The Sequential Philosopher

philosophy of technology postmortem

2010-05-04T09:39:00.000-07:00

Last week was the last week of teaching for Spring semester. I asked the students in my Philosophy of Technology course P.D.'s end of term questions:

What authors from the course would you strongly recommending keeping? Which are particularly insightful and valuable to read now?

Which authors would you recommend leaving out next time? Which seem like historical relics with nothing insightful to offer?

(Here's my syllabus for comparison.)

Here are the highlights:

             yay   boo
Heidegger     12     2
Kurzweil      12     6
Dewey         11     1
Mitcham       11     1
Marcuse        9     1
D. Haraway     7     2
Latour         6     3
A. Borgmann    6     0
W. Berry       6     7
H. Dreyfus     1     5

L. Winner      5     2
Habermas       4     1
Ellul          2     3
Feenberg       2     5
Ortega         1     4

D. Browning    4     3
McDermott      3     4
Hickman        1     5

A few interesting things show up, here. I'm rather impressed by the allegiance to Heidegger, given how much we all struggled with it. And the Dreyfus essay we read on Heidegger, which I thought did a lot to help make Heidegger clear, was pretty much panned! (In the same vein, Dewey did well, but Hickman didn't.)

The popularity of Kurzweil is no surprise, as it was a very accessible and exciting book; nor is the fact that a number of students disliked it. I'm really surprised by the number of people who like Carl Mitcham's book. I thought it was a terrible mess myself, full of too-brief summaries of too many figures in a loose organization. Perhaps it is just a reflection of how important it is to have a general secondary source book in a course like this. My inclination is to try to find a better one.

Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway both did remarkably well, considering, especially since I spent very little time on Haraway.

Of the readings that got 12+ responses, Wendell Berry's short piece, "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer" was clearly the most controversial. This may be a result of the fact that few students agreed with Berry, but we had a pretty good discussion.

I put that second group aside to show how the "major" philosophers of technology tended to get a fairly lukewarm response. Heidegger, Dewey, Mitcham, Marcuse, and Borgmann are all canonical figures (such as they are) that did fairly well. Winner did okay, and Habermas, Ellul, Feenberg, and Ortega y Gasset didn't do so hot. Likewise, the third group, which are the Americanists (besides Dewey), didn't do so hot.

I haven't talked much to P.D. about how he's used the results of these little questionnaires, but I'm sort of more inclined to keep the controversial or even negatively-ranked authors if they got a very high response rate – it means they had an impact – while junking those that got very low responses, suggesting that students weren't made to care one way or the other.

Also, one student wrote in that next time I should add McLuhan and Derrida to the list.

Opportunity Lost

2010-05-02T18:10:00.000-07:00

I received the following unfortunate announcement in my inbox today:

Following nearly fifty years of self-publication, The Southern Journal of Philosophy now appears under the imprint of its new publisher, Wiley-Blackwell. Through increased exposure and assorted logistical and cosmetic updates, the partnership with Wiley-Blackwell promises to broaden the appeal and deepen the impact of the work published in the SJP.

This seems like a move in precisely the wrong direction! I don't have anything personal or professional invested in SJP (I've read a couple of good articles originally printed there, I think), but going from self-publication to a major publishing house is terrible news (whatever one things of Wiley-Blackwell compared to other such publishers). This is a time when the field really needs high-quality, open access journals. It is a time when whole electronic systems for manuscript submission and review can be got cheaply, if not free via open source software. It is a time when online publication is free and easy, and print-on-demand publishing can be had at a reasonable price if a paper copy of the journal is a must. And, as ever, all of the substantive intellectual labor of review and editing is done more or less pro bono by the editorial staff and volunteer referees, and perhaps a couple of meagerly-rewarded graduate students.

So it's really unfortunate in this situation that SJP is going in the direction of more traditional publishing. What a lost opportunity.

Dewey's child-raising practices

2009-11-08T14:09:00.000-08:00

One "liberated" practice that would surely have shocked their Ann Arbor neighbors, had they known of it, was alluded to much later in a letter by Dewey to W.E. Hocking. He told the somewhat genteel philosopher that "during the critical years of the sex-development of their children, Mrs. Dewey and he would go around the house in the nude." (Joseph Ratner believed that this was the reason the children talked about sex so freely.)

Jay Martin, The Education of John Dewey, 132-3.

For Sabrina

2009-11-08T14:00:00.000-08:00

I am thinking of you, and my darling I do want you so this evening.... Oh, sweetheart, you are the centre of everything, so that my being would be torn by its attraction to its centre, were you not the circumference of everything also. My own self, I love you---and it is hard to be without one's self. My own life, I love you---and it is hard to live without one's life. But darling you are my self and my life and so I can be and live.... Darling, how did you ever manage to do away with and put out of sight so thoroughly my old doing & my old thinking, and fill my self so full of you? [You] ... found a home for me, who had been homeless before, because I was always looking for you.

-- John Dewey to Alice Chipman, Christmas 1885, quoted in Jay Martin, The Education of John Dewey, pp. 91-2.

Sweetheart, I have found that I am only an abstractly subjective standpoint without you.

-- John Dewey to Alice Chipman, Christmas 1885 (?), quoted in Martin p. 103

Dewey Birthday Conference, Day II, part 1

2009-10-24T05:30:00.000-07:00

This is my second post about the Dewey sesquicentennial conference. Read day 1 here.

Yesterday began with Ruth Anna Putnam on "Dewey's Faith," continuing the discussion from last night by Larry Hickman. Overall, the conversation convinced me that I need to read and take more seriously Dewey's A Common Faith.

Putnam started with a general description of Dewey's naturalism:

No appeal to supernatural entities could play a role in solving philosophical problem.
Belief in a supernatural being had pernicious effects on one's ability to deal with personal and social problems.

Then she argued that Dewey, following James, thought that experiences appropriately called "religious" are found in all communities. Such experience is valuable, and would be moreso if free from traditional religion & the supernaturalism, which simply hinder what is valuable in genuine religious experience and religious practice.

What is valuable about the religious experience? Not its cause or quality, but its effects. It leads to positive readjustment in one's attitude to life. Such an adjustment is very important. One sees the things one values forming a unified whole, in terms of a unified and unifying ideal. Such ideals, Dewey was always keen to argue, have important effects in concrete life, by which we judge them.

Examples of the "religious life," in Dewey's sense, can be found in art, science, and good citizenship. That's because all of these ways of life are guided by ideal ends. Dewey wrote A Common Faith to make explicit the implicit "religious" values (ideal ends) in science and our common life, especially democracy. We seek truth, beauty, justice, a common good. We have faith in the world's amenability to scientific inquiry; we have faith in the power of democracy. We learn these faiths, not blindly, but slowly, given their value as organizing principles in out lives.

Next up, I'll talk about the panel sessions...

Dewey Birthday Conference, Day I

2009-10-22T20:19:00.000-07:00

Today was the first day of the Dewey Sesquicentennial Conference. You can see my play-by-play thoughts on my Twitter account, but I thought I'd do a quick wrap-up of my thoughts before hitting the bed. Of course, I'm paraphrasing what I took them to be saying, and I may have gotten it quite wrong. This is how it sounded to me and what I thought.

Paul Kurtz gave the first lecture, "Looking Ahead: What are the Prospects for Dewey’s Philosophy in the Future?" This was full of personal anecdotes about Dewey (Kurtz met Dewey when Kurtz was a grad student at Columbia), some quite general comments about Dewey's philosophy, and some reflections on how our current situation, especially the difference in our scientific knowledge after the last 50 years or so, changes the way that we think about Dewey's philosophy.

What Kurtz said was that we know much more about just how contingent the evolution of the human species has been, and now that we have a less romantic account of it than even the early Darwinians, we can see just how uncertain human prospects are. What will come hinges on unpredictable contingencies. Dewey's philosophy gives us a way of understanding ourselves and the world that gives full credence to this, while nevertheless providing some sense of hope.

I would add that most philosophers, who fail to recognize the degree of precariousness and uncertainty in nature, and who give a relatively rosy picture of the likelihood of the growth of knowledge and justice, are deluding themselves.

What Kurtz thinks we need to add to Dewey is a kind of "planetary ethos," which seems like it combines universal empathy for all human beings, and something like a Leopoldian "land ethic," a sense of our responsibility to the natural world.

Larry Hickman then gave a talk on "John Dewey's Spiritual Values." I've heard Hickman speak before and I always consider it a pleasure. At the beginning, he mentioned several projects ongoing at the Center for Dewey Studies. Most exciting, from my perspective, is that they're going to be publishing a bunch of Dewey's lecture notes. Apparently, Dewey's students hired professional stenographers, and the Center has that stuff.

According to Hickman, Dewey was opposed militant atheism and militant supernaturalism. If we understand "atheism" to mean simply, not a theist, then Dewey admits that he is an atheist. But, Dewey said, the popular meaning of atheism is denial of all ideal values, and I'm not an atheist in that sense. Dewey's "spirituality" is thus a kind of "moral idealism," an insistence on the reality of moral ideals.

Now, Dewey was aware that "spiritual" is a problematic term, with a long history of abuse. The problem is that there has been an unwarranted separation of spiritual from material. So spiritual/ideal values are seen as separate from material world. Dewey thinks there is something to our use of "spirituality" that is important, that militant atheism doesn't capture.

