and seen the core. Here he is on Hegel:

Hegel's system satisfied the instincts of philosophers more fully than any of its predecessors. It was so obscure that no amateurs could hope to understand it. It was optimistic, since history is a progress in the unfolding of the Absolute Idea. It showed that the philosopher, sitting in his study considering abstract ideas, can know more about the real world than the statesman or the historian or the man of science.

Given that our attraction to or revulsion from philosophical ideas tends to far precede our understanding of the subtle arguments pro and con (as I discussed a bit here), I suspect Russell is correct that such psychological considerations are a major factor driving both individual philosophers and the discipline as a whole, despite our flattering self-image.

This also makes me wonder whether Russell's late-in-life History of Western Philosophy has more to it than historians generally give it credit for.

The Rule of Three

In connection with Vincent Hendricks's recent advice on increasing one's visibility in academic philosophy and the subsequent discussion at Thoughts, Arguments, and Rants, I thought I'd post some of my recent thoughts on academic memory -- what I'll call the "rule of three".

Here's the rule of three: If you devote cognitive attention to an academic matter only once, you will retain no functional memory of it. If you devote attention to that matter twice, you will recognize it vaguely when you encounter it again, but you won't freely recall it. If you devote attention three times, you will be able to freely recall one thing about it.

This works, I think, in the classroom: If a student reads a philosopher, then hears a lecture about that philosopher, then finally studies that philosopher again for the final exam, she will be able for some time afterward to remember some core thing about that philosopher. If she does only two of the above, she will recognize the philosopher vaguely when the name is presented. If she does only one of those things, nothing useful will be retained.

It also works (more to the present point) in the context of getting to know a fellow philosopher. Based on my own experience: If I have no previous acquaintance with a philosopher (through her work or otherwise) and I have a conversation with her at a conference from which nothing further comes, I will not recognize her the next time I see her. If I do this twice, I will have a vague recollection next time I see her. Three times, though, and I'll remember who she is and probably one key fact about her. I suspect many other academics' memories work the same way. Sometimes, a person gets a two-fer or a three-fer in my cognitive space: If the conversation was striking enough that I return to it later in my mind in some extended way, then that's two instances of attention; if we then follow it up with an exchange of interesting emails (for example), that's three instances.

This principle also applies to presentations and publications. If something I hear or read only once is striking enough, or close enough to my current perplexities, that I think about it for some period of time on at least three separate occasions, I will retain the main idea of it (or what seems to me the most important or useful idea given my interests) for a while. However, most work -- especially conference presentations -- regardless of how assiduously I take notes at the time, doesn't command enough of my interest that I return to it seriously later, and consequently a single presentation of the ideas won't stick. It takes some repetition. If I hear it in a presentation, then we chat about it afterward, then I see the published essay, it will stick with me even if I wasn't much enamored of it. The nature and order of these events doesn't matter much: It might be three journal articles (oh, that's the guy who keeps saying the HOT theory of consciousness has flaw X), or three conversations, or two criticisms of the work by other philosophers followed months later by an oral presentation by the author himself, or whatever.

Now of course this rule isn't hard and fast, and what exactly qualifies as an episode of "cognitive attention" is pretty fuzzy (I mean more than seeing the name cited and less than reading an entire book by the person) -- but the implications for improving one's academic visibility (if that's one's aim) should be clear: Go to the same conferences, publish on the same topics, expose yourself to the same people, multiple times -- don't spread yourself thin. And since you shouldn't expect people to retain more than a single core fact about you unless they're exposed to you more than three times, try to have a consistent theme or idea or topic in your work, especially earlier in your career. Something of intermediate specificity is probably best ("consciousness" is too broad, "problems with Schnerdfoot's reply to Huberdike" is too narrow).

Of course maximizing academic visibility may not be your only aim! I often spread myself too thin, from a career-maximizing perspective, from sheer enthusiasm on too many topics.

Call for Papers: Special Journal Issue on Experimental Philosophy

"Psychology and Experimental Philosophy" E. Machery, T. Lombrozo & J. Knobe (eds.)

European Review of Philosophy, 9 (2009)

Submission deadline: 1 September 2008

Details here.

