April 29-30: Fullerton Philosophy Conference: Consciousness and the Self

Last minute notice, I know, but L.A. area folks might be interested in considering attending all or part of a conference on "Consciousness and the Self" tomorrow and Thursday at Cal State Fullerton.

The speakers are Fred Dretske, Alex Byrne, Sydney Shoemaker, David Chalmers, Jesse Prinz, and me. Info here.

My talk is called "Self-Unconsciousness", posted here.

When Is It Time to Retire?

(by guest blogger Manuel Vargas)

My tenure of guest-blogging here at the Splintered Mind is coming to an end. My thanks to Eric for having me, and to all the thoughtful comments and responses I received from commentators. In keeping with my retirement from this bit of guest-blogging, I thought I’d post something about retirement and its norms, since I know so little about it.

Everyone knows at least one professor, whether a colleague at their own institution or some other, of whom it is painfully clear to everyone EXCEPT that person that he or she should retire. So I’ve been told. I don’t actually know such a person myself, but it seems a common enough refrain that I’ve started to think about the phenomenon. In particular, I’m worried that some day I’ll be THAT guy, the guy whom everyone (except me) knows ought to retire. So, in support of my then-colleagues and chagrined students of the future, I’m trying to work out some general principles of retirement far in advance, so that I might apply them to my own circumstances. Will you help me?

In what follows, I offer some initial thoughts about the matter, with the acknowledgment that I will surely retract everything I write in this post at some point in the next 40 years.

First, some caveats about the scope of the involved ‘ought’:

(1) Let’s suppose we are talking about professors who have no real financial need to teach, nor whose psychology would collapse in some profound way if he or she were not teaching any longer.

(2) Let us also suppose that retirement here does not necessarily mean that the professor emeritus ceases to participate in life of the profession or perform research in some guise. We are only concerned with retirement from one’s regular full-time faculty position at the university.

And, (3) let us suppose that in surrendering said position the department is left not dramatically worse off from a long-term staffing or workload standpoint. And to anticipate, no, having to hire a replacement doesn’t count as making a department dramatically worse off in the relevant sense. So, the ought in my usage of the phrase “ought to retire” should be regarded as ranging over a somewhat limited set of circumstances.

Given the aforementioned restrictions of scope, then, I’m inclined to put the sense of ought that is my concern in those circumstances as something like this: when ought a (philosophy) professor to retire, from the combined standpoints of the professor’s dignity and the general well being, given no powerful or important disincentives for doing so, but given that there are finite jobs in the profession at large and in one’s own department.

Some further caveats and refinements:

(4) I recognize that some professors have no dignity and/or no aspirations of dignity. Indeed, I may be one. But that is the sort of dirty, specific kind of detail that we shall discretely to the side. It is better to pretend that all professors (and departments) have aspirations of dignity.

(5) Our considered question is manifestly NOT about age. Or, at any rate, it is not directly about age. Age may or may not be correlated with whether some of the conditions I suggest, but chronological age itself is irrelevant to what follows. There are plenty of philosophers working now who, despite having known Kant personally, are under no “ought of retirement” of the sort under present consideration. And, presumably, there are people could never have heard a David Lewis talk but who, if they had any good sense, would do themselves and their departments a favor and would retire from the profession— if only their university had the good sense to offer them a reasonable retirement package!

(Randy Clarke once called my attention to a principled argument to this effect made by Saul Smilansky in Moral Paradoxes, an argument that concludes that most of us should retire immediately in light of the numbers of people who could do our jobs at least as well as we are doing them. Still, let’s ignore this too for the moment.)

These considerations having been noted, I suggest that a professor should retire when some weighted cluster of the following conditions are satisfied (the weights given by contextual features of the person’s dignity and the department’s aspirations for itself and what one’s university values in their faculty members):

When, after 7 years or more since tenure . . .

(a) One’s classes are repeatedly cancelled for low enrollment at a much higher rate than other full-time faculty members.
(b) One’s published research has not been cited in more than 7 years in a scholarly context.
(c) One has not been invited or induced to participate in an extra-departmental committee in more than seven years.
(d) When one has not served the discipline in any notable professional capacity in 10 years (e.g., editing a journal, refereeing papers, organizing conferences, etc.)

Do these conditions seem about right? Should something be added or deleted? How would you weight the conditions for, say, a teaching institution or a research institution? Is there some other sure-fire indicator for when someone should retire?

Admittedly, some of these conditions and numbers are arbitrary. And this is all way too rough and foolish. That’s okay, so long as the arbitrariness and foolishness don’t preclude a useful discussion. And anyway, we shouldn’t expect more precision that then subject matter permits, which must be true since Aristotle said it.

Please bear in mind that I’m not supposing that retirement means retirement from participating in the life of the profession. I’m simply assuming that one is walking away from a formal position that will be promptly filled by a new philosopher delighted by the prospect of employment in a profession with grotesquely fewer jobs than qualified applicants.

So help me out here . . . how will I know when I should retire from the active, full-time professor gig?

The Purview of Human Subjects Committees

Federal regulations on human subjects research state that Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) should review activity that involves "systematic investigation... designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge" and which further involves "intervention" or "interaction" with, or the acquisition of "identifiable private information" about, human beings.

Here's what I wonder: Given these definitions, why aren't IRBs evaluating journalism projects? (Of course they aren't. For one thing journalism moves too quickly for IRBs, which typically take weeks if not months to issue approvals.)

Journalists interact with people, obviously (according to the code "communication or interpersonal contact" counts as interaction), so if they don't fall under the Human Subjects code, it must be because they don't do "systematic investigation... designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge". Tell that to an investigative journalist exposing the abuses of factory laborers!

Is investigative journalism on factory workers maybe not "systematic"? Or not "generalizable"? I see no reason why investigative journalism shouldn't be systematic. Indeed, it seems better if it is -- unless one works with a very narrow definition of "systematic" on which much of the research IRBs actually do (and should) review is not systematic. And why should the systematicity of the research matter for the purpose of reviewability anyway? I also don't see why investigative journalism shouldn't be generalizable. The problems with this criterion are the same as with systematicity: Define "generalizable" reasonably broadly and intuitively, so that a conclusion such as "undocumented factory workers in L.A. are often underpaid" is a generalization, and journalism involves generalization; define it very narrowly and much IRB reviewed research is not "generalizable". And like systematicity, why should it matter to reviewability exactly how specific or general the conclusions are that come out in the end?

IRBs were designed in the wake of 20th century abuses of human subjects both in medicine (as in the Tuskegee syphilis study) and in psychology (such as the Milgram shock study and the Stanford prison experiment). Guidelines were designed with medicine and psychology in mind and traditionally IRBs focused on research in those fields. However, there are plenty of other fields that study people, and the way the guidelines are written, it looks like much research in those fields actually falls under IRBs' purview. So the U.C. Riverside IRB -- of which I'm a member -- has been reviewing more and more proposals in Anthropology, History, Ethic Studies, and the like. Let's call it IRB mission creep.

We recently got news of a graduate student in Music who interviewed musicians and wanted to use those interviews as the core of his dissertation -- but he didn't think to ask for IRB approval before conducting those interviews. The IRB originally voted to forbid him to use that information, basically torpedoing his whole dissertation project. That decision was only overturned on appeal.

It makes a lot of sense, especially given the history of abuse, for IRBs to examine proposals in medicine and psychology. But do we really want to require university professors and graduate students to go through the rigmarole of an IRB application -- and it is quite a rigmarole, especially if you're not used to it! -- and wait weeks or months every time they want to talk with someone and then write about it?

Here's the core problem, I think: Research needs to be reviewed if there's a power issue that might lead to abuse. If the researcher has a kind of power, whether through social status (e.g., as a professor or a doctor vis-a-vis a student or a patient, or even in the experimenter-subject relationship), or through an informational advantage (e.g., through subjecting people to some sort of deception or experimental intervention whose purposes and hypotheses they don't fully understand), then IRBs need to make sure that that power isn't misused. But no IRB should need to approve a journalism student interviewing the mayor or a music professor interviewing jazz musicians about their careers. In such cases, the power situation is unproblematic. Of course in any human interaction there are opportunities for abuse, but only Big Brother would insist that a regulatory board should govern all human interaction.

Why the Gourmet Report is a Failure

(by guest blogger Manuel Vargas)

I’m a long-time fan of the Gourmet Report.* Nevertheless, I’ve recently started to wonder whether the Report fails to measure faculty quality, even when it is construed in roughly reputational terms, that is, in terms of concrete judgments of faculty quality as seen by the mainstream of research-active elements in the Anglophone portion of the profession.

(Before you start to roll your eyes let me note I’m still a fan of the report, and despite the problem I’m about to note, I think it is like democratic government— deeply problematic, but better than any of the alternatives. Moreover, it isn’t like my department or my work is at stake in anything the report does— I’m in a department with no graduate program and my career, such as it is, is beyond the point at which the reputation of the institution that awarded me a Ph.D. is of much consequence to it. So there.)