According to Hickman, Dewey's conception of spiritual values are just as relevant today, situated as we are in the cultural battleground between religious fundamentalists and the New Atheists.

There was some really interesting discussion after this, though I must admit it was getting a bit late in the day for me to process it very well. I'll just reproduce the notes I have on three key points, paraphrasing what I took them to be saying:

Paul Kurtz: There's a crisis in secular humanism. We need a "natural reverence" that the New Atheists cannot capture.

Larry Hickman: There's "spirituality" in the sense of moral ideals, and in the sense of wonder. Dewey wanted to capture both. And "spiritual" can act as an important talisman for coalition building with religious humanists.

Philip Kitcher: Values aren't beliefs; commitments, promises, hopes, emotions are the right cognitive attitudes. The problem with the New Atheism is they identify religion w/ a set of beliefs. But it's also community structure, values, hopes, etc. James and Dewey saw this clearly. This is one reason that A Common Faith is so valuable.

Looking forward to a full day tomorrow!

John Dewey's 150th Birthday Celebration (10/22-24)

2009-10-21T19:34:00.000-07:00

This weekend, I'm going to be at John Dewey's 150th Birthday Celebration: An International Conference on Dewey's Impact on America and the World. I'm going to be presenting a paper, "Dewey on Science", which lays out some of the key features of Dewey's philosophy of science, with some special reference to issues of concern for contemporary debates about science. Largely, the focus will be on giving a systematic explanation of the core of Dewey's philosophy of science, though of course in a 20 minute conference paper, some important stuff will be left out.

I'll be blogging about the conference live, here and on twitter, as much as possible.

How-To Automate UT-Dallas Proxy Server

2009-10-12T22:51:00.000-07:00

So, among many of the things that is difficult to navigate about the library at the University of Texas at Dallas is the library proxy. They provide no way of configuring a proxy for your browser or any kind of PAC script, nor is there any all-purpose link on their website, or even a VPN, so far as I can determine. You have to go through the library website to get the link to the journal. As a result, if, say, someone links to a journal on their webpage, or a friend links to a Chronicle article on facebook, it's basically not worth your time to actually try and get there through the obvious channels. Hacking around it even proved fairly difficult, due to the fact that UTD uses a suffix proxy system. Here's how I finally figured out my way around the problem for Firefox.

First, I looked at some links from the library website to outside journals and databases. I noticed that they tend to look like this:

http://chronicle.com.libproxy.utdallas.edu/article/Wanted-Female-Philosophers/48729/
http://www.jstor.org.libproxy.utdallas.edu

Noting the similarity, I decided to navigated on over to http://libproxy.utdallas.edu . This gives a big old list of electronic journals and databases, with several links that are out of date. But I noticed a common pattern here. All the links were to:

http://libproxy.utdallas.edu/login?url=http://www.jstor.org/
http://libproxy.utdallas.edu/login?url=

http://www.ipap.jp/index_journals.html

This was the key to my problem. I finally found this MozillaZine article on creating keyword searches.

What you need to do is go to Bookmarks->Organize Bookmarks. Add a bookmark with the location as

http://libproxy.utdallas.edu/login?url=%S [the capital S is crucial]

And add the keyword as "utd" (or whatever you like). Then, when you have a webpage that you need the library proxy for, click in front of the URL and add "utd " in front, like so:

Then hit return, and you'll be taken to the login for the UTD library proxy, and then you'll be taken to:

http://chronicle.com.libproxy.utdallas.edu/article/Wanted-Female-Philosophers/48729/

Ta-da! Full access, much less hassle.

Anyone else found an easier way?

Recent Blogging

2009-10-07T22:41:00.001-07:00

Just checking in to let you know what I've been blogging about lately.

Letter to My Senators (The Sequential Philosopher) – Please don't cut off NSF funding for political science.
Exciting Trends in Philosophy of Science (It's Only a Theory) – The four most exciting areas in general philosophy of science, IMHO.
The Varieties of Evidence (It's Only a Theory) – A very general description of the complex,* process-functionalist theory of evidence that I'm working on.
Science, Values, and Popular Culture in the Psychology of William Moulton Marston (Science, Values, and Democracy) – A description of my new research project.
William Moulton Marston: Educational and Professional Background (Science, Values, and Democracy)
Pragmatism, Positivism, Science, and Values in the 1930’s (Science, Values, and Democracy)
Brief discussions on Science, Values and Democracy on Philip Kitcher's Science, Truth, and Democracy Part I and II and on The Challenge of the Social and the Pressure of Practice Part I: The Play of Values within the Core Areas of Scientific Research.

* By "complex," I don't mean to tout the complexity of my theory. Rather, I mean that there is a complex profile of functions that evidence is involved in. But, multi-process-functionalist and its cognates are uggers.

Letter to my Senators

2009-10-07T15:39:00.000-07:00

Dear Senator,

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has introduced amendment 2631 to H.R. 2847 with the aim of prohibiting the National Science Foundation from funding research in political science. Senator Coburn's amendment is not based on an understanding of the nature of scientific research nor a concern for funding scientific projects that, as he says, "expand our knowledge of true science and yield breakthroughs and discoveries that can improve the human condition." Rather, Coburn is attempting to interfere in the funding of science purely on the basis of political motivations and base anti-intellectualism. I strongly urge you to oppose this amendment.

I am an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, and my main area of teaching and research is in the philosophy of science and technology, which addresses, among other thing, the nature of scientific inquiry. While the differences between the natural and social sciences is a complex and subtle academic issue, there is absolutely no basis for the wholesale discrimination against political science and the social sciences generally that Coburn's amendment implies. Political science no less than physics or chemistry aims at knowledge and discoveries that can improve the human condition. If it is relatively less developed than some of the natural sciences, that is all the more reason to fund its improvement, especially in a day and age in which social and political problems are as or more pressing than problems dealing exclusively with the mechanisms of the natural world.

For the sake of the growth and integrity of science, I urge you to vote against such an amendment.

Sincerely yours,
Matthew J. Brown, Ph.D.

Call to Action! Expanding Dragon*Con Academics

2009-09-17T13:12:00.001-07:00

Dragon*Con Academics was GREAT this year. We did 8 panels with high attendance, great presentations, and rousing discussions. Now's the time to push for an expansion of academic programming at Dragon*Con! The way to do this is to let the Dragon*Con office know how much support there is for academic programming and an academic conference at the convention. I'm aiming for the stars, hoping to get a full academic track at the convention.

To see the panels we've done in the last two years, you can visit these links:

http://thehangedman.com/dragoncon

http://thehangedman.com/dragoncon/dc2008.html

What I'm asking from you is to contact the office and let them know how you feel. There are three ways to do this. You can email them at dragoncon@dragoncon.org. You can fill out the webform at:

http://dragoncon.org/dc_contact.php

Or you can call the office at 770-909-0115 (M-F 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. EST).

Below I've provided the beginning of a message. You can edit it, mix and match your reasons, and (this is crucial!) provide some detail about your own experience.

Thanks for your support! Tell your friends!

Best, Matt

-8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<--

Subject: Track Request: Academics

Dear Dragon*Con Office,

I'm writing to request the creation of an academic track at Dragon*Con. I [[attended / participated in / wish I could have been at]] the academic conference organized by Matt Brown at Dragon*Con in [[2008 / 2009]], and I am very much in support of expanding it. The attendance has been very high, the presentations have been interesting and informative, and have lead to lively discussions.

While the ordinary, informal fan discussions at Dragon*Con can be fun and informative, these panels really bring something extra to my Dragon*Con in terms of the amount of work that has gone into the panel, and the type of intellectually stimulating discussion that results.

It would really help to have the academic panels be more officially organized, so they would be easier to find and in a more consistent space as well.

It seems like making an academic track would allow a wider variety of academic presentations. Right now, it seems to be limited by what tracks have space open.

We're not only ready for a higher level of intellectual discussion at Dragon*Con. We need it!

I've also heard that Matt Brown is willing to continue to organize academic presentations at Dragon*Con. [[I'd also be willing to help out by presenting / volunteering at the Con / helping with organization / attending the panels.]]

Thank you for your time!

[[Your signature here]]

Class Blog

2009-08-27T11:53:00.000-07:00

For those who happen to follow this blog despite the lack of postings, I suspect that much of my blogging energy this semester is going to be directed at the blog I set up for my grad seminar on "Science, Values, and Democracy":

http://scienceandvalues.wordpress.com/

Hopefully some of you will be interested in the discussions.

Dragon*Con 2nd Annual Comics & Popular Arts Conference

2009-05-20T16:21:00.001-07:00

Call for Participation

Institute for Comics Studies
Comic Book Convention Conference Series

DRAGON*CON 2nd ANNUAL COMICS & POPULAR ARTS CONFERENCE

Atlanta, Georgia September 4-7, 2009

The Institute for Comic Studies and Dragon*Con present their second annual academic conference for the studies of comics and the popular arts to take place at Dragon*Con, the largest multi-media, popular culture convention focusing on science fiction and fantasy, gaming, comics, literature, art, music, and film in the US. For more info on Dragon*Con, visit http://dragoncon.org/

Please submit a proposal for a 15/20-minute presentation that engages in substantial scholarly examinations of comic books, manga, graphic novels, anime, sf, fantasy, and popular culture. A broad range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives is being sought, including literary and art criticism, philosophy, linguistics, history, and communication. Proposals may range from discussions of the nature of the comics medium, analyses of particular works and authors, discussions of the visual language of comics, comics pedagogy, cross-cultural and cross-medium comparisons, and more. This year, we're especially interested in proposals dealing with anime/manga, sf/fantasy literature, and Star Trek, though presentations on any of the above topics will be considered.

