Recent Blogging

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

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

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

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

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

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.

1. 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.


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


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


4. 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

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

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),⁴ neurophilosophers 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.

---

1. 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). ↩
   


2. 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. ↩
   


3. 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.
   ↩
   


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


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


6. See Doris and Stich (2005). ↩
   


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


8. Myself included, I am sorry to say. ↩
   

Whitehead on Philosophy

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

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...

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

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

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!

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

(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

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

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

(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!

(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

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!