Here’s why I suspect that the Report is a failure at measuring faculty quality: we are bad judges of our own estimates of quality. That is, I suspect that we are unreliable reporters about the work that we regard as best, in something like a stable, all-things-considered sense. (I certainly think students are unreliable judges of what teaching they learn the most from, and I suspect something analogous is true of philosophers.**) I suspect the quality of my quality assessment is a function of lots of different things— what I’ve read recently, what first springs to mind when I see their name, whether I had reason to attend very closely to something of theirs, what I’ve forgotten about their work, and if so, whether I disagreed vehemently or lightly with it, and so on.

Even bracketing framing effects, though, I suspect that my explicit deliberative judgments of quality fail to perfectly track my actual positive regard of quality for philosophers and their work in some complex ways. Here’s one way my judgments might fail to track my actual regard: X’s work was underappreciated by me simply because the ideas sat in the back of my mind, and later played a role in my own judgments about what would work and what wouldn’t, but I never picked up on the fact that it was X’s arguments about Y that did that for me.

Here’s another way that might happen: I could be aware of X’s work, and think well of that person’s work, but underrate its importance to my own thoughts in the following way: I might not realize how much of that person’s work I cite and respond to in a way that takes it seriously. That is, I could think that work is of very high quality (perhaps worth more of my time than any other work on the subject matter!) but unless I counted up citations or counted up the number of times I focus on responding to that figure, I might simply fail to realize how significant that person’s work really is for me, and so I might fail to accurately assess the quality of work. (Of course: I might also overinflate importance for a related reason—I spent a lot of time criticizing someone’s work because it is easy, but that makes their name loom larger in my mind than my actual regard for it.)

Here’s another way “under-regarding” might happen: I could be subject to implicit bias effects of a peculiar sort. That is, I could unconsciously downgrade (or upgrade) my global assessment of quality on the basis of perceived race/class/gender/age etc., even if, when asked, I sincerely disavow that these things have anything to do with it. On this picture, the relevant test might be closer to something like: what would I think of this work if I had never known anything about the author? A: We’ll never know.

(Relatedly, implicit bias might work in a more targeted way, only affecting my overall assessments of worth, and not my assessments of a particular argument, or even a specific paper even when conscious of race/class/gender/age/etc.)

Here’s another way that might happen: I could be less good than I think at blocking halo effects of various sorts. So, knowing that X is at Wonderful Institution Y may inflate my estimate of that person’s work unconsciously. Or, my agreement with X on matter M may lead me to think better of X than someone else when filling out a survey, because we share the same beleaguered position on some matter. Or, knowing X has published many times in some journal I think well of might lead me to cast doubt on my own assessments of the quality of the work.

Suppose you thought people in general are subject to these effects. Are philosophers vulnerable to such effects? I think yes, but I’ve been repeatedly told that philosophers are special, and alone among humans immune to these sorts of effects because of our marginally greater reflectiveness. So, I must be wrong.

Still, there is some evidence that at-a-time global self-assessments are subject to priming and framing effects. There is some literature on the way in which people are good at monitoring their own discriminatory behavior only when they have reason to think it will be observed (so, for example, you probably aren’t very good at monitoring your discrimination against groups whose salience is not raised for you: think age, disability, non-black/non-white racial groups, etc.). There is also the fast-growing literature on implicit bias and the way it operates. And, there is a large body of work in cognitive science and psychology casting doubt on the accuracy and efficacy of conscious, deliberative judgments with respect evaluative matters (something that Leiter himself, writing with Joshua Knobe, wrote about in the context of Nietzschean moral psychology!).

I don’t know how to correct for any of this, given the Report’s aim of measuring faculty quality in terms of conscious, explicit, global judgments of quality. Keeping track of citation impact corrects for at least one of the possible misalignments I mentioned, but not all of them. And anyway, citation impact rankings are subject to their own difficulties as well. (Although I think it would be a useful supplement to the Report to track this data, too.)

In sum, although I think the Gourmet Report probably fails to accurately report in fact estimations of faculty quality, it nevertheless is likely the best thing we’ve got going for judging philosophical reputation of departments and their specializations, as seen by the mainstream of research-active elements in the Anglophone portion of the profession.

*Indeed, I may be one of the longest of the long-time fans of the PGR: somehow I stumbled across an early version of it, back when Mosaic was my browser of choice, using email required some degree of sophistication with UNIX commands, and the Report appeared to be something produced on a typewriter. Anyhow, the Report was a big help when thinking about graduate schools and a nice supplement to local advice about where I should consider applying. In several cases the Report highlighted departments than individual advisors had never mentioned, but when I asked them (because it was listed on the Report), the response was invariably something like “Oh yeah— so-and-so is there; that place would be pretty good, too.” I think the report has improved in numerous ways since those early days, and I think that it continues to be excellent at its ostensive function as one of several tools for those thinking about graduate school in philosophy. Indeed, it is out of a sense of its ongoing utility for graduate students that I’m happy to serve as one of the folks providing specialty rankings in philosophy of action.

** Regarding student unreliability, the matter is complicated. But see Mayer et al. “Increased Interestingness of Extraneous Details in a Multimedia Science Presentation Leads to Decreased Learning” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied (2008) Vol. 14, No. 4, 329–339. And think about research on what teaching evaluations track. One might worry that too often teaching evals track those things irrelevant to learning, or even—if the Mayet et. al. data proves correct, impediments to learning!)

Where Does It Look Like Your Nose Is?

Following the suggestion of H. Ono et al. in their weird and fascinating 1986 article on "Facial Vision" in Psychological Research, I drew two lines on a piece of cardboard, and you might want to do the same. The lines start at one edge, about 6 cm apart, and converge to a point at the other edge. (A piece of paper held the long way will work fine, as long as you can keep it rigid.) Hold the midpoint of the 6 cm separation at the bridge of your nose and converge your eyes on the intersection point. If you do it right, it should look like there are three or four lines, two on the sides (one going toward each ear) and one or two in the center, headed right for the bridge of your nose.

The weird thing of course is that there are no lines on the cardboard that aim toward your ears or terminate at the bridge of your nose. Ono et al. suggest that the explanation (of the nose part at least) is that from the perspective of each eye the nose appears to be at the location of the other eye, so that the line headed toward your left eye seems to your right eye to be headed toward your nose and the line headed toward your right eye seems to the left eye also to be headed toward the nose.

With that in mind, I remove the cardboard and close one eye. Where does it seem that my nose is? Well, at first I'm inclined to say my perception is veridical: To the open eye, the nose seems closer than does my closed eye (or my bodily map of where my closed eye should be). But now I open and shut each eye in alternation. It does seem that my nose jumps around, maybe an inch or two side to side when I do this. But maybe that's just because my assumed egocentric position changes, relative to my nose?

Ono et al. also suggest trying to locate your phosphenes with one closed eye. (I had a post on this some time ago.) Phosphenes are those little circles you can see when you press on your eye. I find them easiest to see when I press on the corner of a closed eye and attend to the opposite corner of that same eye, looking for a dark or bright circle. (It may take some trial and error to get this right.) As I noted in the old post, for me at least the phosphenes generated by pressing the outside corner of a closed eye, with the other eye open, appear to be spatially located inside or behind the nose. This seems to me to be the case no matter which part of my closed eye I press. At the time of that post, it didn't occur to me that this might be because my nose was subjectively located as co-positional with the closed eye. Holding my nose with two fingers and pressing my closed eye with another finger from the same hand, to throw some tactile feedback into the mix, doesn't seem to change anything.

Armchair Sociology of the Profession IV: Splintered Fields

(by guest blogger Manuel Vargas)

UCR’s Peter Graham once mentioned to me that if you go to different departments, what you’ll find is that different figures will be really prominent in the local conception of a field. So, all the graduate students at School A read figure Y and all the grad students at School B read figure Z. What it takes a while to realize, he said, was that half of the time mostly the same views are in play, just filtered through whatever figures have local prominence. So, everyone is getting their dose of externalism, anti-realism, or whatever, but filtered through the concerns of whichever figures loom large in local graduate education. (Peter had a nice example of this, but I have since forgotten what it was. Go ask him yourself and see if he remembers what he had in mind.)

That picture seems mostly right to me. In different departments, different figures are more and less likely to be taught, even if there is widespread professional consensus outside the department about which figures are worth teaching and which issues are important. Local variation can be explained away in several ways: partly in terms who faculty members are reading or responding to in their own work at the time, partly in light of the literatures faculty members were trained in, and (without a doubt) whether any of the big cheeses in a field are members of the department in which one is getting trained. In many (most?) fields, the overlap is substantial enough so that if, for example, you study metaphysics at Notre Dame, right out the gate you are going to be able to have fruitful, meaningful conversations with people who study metaphysics at Princeton.