This conference of Dragon*Con represents the Institute for Comics Studies' mission to promote the study, understanding, and cultural legitimacy of comics and to support the discussion and dissemination of this study and understanding via public venues.

100 to 200 word proposals due: July 1, 2009

STAR TREK PROPOSALS due JUNE 1, 2009!

Please submit your proposal at the following address:
http://www.hsu.edu/form.aspx?ekfrm=43888

Prospective participants are encouraged to submit a guest application in advance at the following address: http://dragoncon.org/dc_guest_app.php

Matt Brown
Dragon*Con Academics Chair
thehangedman@gmail.com
www.instituteforcomicsstudies.org

web presence

2009-03-30T22:04:00.000-07:00

I need to figure out what to do with my web presence. I'm not necessarily opposed to having a bunch of different faces updated a bunch of different ways, but I think mediocre user interfaces and ho-hum appearances are cramping my style and decreasing the frequency of updates significantly. So far I've got:

Homepage: thehangedman.com - made with iWeb, which produces okay-looking output but is no fun to use, and loses points for being WYSIWYG. Also, iWeb's directory and file structure is a dog's breakfast.

Blog 1: The Sequential Philosopher - That's this. Handles line breaks fairly poorly, such that I can't compose entries in Markdown without either (A) ending up with tons of extra line-breaks in the posts or (B) deleting all the line-breaks in all prior posts. Pages look okay, but configuring appearance is a bear.

Blog 2: Livejournal - Ugh. Acceptable for keeping track of livejournal friends, posting semi-private entries and junk I don't want to post on my more "serious" blog.

Twitter - Pro: Super easy to update. Brevity is the soul of wit. Con: few users of Twitter (though twitter facebook app helps).

Facebook - Insert old man grumblings about interface updates and applications. I actually kind of like facebook for lots of things, except that it isn't good for professional stuff. Something about navigating facebook makes me unlikely to update it if I haven't recently been updating it a lot.

Academia.edu - Pretty cool academic social networking site. Tuned for making professional-looking pages and posting papers and such.

Flickr - Last updated July 2008. (Probably as much for my lack of picture-taking as anything.) Irritating restrictions on service if you're not willing to pay.

Is that it? I hope so.

Anyhow. I'm not afraid of PHP, CSS, or hand-coding HTML, and in fact I far prefer it to using programs like Frontpage and Dreamweaver, and I kind prefer it to using iWeb. Except, I'm not so confident in my ability to make pages that don't look like crap, and I'm not sure I've ever had one that didn't. Besides, who has time to design webpages? Also, I've been burned by things like Movable Type and Wordpress in the past, and I'm overall not sure that having big hulking blog software on my own server makes any sense. Here's what I really want, in order of importance.

An attractive personal home page containing easily accessible information like publications, course info, CV, and such which is also easy to update and not beholden to finicky and irritating WYSIWYG editors.

A blog that is easy to update, preferably in Markdown, easy to read.

Somewhere to post pictures that is easy to use and will let me access all my pictures.

Reasonable integration of all these things (which a possible exception of my Facebook-Livejournal un-professional space).

(1) is really my major concern right now. Help?

dissertation: almost done

2009-03-24T13:05:00.003-07:00

Just posted a draft of my dissertation on my website. I'm taking a big step, I think, publishing it under a creative commons license. But it's important and I'm sticking with that.

Best,
Matt

book review - anti-individualism

2009-03-10T20:08:00.000-07:00

Good news from analytic philosophy! A review of

Anti-Individualism: Mind and Language, Knowledge and Justification by Sanford C. Goldberg, Cambridge University Press, 2007, 280pp., $90.00 (hbk).

Reviewed by
Matthew J. Brown

To most readers of Mind, Culture, and Activity, the thesis of Sanford Goldberg's Anti-Individualism will seem familiar and uncontroversial. He defends the view that the content of language and the mind, the nature of knowledge and the justification of belief depend not merely upon the properties of an isolated, individual speaker, thinker, or knower, but these things also essentially depend on the physical and social environment or context in which they are embedded. Goldberg's style of presentation and method of argument, on the other hand, will seem highly unfamiliar, abstruse, and daunting to most readers of this journal. On the other hand, from the point of view of the intended audience of the book, analytic philosophers, the thesis will seem somewhat radical and extreme (though it is, I think, becoming an increasingly common position), but the style and method of presentation will seem quite common and familiar.¹ In mainstream experimental psychology and cognitive science, I suspect that both the claims and the methods of the book would seem quite radical and implausible.

Anti-Individualism does not proceed primarily through examination of experimental data nor detailed individual case studies.² The vast majority of the citations are to work in anglophone philosophy from the last thirty years. The main arguments in the book proceed by the elaboration of complex thought experiments, mostly about the nature of testimony, i.e., the communication of knowledge through language, and marshalling the intuitive judgments "we" make about such cases. Considering the following example of the type of argument Goldberg relies on:

Imagine a distant planet, which I will refer to as "Twin Earth," which is exactly like our own Earth in all but one respect: on Twin Earth, the liquid English speakers refer to as "water" is not H2O, but a liquid with a complicated chemical formula that we will conveniently abbreviate XYZ. At large scales, at standard temperature and pressure, XYZ is qualitatively identical to H2O, such that travelers on a spaceship from Earth would originally assume that "water" has the same meaning on Twin Earth as it does back home. Only consulting with Twin-Earthling chemists or doing complex laboratory experiments would convince them that "water" means XYZ on Twin Earth. Nevertheless, prior to the advent of chemistry, "water" still means H2O on Earth and XYZ on Twin Earth (because these are the substances that the word refers to).³

Goldberg vastly extends this line of argumentation, covering a wide variety of situations of thought, language use, and the communication of beliefs, with complex tales of the difference between speakers of English and Twin English, reliable witnesses amongst roomfuls of liars, and so on. This type of argument is much more controversial amongst philosophers than it was even a decade ago, with challenges from "experimental philosophers" who have put such claims about "intuitions" to empirical test (with surprising though likewise controversial results),⁴neurophilosophers who suggest we should begin not with naive intuitions but the results of neuroscience and cognitive science,⁵ philosophers who draw on empirical research more generally,⁶ and pragmatists who argue that all intuitions are historically conditioned, fallible, and revisable.⁷ Nevertheless, this is still a common and often-defended method of philosophical theorizing.

One interesting and important departure is the reliance in the final chapter (Chapter 8) on the literature in developmental psychology on the role of testimony in the acquisition of beliefs by children. Even here, Goldberg does not depend on the details of the processes of learning and development. What Goldberg does appeal to is empirical data that suggests that very young children, those Goldberg calls "cognitively immature," do little to monitor the credibility of testimony; they are quick to trust what others say, especially adults. Whatever the exact texture of the growth of critical or skeptical capacities, there is a clear difference between three-year-olds and four-year-olds (p. 203), and a variety of empirical studies that point in this direction. Goldberg argues that what guarantees the successful transmission of knowledge in these cases (which is potentially threatened by uncritical acceptance) is that the reliability of testimony is monitored for the child by others (p. 200) and further, that this is a general phenomenon displayed most clearly in the case of children because they are not also extensively
monitoring credibility themselves. Thus, the acquisition of knowledge via testimony is actively anti-individualist, since it depends not only on social (linguistic and epistemic) norms and an individual's ability to discriminate on the basis of those norms, but also on social processes of monitoring and checking the testimony of others to others. This argument is significant for those interested in learning and development not because it sheds particular light on the psychological
processes at work (it doesn't), but because it makes clear that there is a normative social structure at work in such processes. In teaching/learning we care not only about the transmission of beliefs, but about the reliable transmission of accurate beliefs for the right
reasons.

Whatever the judgment of philosophers of mind, language, and epistemology about this book, the majority of the readers of this journal would likely find Goldberg's book a difficult read with little ultimate pay-off due to mere differences in interests.⁸ Those tempted to give the book a go are encouraged to read the introduction and skip straight to the final chapter before deciding what other parts of the book to tackle. Those not so tempted are encouraged to take comfort from the fact that scholars in very different disciplines, using radically different methods and beginning from almost opposed principles and presuppositions, can come to very complementary conclusions.

References

Adler, J. (2009) "Review: Sanford C. Goldberg, Anti-Individualism: Mind and Language, Knowledge and Justification," Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Churchland, P.M. (1979). Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Churchland, P. S. (1986) Neurophilosophy: Toward a unified science of the mind/brain. MIT Press.

Churchland, P.S. (1994) "Can Neurobiology Teach Us Anything about Consciousness?" Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 67, No. 4, pp. 23-40.

Doris, J.M. and Stich, S. (2005) "As a Matter of Fact: Empirical Perspectives on Ethics," in F. Jackson and M. Smith, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Analytic Philosophy, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 114-152

Margolis, J. (2002). Reinventing Pragmatism: American Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Putnam, H. (1975) "The Meaning of 'Meaning'." In K. Gunderson (ed.), Language, Mind, and Knowledge (Minneapolis, Univ. of Minnesota Press).

