New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

A small note on memetics (the science of flattery)

In the early 1990s I was an undergraduate at Tufts, and took an exciting seminar with Dan Dennett on his manuscript that became Darwin's Dangerous Ideas. After graduation and some travel I ended up alone on a Greek Island, where captivated by the memetic theory, I wrote a very long (80 pages?) ms on how to turn memetics into a science. I sent it to Dennett and received a very kind, encouraging response. (All of this aided by Greek mail.) I went to Chicago to work with Bill Wimsatt on the science of memetics in a weekly reading group with Bill and Betty Van Meer. Bill was skeptical, but open-minded. So, we decided to focus on technology as a species of cultural evolution and try to build a science of memes out of a collection of case-studies. After relentless discussion and debate, I gave up on turning Memes into a science just as the Journal of Memetics was founded (ca 1997). Bill wrote a lovely, much cited piece about memes, and that was the end of the memetic matter for me.

So, I read the this review of a book bashing memetics with a touch of bemusement; the reviewer agrees with the book (and also bashes neo-classical economics). The following paragraph astonished me:

Mogens Laerke wins 2011 JHP Article Prize.

The distinguished Leibniz and Spinoza scholar, Mogens Laerke, has won the 2011 The Journal of the History of Philosophy Article Prize for his "Spinoza’s Cosmological Argument in the Ethics."

Journals and Tenure

On the eve of the millenium, Lindsay Waters of Harvard University Press wrote (PMLA 2000) an elegantly phrased, yet challenging, indictment of the book-criterion of tenure in literature departments. It had become a way of shifting the burden of tenure decisions from departments to university presses, he said. The result, he said, was that university presses were under "pressure to publish books that have little other justification than to build up a tenure case."

Thirty years ago, reputable publishers could expect college and university libraries to buy between 1,250 and 1,500 copies of any book that had successfully gone through the rigorous scholarly review process. That number has dwindled now to about 275 copies worldwide.

New APPS Interview: Rebecca Kukla

Today’s New APPS interview is with Rebecca Kukla, Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Fellow at the Kennedy School of Ethics at Georgetown University.

Thanks for doing this interview with us, Rebecca. You’ve written a well-known book, ‘Yo’ and ‘Lo!’: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons (Harvard, 2009), with our own Mark Lance. Tell us a little about your collaborations.

I find collaborative writing and all forms of philosophical interaction extremely pleasurable. When I collaborate and it goes well (as it certainly did for the book), I definitely feel like the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In the midst of collaboration, I can think in ways I simply couldn’t on my own; it is very exciting.  I find solitary writing excruciatingly painful and a huge test of my will power, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love it.  There is nothing that makes me feel as fulfilled as writing. I’ve never bought into this idea that it’s somehow obvious that pain is bad, even subjectively.  I’m totally down with pain.

To adapt the old line about politics, you may not be interested in pain, but it’s interested in you! Tell us something of your daily practice if you would.

Massimo Pigliucci turns down (possibility of) Templeton funding

By contrast, I would accept funding from Templeton. Would you? It would be better if philosophy research (positions) would be funded entirely out of income from university endowments, where available, and enrollments. For as Massimo suggests, all funding comes with indirect strings. But I am not in the position to be too choosy; my research (and that of my PhDs) is funded by grant agencies. I view Templeton as a splendid possible, alternative source. It's called diversification (or portfolio-management). It also reduces the influence of any given funding source.

WAM! The Story of an Academic Spat

We have been discussing academic refereeing on NewAPPS, and I thought I might contribute a little story about an academic dispute. It's about me, and it is more or less irrelevant to abstract questions about the pros and cons of blind refereeing. And it's much longer than I usually post here. So it might belong in what Catarina Dutilh calls "the Department of Shameless Self-Promotion". But it's about academic politics and publishing. And my self-centred account may be mildly amusing to some. So indulge me, please.