Still, there are cases where there are vast gulfs in the conception of fields, both in terms of what positions are worth serious engagement and in terms of what the assumptions are that are governing inquiry into the field. Some places take Wittgenstein seriously. Others don’t have more than the vaguest idea of who he is. Some places love them some Davidson. Other places haven’t had him on a syllabus in decades.

This year, I’ve been struck by some surprisingly deep fractures in philosophy of action. I’ve sat in on a couple of seminars in philosophy of action at my host institution this year and it has been incredibly fascinating to see how different the conception of the field looks in these courses than it did in my own graduate training, my own teaching, and my own work in related parts of the field. Even though all these accounts are in some sense concerned with agency, the will, and the relationship of agents to actions (that’s why it counts as philosophy of action) it seems to me that the local differences are manifestly not a case of the same basic positions, substantive concerns, and the like being presented through a different constellation of figures. (For those who are wondering, it seems to me less of a Causal Theory vs. non-causalists, and more of a divide between those-who-start-with-Davidson and those-who-start-with-Anscombe, where starting with either does not necessarily entail substantial agreement.)

Lest I be misunderstood, I don’t say any of this by way of criticism of anyone’s conception of their field—please, let those flowers bloom. Indeed, I feel fortunate to have gained a sharper sense of my own philosophical presuppositions as a result of the experience. And, I think we all benefit from a variety of conceptions of a field, from a range of philosophical concerns, and from a broad range of philosophical methods and approaches. (I take it that something like this phenomenon is common enough that at least some departments used to resist incestuous hiring precisely out of a concern for limiting the intellectual vision of their local ecosystem.)

Anyway, what I’m wondering is what other fields have gulfs internal to them that make challenging any substantive discussions across these splintered portions of the field. Maybe Nietzsche scholarship is one instance, with the Frenchified Nietzsche interpreters on one side and the broadly “analytic” Nietzsche scholars on the other side. I imagine that there would be lots of head scratching about how to talk to each other, if (assuming the unlikely) either group had any substantial interest in doing so. But surely there are other instances of a big divide in presuppositions that significantly hinders intelligibility across camps internal to the same subfields.

Any thoughts about good candidates for other deeply fractured fields? I’ve heard suggestions of something similar internal to ethics, with (broadly) sentimentalists on one side and a priorists (rationalists, contractualists, etc.) on the other, but I’m less confident that we’re at a very significant degree of head scratching puzzlement about what the other camp(s) are doing internal to ethics. Any of this going on in phil mind? Epistemology? Political phil? Elsewhere?

Why Does the Pacific APA End on Easter?

This year, as usual, the Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association ended on Easter Sunday. At the beginning of the conference, God is crucified. While He is dead, everyone delivers their grand lectures and stays up late partying. When He rises, we're on our planes out of town.

On Encouraging Children to Reflect about Morality

Consider these two views of moral education:

(1.) The "liberal", inward-out model: Moral education should stress moral reflection, with rules and punishment playing a secondary role. If six-year-old Sally hits her friend Hank, you have to enforce the rules and punish her (probably), but what's really going to help her improve morally is encouraging her to think about things like: Hank's perspective on the situation, how she feels about having hurt Hank, and the best overall norms for behavior. Adults, likewise, make moral progress by thinking carefully about their own standards of right and wrong and whether their behavior lives up to those standards. Thus, mature morality grows from within: It's a natural development of the values people, upon reflection, discover to be already nascent in themselves.

(2.) The "conservative", outward-in model: Moral education should stress rules and punishment, with moral reflection playing a secondary role. You can't understand and apply the rules, of course, without some sort of reflection on them, but reflection should be in the context of received norms. Otherwise, it's likely just to become rationalization of self-serving impulses. Until people are morally well developed, the values that emerge from their independent and free reflection will almost inevitably be inferior to time-tested traditional cultural values. Thus, mature morality is imposed from without: People are forced to obey certain norms until obedience to those norms becomes habitual. Perhaps eventually those norms will be understood and embraced, but that's near the end of the developmental trajectory, not the beginning.

Now academically affiliated researchers on moral development almost universally prefer the first model to the second (examples include rationalists like Piaget and Kohlberg, most their opponents who stress the importance of sympathy and perspective-taking, as well as people like Damon who endorse a hybrid view). The common idea is that children (and the morally undeveloped in general) improve morally when they are encouraged to think for themselves and given space to discover their own reactions and values.

Now I'm sympathetic to this idea, but here's my thought: Suppose Sally hits Hank and a liberally-minded teacher comes up and asks her how it made her feel to hurt Hank. What child, realistically, would say, "Well, I know he didn't deserve it, but it just felt good pounding him to a pulp!"? The reality is that the child is being asked to reflect in a situation where she knows that the teacher will approve of one answer and condemn another. This isn't free reflection; and the answer the child gives may not reflect her real feelings and values. Instead, it seems, it is a kind of imposition -- and one perhaps all the more effective if the child mistakes the resulting judgment for one that is genuinely her own.

Therefore, maybe, a liberal-seeming style of moral education is effective not because we have in us all an inclination toward the good that only needs encouragement to flower, but rather because reflection in teacher-child, parent-child, and similar social contexts is really an insidious form of imposition -- and thus, perhaps, the conservative's best secret tool.

Armchair Sociology of the Profession, part 3: A Manifesto on Geography and Social Networks

(by guest blogger Manuel Vargas)

I’ve spent most of my philosophical life hanging out in philosophy departments up and down California, partly by luck but also by disposition. This year, however, I’ve been living on the East Coast and I’ve been struck by the difference geography makes to the profession. (Caveat: In what follows, I frame things mostly in terms of differences across coasts, but I expect that many of these factors are at play to lesser and greater degrees in the interior of the U.S., and these issues will certainly be salient to philosophers coming into the US from abroad. But I write in terms of coastal examples since that is what I know firsthand. Also, I'm going to focus on West Coast disadvantages, ignoring some of its clear advantages in non-professional ways.)

Consider the dense network of terrific departments in the Boston and New York areas. This proximity is conducive to a range of interactions and a degree of inter-departmental familiarity that is much harder to reproduce nearly anywhere else where geographic clustering of departments is not so tight. MIT, Harvard, BU, BC, and Tufts are all closer to each other than are two schools that are frequently thought of as relatively close, geographically speaking: Berkeley and Stanford. The latter are more than 10 times as far apart from each other as those Boston area schools! Although I didn’t bust out Google Maps to check, I’m pretty sure the same is true of the L.A. area schools vs. those Boston schools, too— the distances on the left coast are much larger. So, in places like NYC and Boston, you’ve got a density of philosophers and departments that can’t be matched elsewhere. And, indeed, something like this is true on the North Atlantic coast as a whole, at least in comparison to the West Coast.

This isn’t to say that there is as much interaction in the greater Boston and (I imagine) New York areas as an outsider might expect—professors everywhere are over-extended and can’t participate in everything. Still, there are lots of effects, many indirect and apart from philosophical feedback and interaction. Here are some:

First: financial effects. It is cheap to go to local talks and conferences in at least the North Atlantic states, because the distances are not huge and the transportation options are good and comparatively inexpensive. So, if you’ve got a fixed research account, you can afford to go to comparatively more conferences than your West Coast brethren on the same budget. Similar economies of distance come into play on the interpersonal axis as well. If you have a family, and a partner who is willing to put up with you going away for professional travel without family, it is surely easier to do so when you can be gone for shorter periods of time, which closer geographic proximity permits.

Second: effects of professional esteem. In a previous post, Eric wondered about the curious stability of UCR’s rankings. I had some things to say about it in the comments, but one of the things I floated was the hypothesis that departments will fare less well in reputational rankings if they are not part of a densely networked collection of departments. Since, if I’m right, this is partly driven by geographic proximity, geography ends up having an impact on things like the Gourmet Report, the perceived quality of degrees for a given graduate program, and so on. That is, philosophers will more highly rate departments they are familiar with, but if familiarity is partly a function of geographic relationships, than geographically isolated departments will suffer from a geographic bias among evaluators, and this propagates through the profession in complicated ways.

Third: early careers. A big problem here is the Eastern APA, where everyone goes to look for a job. Pretty much everything about the Eastern is bad, but for West Coasters it is invariably more so. It is more expensive to get to, more time-consuming to go, and one is less likely to have faculty advisors and supporters present when you get there. It would be interesting to compare how East and West Coast job candidates fared over several iterations of the market if all the East Coast candidates and none of the West Coast candidates had to suffer the effects of jet lag and time zone changes, of having diminished numbers of advisors, committee members, and departmental mentors present during the hiring bloodbath, and so on. My bet is that putting the meeting in San Diego for a few years would help the performance of West Coast folks and hurt the performance of East Coast folks. Anyone want to try?