Rorty, R. (1979) Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Rorty, R. (1982). Consequences of pragmatism (Essays 1972-1980). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Weinberg, J., Nichols, S. and Stich, S. (2001) "Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions." Philosophical Topics, 29, 429-460.

Those familiar with, interested in, or patient enough to
struggle through dense work in analytic philosophy of mind,
language, and epistemology might consult Jonathan Adler's review
(Adler 2009). ↩

Though there are occasional footnotes to work in experimental
psychology consonant with the claims of the book, they are not the
crux of the arguments, with some exception in Chapter 8. ↩

This example is a summary of one originally due to Hilary Putnam
(1975). I pick Putnam's example because it is famous in the field,
and relatively simply statable as compared to Goldberg's examples.
↩

See Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich (2001). ↩

See Paul Churchland (1979); Patricia Smith Churchland (1986;
1994). ↩

See Doris and Stich (2005). ↩

See Rorty (1979; 1982) and Margolis (2002). ↩

Myself included, I am sorry to say. ↩

Whitehead on Philosophy

2009-02-18T16:46:00.000-08:00

Has anyone else noticed that there are all these Science Studies and Lit/Cultural Studies folks into Whitehead now? What's that about?

Here's a great bit of Whitehead:

Philosophy destroys its usefulness when it indulges in brilliant feats of explaining away.

Walking and Riding From Hell

2008-09-08T11:22:00.003-07:00

This blogger has turned the chapter of From Hell where they tour London into directions for an actual walking tour! It's pretty neat.

John was sitting in a chair at the window...

2008-08-15T11:55:00.001-07:00

Sabrina has discovered that someone actually wrote what amounts to John Dewey fan fiction! Unbelievable.

A little sample:

"I can't be less than honest with you. You're a god-awful cooking teacher."

"Learn from experience, you wrote!" She defended herself with his own ideas, though she understood them better than she practiced: indifference isn't experience; chaos isn't experiment.

Absently, lost in reflection, he took up one egg, then two, cracking them against the pan as if to test for himself the possibilities in this encounter with eggs.

Their insides slipped out and lay in the pan like the breasts of a woman reclining, the soft padded circles fallen back against her body. They looked at him. They hissed in their butter. (p. 33)

And this is for her research!! (Sort of.)

Dragon*Con Academic Mini-Conference

2008-07-21T09:37:00.000-07:00

Call for Participation

Institute for Comics Studies
Comic Book Convention Conference Series

DRAGON*CON ACADEMIC MINI-CONFERENCE

Atlanta, Georgia
August 29-September 1, 2008

The Institute for Comic Studies and the Comics and Pop Art division of Dragon*Con are working together to develop an academic conference for the studies of comics and pop art to take place at Dragon-Con, the largest multi-media, popular culture convention focusing on science fiction and fantasy, gaming, comics, literature, art, music, and film in the US.

Please submit a proposal for a 20-minute presentation that engages in substantial scholarly examinations of comic books, graphic novels, and pop art. A broad range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives is being sought, including literary and art criticism, philosophy, linguistics, history, and communication. Proposals may range from discussions of the nature of the comics medium, analyses of particular works and authors, discussions of the visual language of comics, to comics pedagogy, and more.

The academic track of Dragon*Con represents the Institute for Comics Studies’ mission to promote the study, understanding, and cultural legitimacy of comics and to support the discussion and dissemination of this study and understanding via public venues.

100-word proposals due: ASAP or by August 1, 2008:

Matthew Brown
Dragon*Con Mini-Conference Chair
mattbrown@ucsd.edu
Subject line: "ICS: Dragon*Con Proposal"
www.instituteforcomicsstudies.org

Due to the tight deadline and scheduling constraints, early submission is the best guarantor of acceptance

Dragon*Con Guest List

2008-07-18T01:36:00.000-07:00

Check out who is on the Dragon*Con Guest List!

And check out the first Comic Arts Conference panel on Saturday at Comic-Con!

relational quantum mechanics for the win!

2008-07-11T16:02:00.000-07:00

So, my paper on Rovelli's relational interpretation of quantum mechanics was accepted by the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. Pretty sweet!

CPA Report 6: A Feast Fit for Philosopher-Kings

2008-06-15T11:30:00.000-07:00

(Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5)

After the last set of talks yesterday, there was a nice little wine-and-snacks reception. (Did I mention that this trip is totally blowing my diet? But I did (barely) manage to avoid ordering poutine today for lunch!) It was a great time. Roger, Eran, Jaime, Boaz, and the other fellows I got to hang out with over the last few days are really bright, exciting philosophers. I'm thinking that having these fellows to tussle with over the next 5-10 years will make being a philosopher of science very exciting!

Then, somehow, I got Jacob to talk me into buying someone's ticket for the banquet. It was CAN$ 40, which at the going rate is, what, $60? $100? But I got to meet some really excellent philosophers and historians, such as Bernie Lightman, Margaret Schabas, Gordon Something, and several others. I probably unwisely avoided interacting with Alan Richardson again, as well. And I was glutted with a feast of fancy Chinese.

It was good. Plagued by momentary fits of boredom and anxiety as all such events are, but I enjoyed my conversations with people for the most part.

Now, better than a week later, after our quarter is finally over and I got back to this post, things aren't near so fresh in my mind. The next day included some talks on Kuhn and Feyerabend, a hilarious note-passing discussion with Danny Goldstick about whether realist arguments tended to be question-begging against Kuhn, and the long attempt to get home from the conference. It was a good time. Oh, also, I talked to Jon Johnston over the phone, which I wasn't expecting to be able to do nearly so soon. It was very nice.

CPA Report 5

2008-06-05T11:05:00.000-07:00

My last session of the day yesterday was called "Around Quantum Mechanics," which is about right, since quantum mechanics was more or less secondary to each of the presenters topics. First up was Eran Tal, illustrious former guest of the former Beck-Brown-Skywalker household, doing a talk on "Simulated Evidence: Signatures of a Quantum Phase Transition." I think his case study is really interesting, and its going to blow a bunch of stuff wide open. He's looking at cases in which theorists (at Oxford?), using computer simulations based in part on the theory, and in part on the description of an experimental device used by a set of experimentalists in Zurich studying phase transitions between superfluids and Mott-insulators. By simulating both together, and varying certain assumptions about initial conditions and the background device, these theorists claim to have shown that the Zurich experiment (whose results are somewhat messy) was a successful detection of the phase transition, since the signature produced in their simulation has a qualitative match to the results produced in Zurich. In other words, they claim to have shown (a) that the Zurich experiment was reliable, and (b) that the Zurich experiment successfully measured what the theory predicted, when neither was certain before.

This is super-interesting! What they did cannot be said to be an elaborate prediction from theory, nor clarification of the data, but rather some combination of the two, plus something else besides. Most interesting to me, as I pointed out to Eran later at the reception, is how this clearly raises a problem for the Suppes/Giere theory about different levels of models which nonetheless come in two flavors: models of data and theoretical/representational models. I'm not sure what Giere should say, nor am I sure what a Deweyan should say (this process doesn't clearly fit on either side of the existential/conceptual gap distinction, either).

Next, Melanie Frappier gave a talk entitled "If 'Copenhagen' is Leibzig's Code Name, What does 'Interpretation' Mean?: A Re-examination of the Origin of the Copenhagen Interpretation." Melanie was responding to Don Howard's paper, which suggests Heisenberg invented the notion of a unified "Copenhagen" interpretation in the 1950's, but that whatever Heisenberg identified wasn't Bohr's "complementarity" view, and it wasn't really a consensus at all. She agreed with the former point, but denied the later, based on a nuance about what the physicists meant by "interpretation." She showed clearly that from much earlier on, various physicists talked about "interpretation," but that this sense of interpretation is very different from what we mean today. In particular, she gave reasons to believe that the theory has a univocal interpretation, in Heisenberg's sense of "interpretation."

If you think about it, it makes sense. A theory is not just a formal-mathematical system; it is also a set of concepts related together in a certain way, where each concept has a certain meaning, or empirical criterion of application, or something. What an alternative interpretation would have to provide, which most "interpretations" of quantum mechanics today don't, is an alternative criterion of empirical application for the terms of the theory. All the insistence by Bohmians and others that their interpretation has identical empirical results sounds to Heisenberg like they have the same interpretation. All the other stuff is not part of what physicists do. (This makes sense of something I've puzzled with for a long time, which is David Finkelstein's insistence that quantum theory already comes with an interpretation, so there is little sense to the project of "interpreting" quantum theory.)

Isaac Record gave an interesting talk on "Instruments of Explanation" which I'm not going to summarize. He was arguing, basically, that new instruments provide new realms of "technological possibility," which unlike logical and physical possibility, is sensitive to contingent facts and to practical issues like time it takes to complete a procedure. On his view, computers really open up a new realm of possible explanations, because we can realistically consider options that we couldn't before we had super-fast computers. Something to think about, with real echoes in Dewey's own concept of relations and potentials.

Off to the Aeroport!

CPA Report 4: The Value of Values

2008-06-04T13:41:00.000-07:00

The late morning session I went to was quite good! I saw four papers on Science and Value that all brought something interesting to the table. It was a long session, a bit tiring, but I liked all the papers very much.