Why does this music make me feel younger? Tidiness versus accuracy in psychological studies

In a recent paper in Psychological Science, Joseph Simmons et al. report how listening to particular musical compositions affects your subjective age. In one experiment, they report how people listening to Hot Potato (by The Wiggles) felt subjectively older than those who listened to a control song (Kalimba, an instrumental tune that comes with Windows 7). In a second study, they report how listening to the Beatles' When I'm 64 leads one to underestimate of one's own age. Undergraduate students listened to either When I'm 64 or Kalimba. They were then asked to fill out a questionnaire including the age of their father and their own date of birth. Students who had listened to When I'm 64 reported an age of almost 1.5 years younger compared to those who listened to Kalimba. If these results strike you as unbelievable, they are! The study is absolutely bogus, as the authors themselves freely admit. Yet, they did not fabricate data or tamper with their results, but simply used practices that are common in experimental psychological research. 

A philosophy course materials links page / wiki?

Facebook conversation among myself, Jason Stanley, and Keith DeRose revealed each of us has an extensive course materials page.  

Stanley: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jasoncs/Courses.html

DeRose: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~kd47/

Protevi: http://www.protevi.com/john/courses.html

There must be hundreds of other such pages on the web. How can we organize access to them? Is there a wiki already? (Is "wiki" the right term for a user-controlled links page?) If not, does anyone have any ideas here on developing one? I've contacted the Phylo folks, and the PhilPapers folks. Any others I should contact? Is this an idea worth pursuing? If so, who wants to lend a hand here? 

Weekly philo of economics: Adam Smith, not-so-Newtonian, after all.

[I start with intellectual autobiography because, perhaps, my journey may serve as a warning to students who let the secondary sources do their thinking while reading primary sources.--ES]

One of the dogmas that I encountered and accepted uncritically when I started doing scholarship on eighteenth-century figures is that they were 'Newtonian.' This conceit wrecked my dissertation (on David Hume and Adam Smith) because I had to conclude that Hume either was an ignoramus or dishonest.

Later, by teaching Berkeley to very inquisitive Wesleyan undergraduates, I realized that very smart philosophers could be informed critics of Newton, and contest the authority of natural philosophy (this paper is the finding of my scholarly voice, which resulted in a more ambitious project.) I returned to Hume and started to see the un-Newtonian and anti-Newtonian aspects. In the wake of my more recent scholarship on Spinoza, I started to discern a whole eighteenth century debate over the application of mathematics to human affairs.

But Adam Smith was not touched by my revisionism. I continued to stand by my reading of the Wealth of Nations, and to see in Smith a very sophisticated Kuhnian-naturalistic defense of the Newtonian paradigm. After all, it was Smith's student, the great jurist-sociologist John Millar, who tagged Smith as the Newton of civil society. [Millar pairs Smith with Montesquieu, presumably to keep Hume out of the picture.]

Now, however, reflection on work by a young Argentinian visiting scholar, Leondro Stieben, and, especially, a fascinating manuscript-monograph on Adam Smith by the distinguished scholars Mike Hill and Warren Montag, which usefully compares Spinoza and Smith, has led me to reconsider Adam Smith. Consider the following paragraph:

The boycott on Elsevier -- update

I suspect that most readers have already seen this somewhere (Eric had a post on this last week), but just in case: there is an ongoing campaign to boycott the academic publisher Elsevier. So far it has been signed by 1983 people, who pledge not to publish, referee or do editorial work for Elsevier (it is possible to opt out of only one or two of these). The reasons given are the usual: they charge exorbitant prices for their journals and practice ‘bundle subscription’, so that libraries are forced to acquire a whole package of journals they do not want in order to subscribe to the ones they do want.

Elsevier is not a particularly big publisher in philosophy, but its presence in math and physics, and many other fields, is very strong. Indeed, Fields medalist Timothy Gowers has been one of the most vocal supporters of the boycott campaign. But we have our own ‘sharks’ in philosophy too (Springer in particular comes to mind), and the scam that is commercial academic publishing has been extensively discussed here at NewAPPS. Are we ready to follow the lead? Should similar campaigns be launched for other publishers?

Looking for photos of Gentzen's manuscript

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

Ok, this is going to be a bit of a self-serving blog post, I hope readers will not mind too much...