Armchair Sociology 101, part 2: Further Ruminations on The Two Models

(by guest blogger Manuel Vargas)

Belated introduction

Last post was my first post as a guest blogger here at The Splintered Mind, and I realized I neglected to introduce myself. Anyway, I’m Manuel Vargas, and my day job is philosophizing at the University of San Francisco. I mainly publish papers on issues connected to agency, responsibility, moral psychology, and various topics in Latin American philosophy. In my heart of hearts, though, I am an armchair sociologist of philosophy. Since I can’t blog much about that at my usual place of bloggery (the Garden of Forking Paths), I’m doing it here for the next few weeks.

Armchair Sociology 101, part 2: Further Ruminations on The Two Models

In my previous post I discussed two models of philosophical production, a traditional one emphasizing cautious, precise, and highly elaborated ideas, and a newer (to philosophy) model emphasizing novelty as paramount with a somewhat downgraded (but not rejected) emphasis on caution, precision, and conceptual elaboration. For better or for worse, my bet is we’ll see the second, newer model (and variants that lean in that direction) proliferate over the next couple of decades, making up a larger and larger chunk of how philosophy gets done in the English-speaking world. I can think of several reasons, which I mention in the Underblog. My main interest, though, is to think about the consequences of this trajectory if indeed it is the case that this approach will proliferate.

I’m inclined to think that we all benefit from the presence of a mixture of varied strategies in the general philosophical population. However, I wonder whether what we’re likely to see is (1) fragmentation across communities that reflect judgments about these different models, followed by (2) diminished interaction across these communities, followed by (3) greater entrenchment of the newer model across the profession, followed by (4) further fragmentation of subfields developed internal to those fields working on the newer model.

As some of the commentators noted on that earlier post, something like this seems to be what happens in the sciences, and one might think it is simply the general trajectory of fields. But there is also a temptation (also expressed in the comments in the earlier post— go read ‘em!) to think that philosophy should be different, more synoptic, more concerned with how everything hangs together. It is harder to see how you do that if the discipline suffers from field fragmentation of the sort I’m gesturing at.

At any rate, what, if anything follows from all of this? Should awareness of this trajectory affect how we encourage graduate students to think about their own publication strategies? Does the traditional way of doing things need defense? Is so, how? If not, why not?

Perplexities of Consciousness, Ch. 3: Galton's Other Folly

... is now up in draft on my homepage.

Here's an abstract:

In the 1870s, Francis Galton asked people to describe their visual imagery experiences when recalling their breakfast table as they sat at it in that morning. Apparently ordinary people gave very different reports, spanning the full range from claiming that imagery was entirely unknown to them to saying that their imagery was as clear and detailed, or even more so, than ordinary vision. Since then, a long history of attempts to correlate differences in subjective report of imagery experience with performance on presumably imagery-facilitated tasks (like mental rotation, mental unfolding, visual memory, and visual creativity) has largely failed. Given the ease with which most people can be brought to uncertainty about the character of their imagery experience (its richness of detail, its stability, its coloration, etc.), and given the history of debates in psychology and philosophy about the phenomenal character of imagery (e.g., the "imageless thought" debate, the Locke-Berkeley debate about abstract ideas), it shouldn't be too surprising that people's reports about their imagery experience don't reliably reflect real differences in their underlying experience. Hence, the disaster of Galton's subjective methodology.

As always, comments warmly welcomed (here on this post or by email). The title and framing around Galton are new. (Previously it was "How Well Do You Know Your Own Visual Imagery?", without section i and with less focus on Galton throughout.) I'm inclined, today at least, to think the shift makes the chapter livelier; but I could easily see changing my mind about that.

Armchair Sociology of the Profession 101: Two Models of Philosophical Production

(by guest blogger Manuel Vargas)

I take it that for any one reading this blog, it is not news that philosophical publication matters for disciplinary reputation. What I think is less widely recognized is how there are increasingly two main models around which philosophers organize their own writing, and what consequences this might have for individuals and the profession as a whole.

(By identifying two models I do not meant to suggest that these are the only models, that there are no mixed models, or that there are not differences internal to these models, broadly conceived. As seems necessary, imagine the relevant qualifications in what follows.)

The older, traditional model is one that aspires to produce only careful, precisely worked out, and exhaustively defended works. Doing this takes time, and on this model, quantity of production is not nearly so important as quality of production. Indeed, on this model, too much publication suggests a kind of shallowness, or a failure to carefully think things through.

In recent years, an alternative model has emerged in various parts of the profession, especially those that interact with the cognitive and social sciences. On this model, it remains a virtuous to produce careful, precise, and exhaustively defended works. But these virtues are not paramount. Instead, what is paramount is the presentation of a promising new idea, a novel argument, or a relevant datum that does not already have currency in the discussion.

Philosophers working under the newer model tend to publish more frequently. It is a model where one can justify a publication by presenting the new idea even if the presentation of it is not maximally careful, precise, or exhaustively defended. Moreover, to the extent that one’s interlocutors also operate with this model, one needn’t be especially worried about the old virtues: if the idea is a good one, the marketplace of ideas will do much of the precisifying, along with the articulation of objections and replies. It is a model that relies on something like a division of cognitive labor, where the marketplace of ideas does much of the work that old-model philosophers regard as a prerequisite to publication. Of course, a mangled presentation never benefits any idea, so the old virtues are never completely abandoned even on the new model. They are merely downgraded, and (partly) off-loaded.

There are I think, lots of things to say about how this plays out in the life of the profession. It is certainly relevant in hiring, tenure, and promotion, and in how subsets of the philosophical community regard one another. Philosophers working under the older model tend to regard the work of philosophers on the younger model as superficial, ill-conceived, not very philosophically rigorous. Philosophers on the newer model tend to regard philosophers on the older model as (let’s be honest) stuffy, remarkably unproductive (especially if at a Famous Institution), and oftentimes disconnected from the larger field or profession.

What I wonder is if, over time, there is any difference in useful philosophical production generated by these models? Take two communities, one working on the old model and one working on the new model. Add a hundred years. I wonder which community will, after a hundred years, have made more philosophical progress by whatever standard you measure such things?

Political Scientists and Political Philosophers Aren't More Likely to Show Extreme Patterns in Vote Rate

Last year, Josh Rust and I looked at the rates at which political scientists vote, compared to other professors. We also looked at the rates at which political philosophers voted, compared to ethicists in general and to philosophers not specializing in ethics or political philosophy. Our main finding (see here) was that all groups voted at about the same rate, except for political scientists, who voted about 10-15% more often. This fits with our general finding (so far) that by a variety of measures ethicists don't behave much differently than other people of similar social background.

The result that surprised me most from that study, though, and the one I keep coming back to in my mind, was this: The variance in voting rate was the the same (really, virtually exactly the same) for all the groups. I had expected that extreme views about voting -- either about its pointlessness or its importance -- would be overrepresented among political scientists and political philosophers, and that this would be reflected in the voting patterns. Maybe political philosophers aren't any more likely to vote, on average, I thought -- but there'd be a fair number who were highly conscientious, voting in virtually every election, and a fair number who were principled non-voters. If this were the case, they should show a wider spread of voting rates -- or in other words a higher variance. However, we found no such thing.

Excluding the non-voters for a minute, let's look at the distribution of voting rates among the sampled groups: political philosophers, political scientists, non-ethicist philosophers, and the comparison group of other professors, in the following four charts. (Each group gets its own chart. On the x-axis is the number of votes per year, on the y-axis is the percentage of the group that votes at that rate.)





The thing to notice is that there's no more spread in any of these groups than any of the others. Each shows basically the same hump in the middle. (The dip just to the left of the 1.00 votes per year in each group is due to the fact that professors are more likely to vote about once every two years [.50] or about once every year [1.00] than three times every four years [.75]. It's also worth noting that local election data are missing for some regions, so this chart somewhat underestimates the overall voting rate.)

The zeros are a little harder to interpret: For about 25% of sampled professors no voting record was found -- which might reflect a pattern of not voting among those professors, but might also reflect registration under a different name or in a different area. So the following numbers certainly overestimate the number of non-voters. But notice again that there is no tendency for overrepresentation at this end of the scale either, among political scientists or political philosophers (the variations in the percentages here are all within the range of chance variation).

Percentage of sampled professors with no voting record found:
political philosophers: 22.4%
political scientists: 26.2%
non-ethicist philosophers: 29.1%
comparison professors: 26.9%

I find the overall results particularly striking for political philosophers: They are neither, on average, more prone to vote than other professors, nor are they bimodally split between conscientious voters and principled non-voters. Most of them just vote occasionally, sporadically, like the rest of us. It's as though all their thinking about politics has no influence on their voting behavior. (I have other evidence that suggests that it has no influence on their political party, either, but that's for another day.)

Philosophical Trust

What is the difference between those philosophers who are willing and those who are unwilling to invest the time to master works like Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Kant's first Critique, or Heidegger's Being and Time (assuming those works touch one's areas of interest)? It must have something to do with trust -- trust that these men were geniuses enough to make the effort worthwhile. Perhaps most relevant here is a ratio, the ratio of self-trust (that one can make progress without their help) vs. trust in others. Of course, pleasure along the way is relevant too: how much joy one gets from puzzling out the details, in the early stages of understanding. But it's hard to imagine such pleasure without an undergirding trust.