Kathleen Okruhlik gave an interesting talk entitled "Putman, Proctor, and Political Economy." If it had just been an advertisement for reading Proctor's book, Value-free Science?: Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge, it would have been worthwhile, but it was much more than that. The case of values and the ideal of value-freedom in political economy is an interesting one, one that Putnam brings up in his book on the fact/value, though Okruhlik suggested that Putnam's view of the history of both political economy and the fact/value dichotomy was overly narrow. Proctor has a wider view, in which Max Weber plays an important role. Chief among the interesting feature of Weber's historical mileu is that those arguing for the value-free ideal of science were progressives, whereas their value-happy opponents were conservatives.

One of the things that came up in Okruhlik's talk was also the "promiscuity" of the use of the term "value" in these debates. Think of all the things that "value" might stand in for: emotions, interests, ideologies, ethical norms, preferences, and so on. Moira Howes, in her talk on "Epistemic Emotions, Salience and Ignorance in Scientific Reasoning" was also emphasizing this point. While Okruhlik focused on ethical norms in her own account, Howes talked about how emotional reactions, and emotion-based preferences and aversions, have both necessary and biasing effects in science.

Something else that Okruhlik brought up that I found really interesting, was an extension of Proctor's explanation of the phenomenon of attempting to escape to value-freedom in science to philosophy. According to Proctor, this ideal is used by scientists as both a shield from a certain kind of criticism (value-free science is not subject to political, ideological, or moral critique) and a weapon against other views (value-laden science is full of wishful-thinking, bias, etc.?). So to, suggests Okruhlik, philosophers ascend to formal, meta-level discussions as both a shield and a weapon of the same sort. As she pointed out, for much of the twentieth century, discussions about ethics were limited almost exclusively to meta-ethics, i.e., value-free ethics! Philosophers have another way of escape as well, she suggested: they can descend into naturalism, avoiding the need to engage with ethical, epistemological, and other kinds of norms and values by moving to discussion of moral psychology, learning theory, etc. Very interesting. I wonder whether some good work couldn't be done on this, about "philosophy's evasion of values" or "philosophy's flight from the political." (Dibs!)

Howes' talk was also fantastic and complex. One of the things that I was most interested in was her discussion about the ways (positive and negative) that emotions or feelings guide rationality and the scientific process. She insisted that feminist philosophers should look carefully at the psychology and philosophy of emotions as a tool for feminist critique and feminist understandings of science. I couldn't help but think about how similar her ideas are to John Dewey's obscure but crucial essay, "Qualitative Thought." There Dewey talks about the way in which a "qualitative background" provides the necessary ground, context, and test of thought. Though I'm pretty sure Dewey meant "quality" to be broader than what we usually call "emotion," I think that his point is really aligned with Howes'. I'm pretty sure she even used and example that Dewey also took up: the way that certain feelings accompany the struggle through a mathematical problem, the way that those feelings can guide the process, and the way that being certain one has attained an answer is tied to the distinctive feeling of success at having solved the problem. Dewey applies such considerations to inquiry in general, and it seems as though Howes has similar aims.

The other talks were good as well, though I don't have as much to say about them. Neelam Sethi discussed "Rethinking Normativity," in which she compared feminist discussions of values and normativity to recent work by Philip Kitcher and Nancy Cartwright on ends / goals in science. Burcu Erciyes gave an ambitious paper, "Feminist Objectivity versus Traditional Objectivity," arguing that feminists provide a genuine rival conception of objectivity, rather than using "objectivity" in a different way.

I'm going to skip and go read a bit until the sessions at 4. Maybe I'll walk around the beautiful UBC campus a bit. Maybe I'll have some fancy pictures for ya'll tonight!

CPA Report 3: Throw 'em to the Lions

2008-06-04T09:44:00.000-07:00

(Part I, Part II)

What is it with Christian philosophers? I don't mean philosophers who happen to be Christians. Some of the best philosophers I know are Christians. Who I mean is, those who present at, attend, etc. meetings like the (Canadian) Society for Christian Philosophers. My first talk of the day was a CSCP talk, and I've attended the occasional bits of such conferences held in San Diego, and the quality is overall pretty low. Maybe this is just bias, or an othering. Maybe the quality of philosophy is generally low, and I'm just picking on the poor Christians out of some unconscious childhood resentment. Anyhow.

The talk was, "On John Dewey's and Karl Marx's Subtraction Theories of Modernity" by Michael Da Silva, who is a very polite and engaged person, who was, however, deeply wrong about the content of Dewey's philosophy. (I can't speak to Marx. Perhaps he got Marx right.) Da Silva was applying Charles Taylor's worries about subtraction theories of modernity and disenchantment to these two characters, to make them look bad compared to Hegel. For reasons I wasn't able to follow, Dewey and Marx were supposed to be unable to explain the modern condition, or ground projects of human solidarity, social harmony, and other stuff. Basically, the death of belief in God leaves a whole which complete secularism is unable to fill.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not unsympathetic (potentially) to this criticism. I just don't think it fits with Dewey. A short summary of how I think Da Silva got Dewey wrong:

Dewey is not a materialist. Dewey is a naturalist, and there is an important difference, as Dewey, Ernest Nagel, and Sidney Hook point out in a classic paper, "Are Naturalists Materialists?" Perhaps Da Silva only meant the very broad sense "materialism" which is just any sort of naturalism. But such a view is not prima facie as problematic for a Taylor-type guy.
Dewey is not a narrow pragmatist who only cares about practical utility or who only believes that our technoscientific encounters with the world exist. On the former, just check out the relevant sections of Experience and Nature or Art as Experience. Dewey certainly thinks that a focus on practice is more important than philosophers have thought, but so does Hegel. Dewey also believes that events happened in the distant past, or that distant parts of space currently unexperienced exist. Responses to these kinds of worries are well-discussed in David Hildebrand's "Progress in History: Dewey on Knowledge of the Past"
Dewey does not believe that we've outgrown religion. For the importance of religiousness and the divine in a general sense, and a celebration of religious experience, see A Common Faith.

Okay, rant over. Let's go see some talks on science and values, yeah?

CPA Report 2: I win!

2008-06-03T22:39:00.001-07:00

(Check out Part I here.)

Today was a good day for philosophy.

After lunch, the first thing I did was go to Shane Ralston's talk on Deweyan democracy, "In Defence of Democracy as a way of life." His commentator canceled, which cheesed me a bit, since I had originally volunteered to comment on that paper. But no matter. I think that Shane has a pretty good response to Talisse's criticisms of Dewey. I still worry that Dewey might not be able to accommodate the degree of pluralism that Berlin or Rawls demands, and that this might reflect negatively on Dewey. Shane called such positions "dogmatism" or "fundamentalism," but I worry then that even many liberals and democrats end up as dogmatists. I appreciate Dewey's call for experimentalism and fallibilism, here, but worry that there is a big tension with pluralism.

Next was my session. Jeff Kochan gave a talk on "Popper's Communitarianism." I think Jeff's paper is super-interesting, but ultimately suffers from a big problem that Jeff isn't alive to, since he comes from philosophy of social science rather than normative political philosophy. The debate between "Liberals" and "Communitarians" is essentially a normative debate, dealing with how self-determination and autonomy are valued. His paper casts it as a methodological difference, about how best to conceptualize and explain the behavior of individuals. I think the audience was ultimately sympathetic to my criticisms. I was left thinking that perhaps Jeff could recast his views in a way that was less problematic and might still be able to adopt the term "communitarianism" in a qualified way.

Finally, I caught most of Jacob's paper. Jacob's work on evidence and robustness is super-sharp. I have some serious reservations about the way that these discussions get cast, but Jacob has once again convinced me that the distance between our views isn't so large. I'm still convinced that looking at two oft-ignored features of evidence will dissolve a lot of the worries that Jacob raises, as well as showing the problematic features of the tradition that Jacob wants to critique. First, we need to look at the temporal dynamics of inquiry, and second, we need to look at the functional roles that evidence plays in the course of inquiries, particularly at the diversity of those roles. I think at that point, much of the talk about "robustness," "discordance," and "evidence for use" may look less important that Jacob thinks.

Then there was the President's reception with snacks and drinks, and more drinks at a grad student pub with UBC and other students. It was a good time. Conversation ranged broadly and interestingly. One particularly interesting discussion had to do with the way that standards of evidence changed in response to the complaints of AIDS activists. An important case discussed in cultural studies, by Epstein, and others. Roger Stanev has a couple of papers here on the topic, and Jacob was pushing him on it. Roger is a nice fellow, and so were Jaime and Josh, who I met. I had an awkward interaction with Alan R. at the reception, which is worrisome given that I'm supposed to be doing a panel with him in November (if we get accepted). But probably I'm over-worried. After all, he'd never met me!

Off to bed soon. Supposed to meet Jacob for breakfast around 8! We'll see if that happens.

CPA Report 1: Woooah Canada

2008-06-03T13:21:00.000-07:00

Thanks for tuning in to the blog for the CPA report. Wait, is anyone still tuning in?

For those who don't know, the CPA meeting is part of this wild all-Canadian Academiganza called simply Congress 2008, or maybe Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities. In addition to CPA, there is the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Science, the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine, the Canadian Society for Adult Education, and so on ad infinitum. It's located on the lovely UBC, which is a wildly huge and beautiful place, in a totally different part of Vancouver that I've never been to before. Getting here was pretty okay, about 4 hours of flying total, and 2 hours of layover in San Francisco (spent having dinner with Corbett, who is awesome). I'm staying in a dorm. Enough about all that.