Color and Dream Experience in Philosophy, 1940-1959

As regular visitors to this blog may recall, I've occasionally discussed a historical trend in reports of the coloration of dreaming -- a tendency for Americans (that is, residents of the U.S.) to report overwhelmingly black-and-white dreaming in the 1940s and 1950s, and a tendency for pre-20th century philosophers and psychologists and 21st century Americans to report predominantly or exclusively color dreaming. With Changbing Huang and Yifeng Zhou, I found the same trend in subgroups in mainland China, where rates of reporting of black-and-white dreaming varied with the prevalence of black-and-white media in one's community. My hypothesis is not that the actual content of the dreams changed between these periods. (For example, rates of color-term use in dream diaries are amazingly consistent.) Rather, I hold that it was only the reporting that changed -- more specifically, that at least some people mistakenly assimilated the properties of film media to their dream experience.

Recently I've been wondering if I'd see the same trend among philosophers. Would philosophers of the 1940s and 1950s say that dreams were mainly black and white? This issue is especially interesting in the context of dream skepticism, the view (from the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi and from Descartes's first two Meditations and from many other sources) that we cannot, or cannot reliably, discriminate between dream experience and waking sensory experience. If waking visual sensory experience is pervasively colored and while dreams rarely contain colored objects, both of which many Americans in the 1940s and 1950s would have granted, it should be easy to tell the one from the other, right? So dream skepticism should be less compelling.

So far, however, in looking through the literature from that period, that's not what I've found. On the contrary, the issue doesn't even seem to arise in the literature on dreams and dream skepticism (though I still need to check more sources to say this definitively). Some philosophers even casually mention color as an element of dreams, without special remark or acknowledgement of the issue. Elizabeth H. Wolgast, for example, when reaching for an example of a dream in the context of a discussion of dream experience and waking sensory experience, imagines someone saying, "In my dream, I saw great blue grasshoppers" (Philosophical Review, 1958, p. 231). She does not remark in particular on the issue of coloration.

I'm not sure how much to draw from this. Even in the black-and-whitest days of black-and-white dream reporting, people tended to acknowledge the possibility, at least, of fully colored dreaming. And maybe that possibility is enough for philosophers to do their thing, and to justify dream skepticism to whatever extent it is justified?

Rationalizing Emotions and The Moral Behavior of Kantians

I've recently been enjoying Joshua Greene's "The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul" (penultimate manuscript available here). Greene's research suggests that the moral judgments of Kantian deontologists (who focus on such things as rights, duties, and "respect for persons") tend largely to be rationalizations of evolutionarily-selected emotional responses, while the moral judgments of utilitarians and consequentialists (who focus on such things as maximizing the good of everyone) tend to be more rationally driven (or at least less driven by emotional "alarm systems"). The sorts of cases on which Kantians and consequentialists tend to disagree are cases where maximizing the good violates what we might perceive as someone's rights. Should you push someone in front of a runaway trolley, thereby killing him, if that's the only way to save five other innocent people? Should you smother your baby to death if that's the only way to prevent yourself, your baby, and several other people from being found and killed by Nazis? The Kantian impulse (with caveats and complications, of course) is to say no in such cases, the consequentialist to say yes.

Now if (a.) Greene is right about Kantianism as principally a post-hoc rationalization of evolutionarily selected emotions -- and needless to say it's very controversial! -- and if (b.) the apparently widespread view is correct that Kantians behave less well than consequentialists, and finally if (c.) emotional reactions tend to be more self-serving than do consequentialist principles, then, well, maybe (a) and (c) together explain (b).

Let me stress that I myself have no beef against Kantian deontology or Kantian deontologists and that conditions (a) and (b) are highly speculative. Finally, the only small bit of direct empirical evidence I have on the moral behavior of Kantians versus deontologists (the rate at which ethics books are missing from academic libraries) suggests that patrons are no more likely, and maybe even a bit less likely, to misappropriate Kantian than utilitarian texts.

Updated Photo

Here's my principle: If your photo on the web is more than ten years old, you're either lazy or vain. (Well, Genius may be an exception!) Fancying myself neither and flirting with the ten-year mark, I've finally been forced to update.

Ah well. At least I'm already married!