It seems to me there's a great divide within philosophy between those with high self- to other-trust ratios and those with low ratios. So I wonder: Is there any way to measure this difference, apart from examining a philosopher's willingness to bang her head against Kant's deductions? Does the difference correlate with any other philosophical or non-philosophical traits or behavior?

What Is an Illusion, Exactly?

I'm confused again. Publicly expressing confusion seems to have become a (perhaps tiresome) professional habit of mine these days.

A classic example of an illusion -- classic in the sense of dating back to ancient Greece, not classic in the sense of central to 20th century perceptual psychology -- is the oar partly submerged in water. Due to (what we now know as) the laws of the refraction of light, the oar typically, in some sense, "looks bent" as it angles into the water. But one might argue (does John Austin argue this?) that that bent appearance is not really an illusion: If one knows enough about the world, one should know that an oar partly submerged in water (seen from a particular viewing angle) should look bent just like that. If it looked straight, I suppose, a longtime oarsman or a person very familiar with the laws of refraction might think the oar looked strange, might even think that it looked like an oar that is actually bent (bent in such a way as to exactly compensate for the bend a straight oar would seem to have at that angle). Perhaps part of what it is for an oar to look straight is for it to also (in a different sense) "look bent" when it is partly submerged in water. (This formulation is indebted to Alva Noe's "dual aspect" view of perspectival appearance.)

So is the skilled oarsman experiencing a visual illusion as he looks at the oar? If we say no, then I'm worried we're off onto a slippery slope to entirely denying the possibility of illusions that are known to be such. When I press gently on the side of one eye, I seem to see double. Is this also no illusion, since I know that's how things are supposed to look when I press on one eye? When I look at the Poggendorff illusion (below) I know that if the upper segment of the line going behind the rectangle really is aligned with the lower segment emerging near the bottom, they should look (in some sense of "look") offset. I've seen this illusion so much that now I think that if I saw a figure of this sort where the lines didn't look (in the relevant sense) offset I would probably infer that they really were offset. Parallel to the oar case, perhaps, what it is for the line segments to look aligned (for me) is for them to look (in a different sense) like they don't align.

(image reproduced from Titchener 1901-1905)

But if the Poggendorff illusion is no illusion for me, then is any illusion an illusion to someone who knows how the illusion works?

So maybe we should say the oarsman does experience illusion. But then there's the risk of a slippery slope on the other side, toward saying that much more is illusory than we ordinarily think. If the bent oar is illusory, it seems that looking at things through a curved glass of water must be, since the refraction similarly distorts things. And then it seems like a magnifying glass held at arm's length similarly creates illusion. But then also does a magnifying glass held near the eye? A telescope? Ordinary corrective lenses?

Do Things Look Flat?

I've posted a draft of Chapter Two of my book in progress (tentatively titled Perplexities of Consciousness). The chapter is titled "Do Things Look Flat?" and is a revision of my 2006 essay of the same title, with a little more nuance and historical depth and a longer discussion of the view (dating back to Ptolemy but peaking, evidently, circa 1900) that most things appear doubled in the visual field. Comments/suggestions/criticisms welcome, of course, either as email or as comments on this post.

Abstract:
Does a penny viewed at an angle in some sense look elliptical, as though projected on a two-dimensional surface? Many philosophers have said such things, from Malebranche (1674/1997) and Hume (1739/1978), through early sense-data theorists, to Tye (2000) and Noë (2004). I confess that it doesn’t seem this way to me, though I’m somewhat baffled by the phenomenology and pessimistic about our ability to resolve the dispute. I raise a geometrical objection to the view and conjecture that, maybe, the view draws some of its appeal from the over-analogizing of visual experience to painting or photography. Theorists writing in contexts where vision is analogized to less projective media – signet ring impressions in wax in ancient Greece, stereoscopy in introspective psychology circa 1900 – seem substantially less likely to attribute such projective distortions to visual appearances. Stereoscope enthusiasts do, however, seem readier than scholars in other eras to attribute a pervasive doubling to visual experience – like the doubling, perhaps, of an unfused image in a stereoscope.

The Strange Stability of UCR's Gourmet Ranking

When I arrived at U.C. Riverside in 1997, we were ranked 34th among U.S. Philosophy Ph.D. programs on in the widely-read Philosophical Gourmet Report. Now we're ranked 30th. In the intervening time, we have hovered steadily between the low 20s and the mid 30s.

Here's a full list of tenured faculty from 1997 who are no longer with the department:

(1.) Bernd Magnus (Nietzsche), retired.

Here's a full list of tenured faculty in 2009 who were not tenured members of the department in 1997:

(1.) Maudemarie Clark (Nietzsche), recruited from Colgate.
(2.) Peter Graham (epistemology), hired as Asst Prof from Stanford, later tenured.
(3.) Agnieszka Jaworska (moral psychology), recruited from Stanford.
(4.) Robin Jeshion (philosophy of language), recruited from Yale.
(5.) John Perry (philosophy of language, only part-time at UCR), recruited from Stanford
(6.) Erich Reck (history of analytic philosophy), present as Asst Prof in 1997, later tenured.
(7.) Eric Schwitzgebel (philosophy of psychology), present as Asst Prof in 1997, later tenured.
(8.) Charles Siewert (philosophy of mind), recruited from Miami.
(9.) Mark Wrathall (Continental philosophy), recruited from BYU.

Also in the intervening years we recruited Gary Watson from UC Irvine and lost him to USC. We also tenured then lost two Assistant Professors (Carl Hoefer and Genoveva Marti) and hired three Assistant Professors who have not yet stood for tenure (William Bracken, Coleen Macnamara, and Michael Nelson).

The tenured professors of 1997 (Carl Cranor, John Fischer, David Glidden, Paul Hoffman, Pierre Keller, Andrews Reath, Georgia Warnke, Howie Wettstein, Larry Wright) have continued to be productive. One measure of this is that all but one of them have produced at least one new book from a leading press in the period (if we count Hoffman's forthcoming book and Wright's influential textbook).

I'd hate to think that my impression that the UCR Philosophy Department has strengthed considerably since 1997 is just another of my self-serving delusions. (Not that I know what the other ones are!) The numbers above at least seem to lend some objectivity to my impression.

So what's the explanation of our virtually unchanged ranking? Not conspiracy, of course, nor the ill will of Brian Leiter (who has spoken kindly of us over the years). Some institutions (for example, USC and Yale) have climbed sharply, so it must be possible. Is the issue, perhaps, that in order to pierce the top 25 a department must have at least one full-time super-heavyweight, and no one in the department is perceived that way? Or were we too highly ranked early on? Or have our peer departments improved just as sharply? Or...? I have a feeling there something to learn here about UCR or about the ranking system....

Update, December 15, 2011:
Between 2009 and 2011 we lost about 25% of our senior faculty. We lost Paul Hoffman (death), Robin Jeshion (USC), Charles Siewert (Rice), and Georgia Warnke (UCR Political Science). Maudemarie Clark went from full-time to 2/3 time. We hired one assistant professor, Josef Muller. In 2009 we were ranked #30. Now we're ranked #31. Not that I'm complaining.

The Consciousness Online Conference

has begun, running through the 27th. Online so far:

Barbara Montero, "Russellian Physicalism"
Gualtiero Piccinini, "First-Person Data, Publicity, and Self-Measurement" (I'm one of the commentators on this one).
Katalin Balog, "In Defense of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy"
Matthew Ivanowich, "A Moderate Representationalism"
Clare Batty, "Scents and Sensibilia"
Dave Beisecker, "Zombies and the Phenomenal Concepts Strategy"
Richard Brown, "Turning the Tables on Dualism"
Derek Ball, "The New New Mysterianism"
Justin Sytsma, "Folk Psychology and Phenomenal Consciousness"
David Rosenthal, "Consciousness and Its Function"

I'm not sure yet what I think of the video format. Reading seems more efficient. But maybe video adds some sort of subtle dimension.

Will You Perceive the Event That Kills You?

from 3quarksdaily. (HT: Josh Rust)

(I think it's going to matter whether the trauma directly involves the perceptual areas of the brain.)

Is Philosophy All in Our Heads?

In a 1998 essay, Alvin Goldman and Joel Pust distinguish between two approaches to philosophy, which they call the mentalist and the extra-mentalist. According to the mentalist, when we do the typical philosophical armchair-reflection thing -- when we think about, for example, whether XYZ on Twin Earth (which behaves like water but has a different chemical formula) is water or not, or when we think about whether a dude who doesn't realize he's in Fake Barn Country knows that the real barn he's looking at is a barn -- we are finding out something not about the world outside of us, but rather about our minds. We are finding out about our concepts. According to the extra-mentalist, in contrast, philosophical thought experiments aim to reveal something about the world beyond our minds -- something about the real nature of water and knowledge, perhaps, or about what is and isn't possible. Goldman and Pust endorse mentalism.