The first talk I went to was a part of the Canadian Jacques Maritain Association meeting, on "A.N. Whitehead's View of Experience in General and of God in Particular" by Richard Feist. The talk included not only discussions of Whitehead on God and experience, but also his idealism, anti-Kantianism, and views on physics, as well as discussions of Leibniz, Kant, Stephen Hawking, Henri Bergson, Nicholas Rescher, David Lewis, the question of why there is something rather than nothing, black holes, Kip Thorne, logical positivism, Kuhn... Well, you get the idea. It was fun. But it was... not particularly careful.

Next I checked out "What You Don't Know Can Help You: The Ethics of Placebo Treatment," by Daniel Groll, which was actually about 70% conceptual analysis of "placebo" and about 30% ethics. Ethically, placebo treatments still count as deceptions. It was actually the analytic part that bothered me. He ended up saying something like, a placebo is a "treatment" where the only causally efficacious part of the treatment goes through the route of a cognitive state of expecting to get better on the basis of the treatment. I wondered whether it really made sense to talk about "placebos" outside the context of something like placebo-controlled trials; that is, it seems to me that the concept of "placebo" comes about in methodological discussions about controlling a certain kind of bias, which gets labeled "the placebo effect," and gets resolved by placebo-control. But outside something like that context, or some other context, it seems difficult to understand what a placebo is. Daniel responded that doctors in context of treatment rather than research still "prescribe" sugar pills and the like. I'm not sure what to make of that. I think knowing the history of the use of the term would help.

Jeremy Howick pointed out to him that there is no such thing as a placebo simpliciter. A sugar pill is not a placebo for a diabetic, and perhaps in certain psychological cases, changing expectations really is an effective treatment. That seems of a piece with my worry, that he's trying to do context-free something that is pretty context dependent.

Last before lunch, Jacob and I checked out "Probability Judgment and the Problem of Uninformative Statistics" by Paul Thorn. I had not even marked it down as one of the options, but Jacob pushed me into thinking that it was probably the right sort of thing. I had been thinking instead of attending "Zoophilic Encounters: Thinking about Bestiality," which sounded sexy (so to speak). Jacob ended up apologizing to me afterwards. I don't think it was a bad talk for what it was, which was a pretty formalistic philosophy of probability theory talk. I told him afterwards that I think I must have some tacit knowledge that I hadn't been able to deploy once he started trying to convince me about why the talk would be good, about avoiding probability theory talks and papers. Maybe now I can avoid them with explicit knowledge that they tend to be... not of interest to me.

Next up: A defense of Deweyan Democracy, a paper on Popper's politics with yours truly commenting, and Jacob on evidence. Stay tuned!

Go Speed Racer, Go!

2008-05-26T19:24:00.000-07:00

I know you probably won't believe me about this, but you should really go see Speed Racer. Ignore the critics and go see the movie with an open mind. I saw it on Friday night and really enjoyed it. I won't be able to say much more than Kazu or Amy Kim Ganter did in their reviews. They nailed it right on the head (and these are both people who are masters of visual story-telling). From the cinematography, to the technical effects, to the story-telling and the characters, the movie is fantastic and fun. I really recommend it. Check out the first seven minutes here, which is much better than any of the previews for communicating something important about the film:

b/c she said I hadn't posted in forever

2008-03-24T09:00:00.000-07:00

This post is dedicated to Sabrina. I've got to get a bunch of exams
graded, and I just found out that they're due about 12 hours earlier
than expected!

We gotta take the scientists down!

2008-02-28T00:39:00.000-08:00

Okay, maybe we don't really.

I had a great time tonight. After Nancy's Objectivity seminar, where I got kind of angry and loud, I repaired to the pub with ECM and Marilena to continue the discussion. The question is the science-policy boundary. I was riled up about the practice that is common where scientists get together (on their own or at government's behest) and try to tell people what to think on the basis of their authority (rather than, say, because they have a good argument or know anything about what they're talking about). More charitably to everyone involved, we were interested in hashing out what the proper relationship of government and science is.

I guess I have a radical view? I think that we don't need the thin kind of interaction that we have now, with committee reports and funding streams forming the bulk of the science-policy relationship, but rather multiple levels of inquiry that bridge the gap. Just like in privately funded research, where ultimately we have a private interest to further or problem to solve (say, how to sell widgets to suckers), where we go from high-level theory to applied science to engineering to corporate research labs to development and production to corporate decision making and back again in a complex but high-bandwidth set of interactions and cross-border talk (where each part nevertheless retains some autonomy), so in the case of private interests and practical problems of a social nature, we need some more robust set of bridges analogous to the levels of engineering, research and development that we have in the technological case.

Anyhow, that's schematic, but the basic principle is, if you have a problem which current research doesn't already solve, the best long-term solution is not to rely on a committee report, but to do more research. Of course, there are all kinds of messy issues here, about whether the analogy holds, how to make decisions under uncertainty, how to implement, how to make sure there isn't too much interference with science, and that was a lot of our discussion.

It was really nice, though. We had a beer, we yelled, pounded the table, did some armchair history of science, made some distinctions, got careful, reached some tentative agreements. It was some good intense philosophy of the sort I hadn't done for a while...

Of course, the seminar ended at 8 and I didn't get home until 12:30, so there's that. But it was worth it.

Professionalism, Specialization, and Bullshit

2008-02-17T23:27:00.000-08:00

When is appropriate to rely heavily on technical vocabulary and theoretical frameworks in academic writing, especially in the humanities? I think many people take for granted that this is simply what we do: just as physicists create theories of the physical world and them apply them to experiments, humanities scholars create critical or analytical frameworks and apply them to texts, discourses, philosophical problems, and so on. But I'm not sure we should take it for granted. I'm not sure what we should be doing in the humanities, but I'm starting to think that constant traffic in theory and technical jargon isn't just so much bullshit and obfuscation.

Aspirations to activism in areas like cultural studies and gender studies not withstanding, for the most part, there has been a pretty systematic disengagement of the humanities from social life in the last half century or more, at least in the American academy. Part of the increased professionalism of this trend involves treating what we're doing as some sort of secret, specialized knowledge, too difficult or arcane for the common person to fathom. When we use the various technical apparatus of counterfactual possible-worlds-semantics, Bayesian probability theory, textual deconstruction, or performance theory, we tend to exclude potential audience, the result being our increasing irrelevance.

I'm not attempting here to argue against technical work, or to say that it has no value, but merely to say that one has to be clear about the reason for applying some technical framework, and to really have a reason. And one should be clear about the value of the gains and losses resulting from professionalization. Because, really, let's be honest here, we academics working in the humanities don't have any sort of special knowledge. We are engaged in various kinds of projects, some of them more difficult than others, but there is no reason that accessibility can't be a major consideration. We need to be careful about being too technical.

I think there is a case to be made (though I won't make it here) that the following sorts of patterns occur in both the sciences and the humanities. Someone develops a new framework or method, or extends an old one, and in applying it generates some novel and interesting results. Seeing a winner, others take this up and apply it to other things, also with some fruitful success. Still others make even less fruitful but still fairly natural applications, perhaps demonstrating the breadth of this type of analysis or this theory. But many also attempt, and by dint of cleverness or stubbornness, manage to fit other situations to the framework that not only isn't illuminating, but also requires many ad hoc assumptions, metaphorical extensions of the vocabulary, or dubious re-descriptions of the evidence. If we align these trends on a spectrum from most fruitful to most ad hoc and uninformative, then we can give some measure of the discipline, area, or research tradition according to the proportion of one or the other (for those with some phil sci background, think Lakatos on progressive vs. degenerating research programmes).

Given not only that specialization can result in public alienation and the diminishment of a serious duty towards public scholarship, but also these inherent pitfalls in the process, it is important to ask whether one's 'theory' is mere window- dressing on the details one is hoping to bring into the light, or whether it is a crucial feature of the analysis. Can I do all the work I want, do the analysis I need to do, without relying on the technical apparatus of Deweyan epistemology? Can you write that paper without introducing a bunch of pseudo-logical formulae? These kinds of questions need to be more important in academia, even though I think the answer may often be "no."

Moblog...

2008-02-14T09:46:00.001-08:00

... GO!

This post composed and sent via email from my SideKick II.

My big problem is

2008-02-14T08:25:00.000-08:00

that, for a person who spends a heck of a lot of time online, I'm not very efficient at it. I do a lot of research using Google Books and Google Scholar. I blog, LiveJournal, twitter, facebook, and so on. I read webpages, webcomics, blogs, I keep in touch with friends via email, gTalk, AIM, facebook, blogs. It's a complicated set of things.

Complicating the matter somewhat, I don't have a main computer. At my house, I have my battery-impaired PowerBook, chained to my desk. At work, I can use the PC or the fairly nice PowerMac in my office, and there is a MacBook that I can use and check out to bring home if no faculty or other staff need it. At Sabrina's house, I have a kind of old PowerMac G4, plus I can sometimes borrow her MacBook Pro. None of these can really do the job of my "main computer." Its too inconvenient to cart my broken PowerBook about, the MacBook isn't mine, and I work and play on the computer in all of these places. As a result, I've gotten used to storing my current work on a USB flash drive, I use a lot of Google products like Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Calender instead of using Apps on my computer.