Mentalism has the following great advantage over extra-mentalism: Mentalism makes it clear how it's possible for philosophers to learn something from their armchairs. What they are learning is about their own minds. They're exploring their concepts. It's much less clear how reflecting in an armchair can deliver what the extra-mentalist wants, valuable information about the world beyond our minds. But there are two equally great disadvantages to the mentalist conception of philosophy. First, it trivializes the subject matter. Where we thought we were learning about the world -- about the nature of language, of knowledge, of the fundamental constituents of reality, of the morally good -- it turns out that we're only learning about our concepts of language, of knowledge, of the fundamental constituents of reality, of the morally good. A very different sort of thing. How disappointing!

The second disadvantage of the mentalist conception is this: It turns philosophy into a methodologically dubious species of psychology. If what we're really interested in is our concepts, is sitting in an armchair thinking about Twin Earth really the best way to go about it? Well, that's one way. But empirical psychology offers us a whole stable of other ways, including polling people about puzzle cases, studying reaction times, asking people to list features in terms of typicality, etc. Armchair reflection about weird possibilities, by people who generally have some theoretical skin in the game, does perhaps have something important to contribute to the study of human concepts, but at most it is one part of a larger enterprise that is probably best left in the hands of psychologists.

So I think we must have an "extra-mentalist" conception of philosophy. Philosophers are trying to learn, not just about what concepts our human minds happen to be stuck with, but about reality as it exists beyond our minds -- and within our minds, possibly beyond our conceptions. But then that forces us back to the question of how reflecting in an armchair about strange scenarios, which is a large proportion of what mainstream "analytic" philosophers do, puts us in touch with that reality. My thought is: It doesn't. Well, let me temper that just a bit. Armchair reflection gives us a preliminary take; it helps us develop and discover the consequences of the views that we have inherited or acquired through everyday experience. In those domains where such inherited, everyday views are well-founded (e.g., the behavior of middle-sized dry goods under moderate force, mundane social interactions), our armchair judgments are likely also to be well-founded. The further we get from the ordinary, however, the less we should expect such armchair reflections to be of value. And unfortunately, most philosophical thought experiments are far from the ordinary.

Recoloring the Dreamworld

I'm hard at work these days on my second book, tentatively titled Perplexities of Consciousness. Chapter One, "Recoloring the Dreamworld", draws from these three earlier essays, integrating, updating, and adding new reflections. I've posted it here.

The chapter treats the rise and fall of the view, widespread in the U.S. circa 1950, that dreams are primarily a black and white phenomenon. I argue that it's likely that dreams themselves did not change over the course of the 20th century, but rather that what changed was only people's opinions about their dreams. The view that dreams are black and white was most likely due to an overanalogizing of dreams to the black and white film media dominant at the time. It's also possible, I suggest, that the contemporary view that dreams are in color -- as opposed to leaving unspecified the color of most of the objects represented -- is also due to overanalogizing to film media.

Corrections and objections welcomed, of course, either here or by email. (Unalloyed praise is of course also welcomed, though less useful!)

Anxiety, Neurosis, Noctural Female Orgasm, and Sabbatical

In rereading some of the old literature on black and white dreaming I came across this:

Perhaps the most striking finding in the present study, however, is that of the high incidence of nocturnal orgasms reported by female neurotics (47 per cent) as opposed to the incidence reported by female controls (8 per cent) (Tapia, Werboff, and Winokur 1958, p. 122).

In clarifying what they mean by "noctural orgasms" Tapia et al. say "A positive response was counted when a subject reported experiencing 'wet dreams', climaxes, or orgasms in his [sic] sleep or dreams" (p. 121). By "neurotic" of course they mean... well, who knows?

Eight vs. 47? Six times higher? Presumably it's not as fun to be a waking "neurotic" as a waking non-neurotic, but it sounds like in sleep the situation is reversed! Or are neurotic women just more likely to report nocturnal orgasms? Well, why would that be?

Winokur, Guze, and Pfeiffer (1959) extend the Tapia et al. results to include "psychotic" women too (perhaps a better-defined group than neurotic), reporting nocturnal orgasm rates of 42% in that group, 46% in neurotics, and 6% in psychologically healthy women. Henton (1976) also reports a positive relationship between high levels of reported anxiety and high levels of reported "sexual excitement during sleep" (though, um, unless I'm reading things very wrong, the numbers on his key table seem to run the other direction; this is what I get for reading crappy journals). Finally (the last report on this topic I can find) Wells (1986) finds anxiety to be predictive of reported nocturnal orgasm in a complex multiple regression taking into account "age, marital status, race, religious affiliation, religiosity, liberal or conservative political views, and hometown population" (p. 428) and 71 other variables including even views about the normality of noctural orgasm, sexual satifaction, and frequency of awakening with non-orgasmic sexual excitement. (I'm not sure I'd have wanted to "control" for those last variables in determining influence on orgasm, since they seem likely to cohere with rather than to confound the factor under study, but what the heck -- even so, Wells got her result.)

This is what you get when you let professors take sabbatical. It turns out they have nothing better to do all day than chase down weird literature on female orgasm.

(I'm not entirely without excuse: Lisa Lloyd was my dissertation chair, and I thought it might make a good footnote.)

The Legend of the Leaning Behaviorist

I've heard this story orally a couple of times. I wonder if any of you know whether it's actually true. Let's call it the "The Legend of the Leaning Behaviorist".

Once upon a time, long ago and far away -- actually, circa 1960 at a prominent U.S. university -- there lived a behavioral psychologist, an expert in the shaping of animal behavior by means of reward and punishment. One semester, when he was teaching a large lecture course, his students tried an experiment on him. Without letting him know, they decided that when he was lecturing on the left of side of the room, they would smile and nod a bit more often than usual. Conversely, when was on the right, they would knit their brows and look away. Soon, all the lectures were delivered from the left. The students then altered their strategy. Whenever he moved to the left, they would smile and nod; whenever he moved to the right, they would knit their brows. The result was that he drifted ever more leftward, until by the end of the term, he was lecturing while leaning against the left wall. On the last day of class, one of the students asked him why he was lecturing from over there, and he said, "Oh, I don't know. It's close to the ashtray."

The Dust Hypothesis

Consider the following argument:

(1.) It doesn't matter what your mind is made of, as long as the functional relationships between your mental states and the inputs and outputs are right. A conscious person could be made of carbon-based molecules with an organic brain, or of silicon chips in a robot body, or of suitably complex magnetic iron structures. If a being dependably acts like a sophisticated, conscious, intelligent being, it is a sophisticated, conscious, intelligent being. (Searle would disagree with this, but it is the majority view in philosophy of mind and standard in fictional portrayals of android and alien intelligences.) Let's call each temporal slice of such a being a "cognitive state".

(2.) The cognitive states (or temporal slices) of people can be temporally or spatially distributed. If a being of the sort in (1) exists for only one second out of every ten, it is still a conscious, intelligent being, just one with temporal gaps in it -- gaps the being itself may not notice. Likewise, if the being is partly instantiated in Paris and partly in Rio, with the two parts in constant communication, reacting in a co-ordinated way to produce the right sort of behavior, that also does not deprive it of consciousness and intelligence. (Something like this is suggested by Dennett.)

(3.) Furthermore, the objective temporal order of cognitive states is irrelevant. If input 1 ("How are you?") is followed by cognitive states 2, 3, and 4, then by output 5 ("Better, now that you've stopped kicking me!"), it shouldn't matter if as measured by the objective time of the outside world, state 3 comes before state 2, as long as in terms of subjective time and cognitive sequence state 2 comes first. (Dennett, again, is useful here. It's a little tricky to figure out what subjective time and cognitive sequence are independent of objective temporal order; but the conclusion of the argument can be weakened to dispense with this premise if necessary.)

(4.) Also, actual connection to the outside world is irrelevant. You could still have the intelligence and consciousness you now in fact have if your cognitive states were instantiated in a brain in a vat. (Here we may be departing from Dennett; but even if, as Dennett's student Noe and others have argued, some environmental connections are essential to mindedness, we can probably still run the argument I'm interested in. We just turn it into brain-and-relevant-bit-of-the-environment in a vat. We could also dispense with certain "externally defined" mental states and still have an interesting version of the conclusion if necessary.)

(5.) If all this is true, it appears to invite the following conclusion: As long as somewhere in the universe, in some temporal order there exists a functional equivalent of each of your cognitive states, no matter where, in what material, or how grossly distributed over time and space, then there is a mental duplicate of you in existence.

(6.) Then, finally: In all the spatial and temporal vastness of the universe, each of your cognitive states will be instantiated somewhere other than your own brain, in vastly different times and locations.

(7.) So, there is a mental duplicate of you spread out across space and time.

(8.) And this generalizes: There are many, many such people; the universe (at least the complex bits of it) is permeated with them; they include many possible alternative versions of you; etc.

Call this the Dust Hypothesis, after science fiction writer Greg Egan's similar Dust Hypothesis in his book Permutation City.

Assuming the conclusion is absurd, the question is where to put on the brakes. My own inclination is either (1), following Searle, or (5), or (6). On 6: Perhaps the functional relationships necessary for sophisticated, conscious thought are so complex that even in the vast universe they would not be instantiated except in coherent, brain-like packages. But maybe that underestimates the vastness and complexity of the universe?

On (5): Perhaps actual causation between cognitive states is necessary to mentality and consciousness, not just the instantiation of those states with the right counterfactual and dispositional relationships. But I worry. Couldn't there be a mental being causally truncated on one end (brought suddenly into being by freak quantum accident, like Swampman), or on the other (destroyed suddenly by lightning), or both (thus existing for only a moment)? Or what if you have an idea due to stroke or quantum accident (and then maybe the idea vanishes for similar reasons)? Or suppose that you are destroyed and merely by chance a duplicate of you is simultaneously created elsewhere -- wouldn't there be a stream of mentality that transitioned from one to the other? (Could you tell? Would it matter deeply to you whether the duplicate came about by chance or design?) Then generalize. It's a complex issue, but for reasons like those, I'm inclined to think that the actual instantiation of dispositional and functional structures, even if they're not actually causally connected, is enough for interesting and subjectively continuous mentality (even if some externally defined states like genuine [as opposed to apparent] memory require actual causation). But then if we grant (1) and (6) and the others, we seem to be back to the Dust Hypothesis.

Open Courseware in Philosophy

A reader just forwarded me this list of Top 100 Open Courseware links in Theology and Philosophy, including syllabae and the professors' lecture notes or overheads. The philosophy sections are dominated by MIT.

Introspection: A Draft Entry for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

... is now up here. It is, I'm afraid, monstrously long (85 double-spaced manuscript pages, about 21,000 words). Hopefully it's well enough organized that people can locate the section most relevant to their interests and read it in isolation. I saved for the end of the entry my own material on our poor knowledge of our own stream of conscious experience.

There are always trade-offs between accuracy, comprehensiveness, readability, and length, and I'm not sure I consistently found the right balance. Feedback welcome!

NEH Summer Seminar on Experimental Philosophy

Ron Mallon and Shaun Nichols are putting together an NEH summer seminar on Experimental Philosophy. NEH summer seminars are seminars for faculty across the country to learn about or deepen their knowledge of a particular topic in the humanities. I participated in one in 1999 (Robert Gordon 's on folk psychology), and it was great fun. It was almost like going to college again. Those of us who chose to live in the dormrooms did frosh-like things like sneak in liquor late at night and gossip over breakfast.

Here's their blurb:

Experimental Philosophy is a new movement that uses experiments to address traditional philosophical questions. Although the movement is only a few years old, it has attracted prolific practitioners as well as ardent critics. (For more about Experimental Philosophy, see the recent article in the New York Times or the ongoing discussion at the Experimental Philosophy Blog.)

This summer, the NEH is sponsoring an Institute on Experimental Philosophy. The Institute will bring in over a dozen distinguished guest faculty, who will present their latest research across a wide range of issues and perspectives. The Institute will also provide participants with the opportunity to learn experimental methods that are used in Experimental Philosophy.

The Institute will take place in Salt Lake City from June 22-July 17 2009. Eligible participants must have a teaching position at a U.S. college or university. The deadline for application is March 2. More information about the Institute, as well as application materials, are available here.

Joshua Knobe and Alison Gopnik Debating Children's and Scientific Thinking

... on bloggingheads.tv. Two of my favorite scholars!

Josh says that ordinary reasoning about mental states is unlike scientific reasoning because our reasoning about mental states is influenced by our moral judgments (as his work suggests) while scientific reasoning is not so influenced. Alison, in contrast, is a leading proponent of the view that scientific reasoning and ordinary reasoning have much in common, especially in children. Josh plays the role of interviewer and lets Alison do most of the talking.

Near the end, Alison touches briefly on what I think is the key flaw on Josh's argument, the unwarranted assumption that scientific reasoning is not much influenced by moral judgments. In my view -- and I think this is now the majority view in philosophy of science -- scientific thinking is, and should be, thoroughly permeated with emotion and morality. The old model of the impartial, objective scientific observer cannot be sustained. So there's no reason Josh's findings about the effects of moral judgments on ordinary reasoning have to stand in conflict with Alison's view of the continuity of scientific and everyday reasoning.

The Gender Migration of Names

Noticing my son's playmates and classmates, the following thought occurs to me: Didn't Sidney used to be a man's name? And August? And Loren?

Being an empirically-minded philosopher (and one with a little time away from classes), I had to check. I went to the U.S. Social Security Administration's baby names site and I looked up the 1000 most popular boy and girl baby names for 1900 and for 2000. August, to my surprise, didn't rate among the top 1000 girls' names (though I know two young Augusts, both girls), but Sidney and Loren both made the gender switch. In 1900, Sidney was #108 among boy names and #777 among girls. By 2000, the ratio had flipped to #594 for boys and #264 for girls. Same with Sydney: In 1900 #730 among boys, unranked among girls; in 2000, unranked among boys and a startling #23 among girls. Loren/Lauren pulled the same trick: In 1900, #342 and #943 for boys, unranked for girls; in 2000, #704 and #11 for girls, unranked for boys.

In other words, Loren/Lauren and Sidney/Sydney went from being modestly popular boys' names to being leading girls' names. But does it ever go the other way around? Do girls' names ever become boys' names? I wouldn't think so: Calling a girl "Joe" (or "Jo") or "Jack" ("Jaq") is cute; calling a boy "Anna" or "Mary" doesn't have quite the same effect. In fact, it might be perceived as something like a lifetime curse.

So I ran a few analyses. In the SSA lists, I found 26 names that switched from masculine in 1900 to feminine in 2000 and 4 that went the other way. (That's p < .0001 on the binomial test, by the way, if you want the statistics.) Here they are:

Male to Female:
(apologies for the small reproduction: click to enlarge)As is evident from this list, 5 of the top 25 girls' names in 2000 (Madison, Taylor, Lauren, Sydney, Morgan) were boys' names in 1900! The gender migration of girls' names to boys' names looks very different.These seem to be aberrations, not a trend. Two appear to be due to an increasing acceptability of "-ie" and not just "-y" as a proper spelling of the long-e suffix for male names. The other two are due to the precipitous decline of "Jean" and "Joan" as girls' names, coupled presumably with the retention of those names as foreign equivalents of the durably and internationally popular boys' name "John". None ranks among the top 500 boys' names.

I can't resist concluding with the thought that if trends continue, someday every Tom, Dick, and Harry will be a girl.

Andrew Sullivan on "Why I Blog"

here. Insights on the nature and advantages of the medium. Much, but not all, applies to academic blogs.

From my first post in April 2006 through our adoption of Kate in March 2008, I posted relentlessly Mon-Wed-Fri. Now it's more like once a week. I suspect that not only the one-year-old child but also the new ipod have cut into my blogging: Many blogging ideas used to come during morning walks, which are now sometimes filled with Frank Sinatra, Al Stewart, or This American Life instead. I haven't decided if this is a good thing or bad.

Oh, and Happy (recent or continuing) Whatever! (Global Orgasm Day, for example.)

Zhuangzi: Big and Useless -- and Not So Good at Catching Rats

[Cross-posted at Manyul Im's Chinese Philosophy Blog]

Okay, I've written about this before; but, to my enduring amazement, not everyone agrees with me. The orthodox interpretation of Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) puts skillful activity near the center of Zhuangzi's value system. (The orthodoxy here includes Graham, Ivanhoe, Roth, and many others, including Velleman in a recent article I objected to in another connection.)

Here is one reason to be suspicious of this orthdoxy: Examples of skillful activity are rare in the Inner Chapters, the authentic core of Zhuangzi's book. And the one place in the Inner Chapters where Zhuangzi does indisputably praise skillful activity is in an oddly truncated chapter, with a title and message ("caring for life") suggestive of the early, immature Zhuangzi (if one follows Graham in seeing Zhuangzi as originally a Yangist). Even the term "wu wei", often stressed in skill-based interpretations as indicating a kind of spontaneous responsiveness, only appears three times in the Inner Chapters, and never in a way that indisputably means anything other than literally "doing nothing".

Zhuangzi writes:

Maybe you've never seen a wildcat or a weasel. It crouches down and hides, watching for something to come along. It leaps and races east and west, not hesitating to go high or low -- untill it falls into the trap and dies in the net. Then again there's the yak, big as a cloud covering the sky. It certainly knows how to be big, though it doesn't know how to catch rats (Watson trans., Complete, p. 35).