On all of these computers, I've been using mostly Safari, and sometimes Firefox, but I've become quit aware of how inefficient these things are. Firefox is often better than Safari, because it seems to work better with some Google apps and such. Plus, it is far more extensible than other browsers, even though there are plenty of plug-ins and customizations for Safari and Camino. Unlike both Safari and Camino, though, Firefox doesn't feel very Mac-like, which breaks up the experience a bit, and it seems (just from my experience using it on slower computers) to be creeping to the behemoth size of some of the more traditional Mozilla projects.

One possible answer is cross-platform Portable Firefox. But this means plugging in my stick every time I want to browse, not just when I need to get some work done. I guess I could put a package of my favorite plug-ins, bookmarks, etc. together and install it on all the computers I use, but then there is the consistency problem, i.e., what if I find a great new Greasemonkey script and get used to it on one computer, and then I don't have it on the others... Anyhow, bears some thinking about. Time to get more professional and efficient with my online work and play!

Dear internet,

2008-02-12T14:32:00.000-08:00

I want back in the game. As you may or may not know, I haven't had much of a serious blog in a while now, and even less so since the untimely demise of askee.net. Sure, there's been a little livejournaling here and there, but we all know that's a disreputable pursuit. I want to get back to blogging. But it's going to take commitment, it's going to take gumption, and it's going to take some systematic changes in lifestyle. I'll need to take some time every day sitting down in front of a computer, putting down some words, making a real effort. That's kind of okay, as if fits a constant maxim for change in my life: spend more time writing. It's a challenge, given all the grading, technical work, and reading there is to do out there. Certainly, I've put a lot of focused work into my dissertation lately, and that's paid off to an extent. But I think in focusing too hard it's becoming hard to think straight, and I feel like the productivity in one place has been at too great a sacrifice. I'm not yet sure exactly how I want to forge this blog. Certainly I've got a lot of outlets already. But rest assured, things are changing...

Pragmatism as Non-Intellectualism

2007-10-11T09:35:00.000-07:00

The History of Critiques of Intellectualism

There have been many critiques of intellectualism in the philosophical tradition. Perhaps the earliest critics were the sophists, e.g., if we accept the interpretation of Protagoras in Plato's Theaetetus as a kind of proto-pragmatist relativism[1]. The philosopher who did some of the greatest damage to intellectualism in the modern period was Kant, who attacked three aspects of intellectualism. He attacked the empiricist thesis that sense-impressions are sufficient for knowledge, and the rationalist thesis that thinking by itself is sufficient for knowledge, because, he argued, sensations and concepts are each necessary and only jointly sufficient for knowledge. More importantly, he attacked the pretensions of theoretical reason to pure knowledge of metaphysical truths, e.g., about God, freedom, immortality, etc. Theoretical reason was only legitimate when it was applied to experience. Other philosophers who can be classified as critics of some stripe of intellectualism include Nietzsche, Bergson, Ortega y Gasset, and especially the American pragmatists.

This opposition to intellectualism is perhaps the greatest unifying theme of pragmatism, which runs in different ways through Peirce, James, and Dewey. Peirce, the experimental scientist, attempts to apply the lessons of experimental science, in that the formation and legitimation of belief depends not primarily on theoretical grounds but on pre-cognitively felt doubts. James wants to make room for passional and personal factors in the justification of belief, whereas Dewey is concerned to work both of these factors into his picture of humans as biological-social beings whose thinking consists primarily as a process of problem-solving inquiry.

It is Dewey who perhaps captures intellectualism most fully in "Experience and Philosophic Method" from Experience and Nature:

By "intellectualism" as an indictment is meant the theory that all experiencing is a mode of knowing, and that all subject-matter, all nature, is, in principle, to be reduced and transformed till it is defined in terms identical with the characteristics presented by refined objects of science as such. The assumption of "intellectualism" goes contrary to the facts of what is primarily experienced. For things are objects to be treated, used, acted upon and with, enjoyed and endured, even more than things to be known. They are things had before they are things cognized. (LW 1: 28).

Several ideas are under attack here. One is the empiricist view that all experience is a species of knowledge. Another is the realist idea that things are known just as they are. Finally, the view that inquiry begins with theoretical knowledge is implicitly criticized, because objects are things had before they are things cognized, i.e., known, theorized about, conceptualized. Which is to say, we begin with the world of primary experience, i.e., the world of our practices, and, as Dewey outlines elsewhere, it is the role of inquiry to solve problems that arise within those practices.

The Critique of Intellectualism in the Philosophy of Science

Intellectualism was rampant in philosophy of science in the early part of the twentieth century. While the pragmatists counseled against the fallacies of intellectualism, their message was lost in the positivist heyday that began in the 1920's. The logical positivists held that the activity of science could be boiled down to a set of propositions and logical relations of support or contradiction between them[2]. Even the great critic of positivism, W.V.O. Quine, held a basically intellectualist view in which science consists of sentences connected in a web of belief. The most famous criticism of the positivist tradition (though his status anti-positivist has been rightly questioned by Friedman and others) is Thomas Kuhn, in his 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Philosophers have often focused on Kuhn's alleged relativism, his defense of "incommensurability," i.e. the logical irreducibility of concepts from different scientific theories, and his apparent anti-rationalism about scientific theory change. All of these positions, at least the first two of which can be seen to oppose the views of the logical positivists, are compatible with the basic orientation of intellectualism. It is his opposition to intellectualism in SSR, and his focus on the priority of scientific practice, which has been highly influential in the field of Science and Technology Studies, and which may well be Kuhn's lasting legacy in philosophy of science.

The key chapters for Kuhn's non-intellectualist position are "The Priority of Paradigms" and "The Invisibility of Revolutions." Here he clearly defends the view that in order to understand the activity of science, one must focus not on the explicit, finished products of science, but on the practices and activities that scientists engage in. To focus only on the finished products of science (an example of "the philosophical fallacy" according to Dewey) is to risk being greatly misled, Kuhn argues. Kuhn's insight in "The Invisibility of Revolutions" is of a kind with Marx's insight in Capital v. 1, Ch 1.4, "The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret," where he argues that to look only at the superficial products of an activity, in this case the items produced by an economy for consumption, can be greatly misleading about the activity that produces it. Similarly, Kuhn argues that the focus on scientific articles, practitioners' histories, and especially scientific textbooks masks the underlying activity of science (whose progress, according to Kuhn, is disrupted by periodic revolutions, which are tidied up in or simply left out of subsequent accounts). The role that these products have in education, training, and in philosophy of science have so far made important features of scientific practice basically invisible to laymen, practitioners, and philosophers alike.

In "The Priority of Paradigms," Kuhn makes a non-intellectualist argument, following Wittgenstein, that the paradigm itself, a certain prototypical way of solving a problem, is prior to any explicit rules and assumptions that guide a discipline. Just as, according to Wittgenstein, we can apply the term "game" to a certain kind of activity without having a definition or rules for applicability, explicitly or implicitly, so to we can engage in, say, high energy particle physics without knowing, implicitly or explicitly, what rules or assumptions guide that practice (SSR 44-5). This is a reversal on the intellectualist tradition, which in part attempted to figure out the methodological rules and the assumptions that guide science, whereas rules and assumptions are, according to Kuhn, a post-hoc "interpretation or rationalization" of a paradigm, a kind of prototype of a problem-solving practice. Nevertheless, because they agree on their identification of the paradigm, potential disagreement in interpretation need not undermine the practice. As Kuhn says,

[Scientists] can... agree in their identification of a paradigm without agreeing on, or even attempting to produce, a full interpretation or rationalization of it. Lack of a standard interpretation or of an agreed reduction to rules will not prevent a paradigm from guiding research. Normal science can be determined in part by the direct inspection of paradigms, a process that is often aided by but does not depend upon the formulation of rules and assumptions. Indeed, the existence of a paradigm need not even imply that any full set of rules exists. (SSR 44)

Kuhn makes reference at this point to another critic of positivism and intellectualism, Michael Polanyi: "Polanyi has brilliantly developed a very similar theme, arguing that much of the scientist's success depends upon 'tacit knowledge,' i.e., upon knowledge that is acquired through practice and that cannot be articulated explicitly"(SSR 44n1). While Polanyi's use of "knowledge," which carries a lot of philosophical baggage having to do with conceptualization, conscious cognition, and explicit justification, might not be an entirely perspicuous term for the kind of practical ability or skill to which he refers, the anti-intellectualist import is nevertheless quite clear.

The Varieties of Intellectualism

At this point, it is fair for the reader to think that a better characterization than that offered so far is overdue. Nevertheless, since "intellectualism" is primarily a term of indictment or abuse levied by its critics, it was necessary to have some historical sense of its critics before we could be completely clear on that which is being criticized. At this point, I think we can pick out the following philosophical views or methods as various aspects or versions of intellectualism:

Empiricist Intellectualism - Holds that each and every experience is an item of immediate knowledge. This usually, though perhaps not necessarily, goes along with an atomistic theory of experience as being made up of epistemic atoms, called "perceptions," "impressions," "sense-data," etc.

Conceptualism - Holds that each and every experience is pervaded by conceptual contents. Like intellectualist empiricism, this is usually associated with a view that experience is always of the kind of knowledge or cognition.