On the one hand, we have the skill of the weasel, which Zhuangzi does not seem to be urging us to imitate; and on the other hand we have the yak who knows how to... how to do what? How to be big! It has no useful skills -- it cannot carve oxen, guide a boat, or carve a wheel -- and in this respect, Zhuangzi says it is like the "big and useless" trees that repeatedly occur in the text, earning Zhuangzi's praise. Zhuangzi continues:

Now you have this big tree and you're distressed because it's useless. Why don't you plant it in Not-Even-Anything Village, or the field of Broad-and-Boundless, relax and do nothing by its side, or lie down for a free and easy sleep under it? (ibid.)

That is the core of Zhuangzi, I submit -- not the skillful activity of craftsmen, but lazy, lounging bigness!

Where else does Zhuangzi talk about skill in the Inner Chapters? He describes the skill of a famous lute player, a music master, and Huizi the logician as "close to perfection", yet he calls the lute-playing "injury" and he says these three "ended in the foolishness of 'hard' and 'white' [i.e., meaningless logical distinctions]" (p. 41-42). Also: "When men get together to pit their strength in games of skill, they start off in a light and friendly mood, but usually end up in a dark and angry one, and if they go on too long they start resorting to various underhanded tricks" (p. 60-61). He repeatedly praises amputees and "cripples" who appear to have no special skills. Although he praises abilities such as floating on the wind (p. 32) and entering water without getting wet (p. 77), these appear to be magical powers rather than perfections of skill, along the lines of having "skin like ice or snow" and being impervious to heat (p. 33); and its unclear the extent to which he seriously believes in such abilities.

How did the orthodox view arise, then? I suspect it's mostly due to overemphasizing the dubious Outer and Mixed Chapters and conflating Zhuangzi's view with that of the more famous "Daoist" Laozi (Lao Tzu). Since this happened early in the interpretive tradition, it has the additional force of inertia.

Keith Frankish Replies to Dominic Murphy on Mind and Supermind

... new in the Underblog.

Do Chinese Philosophers Think Tilted Coins Look Elliptical?

[Cross posted at Manyul Im's Chinese Philosophy Blog]

In my 2006 essay "Do Things Look Flat?", I examine some of the cultural history of the opinion that visual appearances involve what I call "projective distortions" -- the opinion, that is, that tilted coins look elliptical, rows of streetlights look like they shrink into the distance, etc. I conjecture that our inclination to say such things is due to overanalogizing visual experience to flat, projective media like paintings and photographs. In support of this conjecture, I contrast the contemporary and early modern periods (in the West) with ancient Greece and introspective psychology circa 1900. In the first two cultures, one finds both a tendency to compare visual experience to pictures and a tendency to describe visual experience as projectively distorted. In the latter two cultures, one finds little of either, despite plenty of talk about visual appearances in general.

I didn't do a systematic search of classical Chinese philosophy, which I love but which has less epistemology of perception, but I did find one relevant passage:

If you look down on a herd of cows from the top of a hill, they will look no bigger than sheep, and yet no one hoping to find sheep is likely to run down the hill after them. It is simply that the distance obscures their actual size. If you look up at a forest from the foot of a hill, the biggest trees appear no taller than chopsticks, and yet no one hoping to find chopsticks is likely to go picking among them. It is simply that the height obscures their actual dimensions (Xunzi ch. 21; Basic Writings, Watson trans., p. 134)

Though I can recall no ancient Chinese comparisons of visual experience and painting, both Xunzi and Zhuangzi compare the mind to a pan of water which can reflect things accurately or inaccurately, an analogy that seems related (Xunzi ibid. p. 131, ch. 25, Knoblock trans. 1999, p. 799; Zhuangzi, Watson trans., Complete Works, p. 97). In medieval China, which I know much less about, I noticed Wang Yangming saying such a comparison was commonplace (Instructions for Practical Living, Chan trans., p. 45).

So my question is, for those of you who know more Chinese philosophy than I, are there other passages I should be looking at -- either on perspectival shape or size distortion or on analogies for visual experience? I'm revising the essay for a book chapter and I'd like to expand my discussion to China if I can find enough material. Any help would be much appreciated!

(I also wouldn't mind more help on Greek passages, too, if anyone has the inclination. Some of the more obvious passages are Plato's discussion of painters in the Republic and Sophist, Aristotle's discussion of sensory experience as like impressions in wax, Sextus's lists of sensory distortions in experience and his discussions of wax impressions, Epicurus's discussions of the transmission of images, discussions of the sun as looking "one foot wide", and Euclid's and Ptolemy's optics.)

Being Thirsty and Thinking You're Thirsty

Here's a passage from David Velleman's recent essay, "The Way of the Wanton" that caught my attention (earning a rare four hm's in the margin, plus a question mark and exclamation point):

Attentively reflecting on one's thirst entails standing back from it, for several reasons. First, the content of one's reflective thoughts is not especially expressive of the motive on which one is reflecting: "I am thirsty" is not an especially thirsty thought, not necessarily the the thought of someone thinking thirstily. Second, attentive reflection is itself an activity -- a mental activity -- and, as such, it requires a motive, which, of course, is not thirst. Reflecting on one's thirst is, therefore, a distraction from acting on one's thirst, and in that respect is even a distraction from being thirsty. Most importantly, though, consciousness just seems to open a gulf between subject and object, even when its object is the subject himself. Consciousness seems to have the structure of vision, requiring its object to stand across from the viewer -- to occupy the position of the Gegenstand (p. 181, emphasis in original).

Let's go one point at a time.

Does reflecting on thirst entail "standing back" from it? It's not clear what this metaphor means, though Velleman's subsquent three reasons help clarify. But before we get to those reasons, let's just wallow in the metaphor a bit: Standing back from one's thirst. I don't want to be too unsympathetic here. The metaphor is inviting in a way. But I at least don't feel I have the kind of rigorous understanding I'd want of this idea, as a philosopher.

On to the reasons:

(1.) Per Velleman: "I am thirsty" is not an especially thirsty thought, not necessarily the thought of something thinking thirstily.

Walking across campus, I see a water fountain. The sentence "Damn, I'm thirsty!" springs to mind as I head for a drink. Is this not a thirsty thought? It seems reflective of thirst; it probably reinforces the thirst and helps push along the thirst-quenching behavior -- so it's thirsty enough, I'd say. Is it not a thought, then -- or at least not a thought in the self-reflective sense Velleman evidently has in mind here? Maybe, for example, it's simply expressive and not introspective, an outburst like "ow!" when you stub your toe, but as it were an inner outburst? (Is that too oxymoronic?)

So let's try it more introspectively. As it happens, I've been introspecting my thirst quite a bit in writing this post, and despite having had a drink just a few minutes ago I find myself almost desperately thirsty....

Okay, I'm back. (Yes, I dashed off to the fountain.)

All right, I just don't get this point. Or I do get it and it just seems plain wrong.

(2.) Per Velleman: Attentive reflection is a mental activity that requires a motive, which is of course not thirst. It's a distraction both from acting on one's thirst and from being thirsty.

Does mental activity require a motive? If an image of a Jim wearing a duck-hat comes to mind unbidden as I talk to Jim, need there be a motive? (Or is that not "mental activity"?) And even if there is a motive for reflecting on one's thirst, why can't that motive sometimes be thirst itself? For example, reflecting on my thirst might be a means to achieving drink -- for example, it might help ensure that I order something to drink at the restaurant. And as such, it needn't be a distraction from acting on one's thirst; it might be part of so acting. And finally, is it a distraction from being thirsty? Well, not in my experience! Darn, I'm getting thirsty again! I can imagine a kind of contemplative attention to one's thirst (as to one's pain) that in a certain way renders that thirst (or pain) less compelling. Maybe something like that is achieved in certain sorts of meditation. But that doesn't seem to me the standard case.

(3.) Per Velleman: Consciousness opens a gulf between subject and object, requiring its object to stand across from the viewer.

Huh? There's nothing wrong with metaphor per se, but they're hard to work with when you don't see eye to eye. Velleman develops the metaphor a bit in the next paragraph: As a subject of thirst, thirst is not in one's "field of view" -- rather things like water-fountains are. In self-reflection, one's thirst is in the field of view. Now this seems to me mainly a way of saying that one is not thinking about one's thirst in the first case and one is thinking about it in the second. (Is there more to it than that? If so, tell me.) But then that brings us back to the issue in (2): Is there a competition, as Velleman seems to believe, between feeling thirst and acting thirsty, on the one hand, and thinking about one's thirst on the other hand? Or do the two normally complement and co-operate?

Can we venture an empirical prediction here? If I suggest to subjects that think about whether they are thirsty, then set them free, will they be more or less likely to stop by the fountain on their way out than subjects I invite to think about something else? I'm pretty sure which way this one will turn out. Now I suspect this test wouldn't be fair to Velleman for some reason. (Maybe the suggestion will also affect thirst itself and not just reflection on it?) So if one of you is sympathetic to him, maybe you can help me out....

By the way, did I mention that this is a delightful and engaging article?