Theory-First Intellectualism - Holds that inquiry always begins with a theory or a theory-laden question. For example, one might hold that in science, one is always attempt to confirm, refute, or replace the accepted theory, or one might hold that philosophy is inquiry into a set of two-thousand-year-old questions about knowledge, truth, reality, the good, etc. that have remained essentially unchanged.

Language-First Intellectualism - Inquiry always begins with the terms of ordinary language (ordinary language philosophy) or with the attempt to find the most useful vocabulary (Rorty). More generally, the idea that there is nothing outside the text (Derrida).

Idealism - Like Derrida's linguistic idealism, which regards the text as identical to the real, this form of intellectualism identifies things as they are known, conceptualized, etc. as the way the things are in toto.

In the first two cases, the mistake is the identification of experience with knowledge or cognition. In different ways, this mistake falls on most varieties of empiricism and Kantianism. The second two cases, the mistake is to identify the beginning of inquiry with theoretical starting point (TSP), rather than a practical starting point (PSP)[3]. Inquiry that begins with problems posed by pre-existing theoretical or linguistic concepts is merely addressed to what Peirce called "paper problems." Significant or genuine inquiry ought to begin with concrete problems that arise during or are implicit in actual practice or experience[4]. The final mistake that intellectualism can rise to is the metaphysical corollary of the other mistakes, the identification of the real with the "world" of our concepts, theories, language, or knowledge. It amounts to the denial, in Dewey's terms, of things as they are immediately had, enjoyed, used, suffered, etc., rather than or in addition to being known.

Intellectualism in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy

Contemporary analytic philosophy is often said, by sources as diverse as Richard Rorty and Brian Leiter, to have no particular essence, to have no special methods or subject-matter that mark it out as distinct from other historical or contemporary traditions in philosophy (so, e.g., there is no "analytic-contintental" divide of any substance). At best, we can, as Scott Soames suggests[5], pick out a set of chains of historical influence and certain stylistic features, and even then, we won't get a clear demarcation. So, of course, one cannot lay a general criticism on analytic philosophy as a whole, because it is doubtful that it will apply everywhere. The best one can do, as I will do here, is to pick out cases that either plague some philosophers that are prototypically analytic, or that plague some large swaths of the tradition. In other words, what follow is a short laundry-list of complaints that a non-intellectualist philosopher would level at present-day analytic philosophy.

One clear case of a fallacy of intellectualism that is prevalent in analytic thought today is the evidential role given to use of language, folk concepts, and so-called "intuitions". While analytic philosophy no longer seems to proceed entirely via rigorous analysis of the meaning of concepts or the use of ordinary language, nevertheless, facts about the use of language or the meaning of terms is still used widely as evidence for things that go far beyond issues of philosophy of language and lingusitics, in areas such as epistemology, philosophy of mind, and ethics, for example. This method takes inquiries into these subjects to have a TSP in our folk concepts.

Perhaps worse from the point of view of the non-intellectualist, some philosophers attempt to proceed from people's intuitions, their immediate or considered judgments on either particular or generic matters of the subject at hand. For example, it is common in analytic normative ethics to ask for peoples intuitions, or their considered judgments (sometimes misleadingly referred to as "pre-theoretic" intuitions or judgments) on both concrete cases like, "Should this person switch the trolley from this track to that, and in doing so save five by killing one?" and on more generic judgments, such as, "Is it ever permissible to lie?" The goal, then, is to systematize such beginning judgments into a set of universal principles from which such judgments can be re-derived.[6] The method begins with pre-existing beliefs, a variety of the TSP, rather than concrete problems of practice, and indeed seems to have nothing to say about practices other than the practice of making judgments. It makes ethics itself an intellectual matter, rather than a question of how one acts, lives, or how society organizes itself.[7]

Another common case of intellectualism in analytic philosophy, one that leads us into the next section on philosophy of science today, is the tendency to regard the purpose philosophy as addressing certain "conceptual" questions that come up in the course of science. This may be a somewhat outdated conception in the mind of some, which was held by positivists like Reichenbach, but which has great difficulty accounting for large swaths of philosophy prevalent today, such as ethics, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy. Nonetheless, it remains the self-conception of many philosophers in the discipline. Philosophers of biology are often concerned with theoretical questions that arise in the course of biology, while some philosophers of mind see their task as the interpretation and improvement of results from the cognitive sciences, and even ethicists are often concerned to explicate how we can have a normative ethics in the kind of world that science tells us exists.

This sort of pursuit is not always or necessarily intellectualistic. After all, if genuine problems arise in the course of, e.g., inquiries in biology, there ought to be no general objection to philosophers or anyone else taking up such standing problems. On the other hand, some philosophers are doing quite the contrary: they take up questions that don't at all concern practitioners of the science in question, questions on which little or nothing in the associated field turns. In other words, they take up the ideational or factual materials of an inquiry that is running or has run its course, and raise problems that are irrelevant to illuminating the issue for which these materials were developed. Consider, for example, the way that analytic metaphysicians take up the use of "cause" in various sciences, and attempt to furnish theories of causation, e.g. counterfactual theories, the competing versions of which have no impact on the way that scientists use the term.[8]

In contrast to the mistake of taking the fixed products of science as the starting-point of philosophy, there is the tendency to take the questions of philosophy as internally fixed (perhaps they are the "eternal questions" of philosophy, or perhaps they arise in the course of the progress of philosophy), and to consider the fixed products of science to be the proper tools for addressing these problems (this position is often, and in my view illegitimately, referred to as "methodological naturalism"). When one regards science as a set of unconditional statements in a logical system, it is natural to take the products of past scientific inquiries and use them in new circumstances. On the other hand, if one recognizes that science is a practice, and that it takes place in a context to address a certain problem, then one is more likely to be suspicious that the materials taken from one inquiry will be valid in an entirely different one. Future inquiry in physics cannot take the settled products of past physical theiry as absolutely and unconditionally fixed, and neither can any other kind of inquiry which might try to use it, even if that inquiry be philosophical.

Intellectualism in Contemporary Philosophy of Science ###

Scientific realism is a form of idealism (as defined above) in that it assumes that our (true) theories of the world have a one-one correspondence with the world. That is, it identifies the things as they are with the things as we know them.

We've already discussed the danger of merely interpreting the concepts and theories fixed by science.

Many people assume that the ultimate judge of our scientific theory is itself something already theoretical. Feyerabend is often understood this way (wrongly, in my view) when he says that observation-statements are already fully theoretical. (This is Feyerabend's view, but it is also not the case that he usually regards observations as the ultimate test of the value of a theory.) Kitcher is guilty of this when he tries to give a theory of the significance of scientific projects, because all of the items that figure in his "significance graphs" are already intellectualized products: aims, problems, questions, and theories that have already been formulated prior to reckoning significance.

This section incomplete

Non-intellectualism, Not Anti-intellectualism

From the sustained critique on intellectualism that I've been detailing, one might regard pragmatists like Dewey and others that I've identified as "non-intellectualist" to be anti-science, anti-theory, etc., i.e., anti-intellectuals. This would be a dangerous misunderstanding. No one appreciated the importance, the practical value, even the beauty of ideas and theories more than Dewey, Peirce, and many of the others I've mentioned.[9] Their constant reminder has been that theories and ideas, that intelligence itself must be understood in the context of the practices in which they arise, which ultimately give them meaning, and to which they must return in order to exhibit what value they will have. As has been mentioned anecdotally, Dewey rejected the compliment that he was "practicalizing intelligence," insisting instead that made practice more intelligent. But this would have been impossible without first understanding the practical context of intelligence.

Notes

Such a interpretation has been defended in its strongest form by F.C.S. Schiller, but there seems no way around some such interpretation, given the claims in Theaetetus 165e4-168c8 that even though no beliefs are false, some are more or less beneficial.

At least, insofar as the activity of science was relevant to knowledge. To be a little more specific, the positivists usually drew a distinction between context of discovery, into which they lumped all the messy features of practice, and the context of justification, which was the proper concern of epistemology. This distinction remains inherently intellectualist insofar as it assumes that the logic of justification can refer only to the final products of the activity and not the activity itself. In any case, such a distinction has been completely undermined on other grounds.

These terms taken from David Hildebrande, Beyond Realism and Anti-Realism.

The argument for this point will be addressed in Chapter 2, "The Context and Significance of Inquiry" (in my dissertation, Science and Experience).

See his History of Analytic Philosophy in the Twentieth Century.

Though the original judgments need not be regarded as sacrosanct. In the method of "reflective equilibrium" which proceeds more or less as has just been described, judgments in particular cases can be revised in order to accommodate a more plausible universal principle. Presumably, the preferred size of a set of principles is one.

Though contemporary philosophy isn't entirely consistent on this. E.g., Rawls often says that the subject-matter of a theory of justice is the organization of the basic institutions of society, and yet his discussion of reflective equilibrium might lead you to believe that such a theory is meant to help us derive judgments rather than organize institutions. This is an example of another common intellectualist error, idealism or quasi-idealism, the confusing of the judgment for the thing judged, the map for the territory.

Recently, things are looking better for the literature on causation. Nancy Cartwright and others have being trying to turn the field in a direction that addresses actual problems that arise in science based on different notions of causation.

Though perhaps some other critics of intellectualism, such as Nietzsche, might also have more tepid feelings about products of intelligence.