I am now working on ideas for the cover of my forthcoming book, and after a few other attempts, I think I have now finally found exactly what I need: a photo of the manuscript of Gerhard Gentzen’s doctoral thesis, Untersuchungen über das logische Schliessen. (For general historical background on proof-theory, see the wonderful SEP entry by Jan von Plato.) The manuscript was found in 2005 in the Paul Bernays collection of the ETH-Zurich, and is remarkable in many respects. One of them is that it contains a proof of normalization for natural deduction which was not included in the published version of the thesis. Eventually, Dag Prawitz proved the same result some 30 years later (in 1965), which was (and still is) seen as a groundbreaking result for proof-theory. It is quite astonishing to think that Gentzen had arrived at the same result but never went on to publish it! (For those who want to know more, here is the article by Jan von Plato containing a translation of the proof, and here is a blog post by Ole Hjortland commenting on Gentzen’s result.)

Refereed Publications: A Modest Proposal

Helen's recent post on the difficulty of finding referees made me wonder why we bother any more. Why does the institution of refereed publication persist?

There was a time when refereeing was supposed to be a guarantee of quality. You read the top journals, because supposedly the high submission rate combined with excellent refereeing and the high cost of publication to guarantee very high quality. This is not particularly plausible any more.

Annals of privatization, vol. 4683

Not the Onion, just the Baton Rouge (Louisiana) Advocate:

A contract signed by the Jindal administration offers a sizeable bonus to a financial firm if the privatization of a state employee health plan occurs. Morgan Keegan & Company Inc., based in Memphis, Tenn., could make up to $900,000 if a private company successfully bids for the state Office of Group Benefits’ book of business....

The contract with Morgan Keegan calls for the firm to help the state “make informed decisions as to the future direction” of the Office of Group Benefits. Morgan Keegan will be paid $150,000 to determine the office’s financial value. An ultimate privatization would net the firm an additional $350,000 to $750,000 for helping with the bidding process and contract negotiation.

State Commissioner of Administration Paul Rainwater, who is one of the governor’s top advisers, said Morgan Keegan will provide unbiased advice, despite standing to profit more from privatization than from the status quo. “Morgan Keegan understands very well they work for us, and their job is to do an analysis that gives us the information we need to make a decision,” he said.

No information was available as to whether Rainwater was able to keep a straight face while saying this or whether he broke out in a fit of laughter.

The new mainstream in economics?

Sixth, the world is not computable. It is far more sensible to think in terms of irreducible uncertainty than computable risk. This fundamental point made by John Maynard Keynes was lost in the subsequent so-called “neoclassical synthesis”

More here.

Are blogs the new gate-keepers?

Maybe in economics, yes:

Marginal Revolution, Tyler’s blog with Alex Tabarrok, is a new alternative to the traditional gatekeepers in economics — the journal editors or the program leaders at the NBER. Tyler and Alex earned this position simply by being good at what they do. Adding sites like this may do more to increase competition in the space of ideas than traditional strategies such as creating new journals. A mention from a site like MR is now an alternative way for new ideas to get attention, one that can parallel the traditional mechanisms.

On referee selection

In discussion over at Helen's post, Brit suggested "People tend to get asked to referee when their own papers are cited in the list of references. At least, those are usually the people I ask first." Echoing Steven Gross, I want to reiterate three concern over this practice: i) such referees have an incentive to accept the paper (because it improves their "impact factor"--not a small matter in many research funding environments); ii) this practice encourages echo-chambers among the well-connected; c) this practice encourages 'referee-steering' by authors.

More background on Philosophers' Imprint.

One of our informed readers provides useful details.

CFA: Moral Psychology and Poverty Alleviation (ASAP)

Meena Krishnamurthy sent me this interesting call for papers for the Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP) Anniversary Workshop at Yale this April.

The Economist on race and racism in Brazil

Brazil in the news again: this week the Economist has an interesting article on race and racism in Brazil, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the variability with which the phenomenon of racism manifests itself in different places. (It illustrates well some of the points I was trying to make here, in the post and in comments.) An excerpt:

Unlike in the United States, slavery in Brazil never meant segregation. Mixing was the norm, and Brazil had many more free blacks. The result is a spectrum of skin colour rather than a dichotomy.

Few these days still call Brazil a “racial democracy”. As Antonio Riserio, a sociologist from Bahia, put it in a recent book: “It’s clear that racism exists in the US. It’s clear that racism exists in Brazil. But they are different kinds of racism.” In Brazil, he argues, racism is veiled and shamefaced, not open or institutional. Brazil has never had anything like the Ku Klux Klan, or the ban on interracial marriage imposed in 17 American states until 1967.

The increasingly hard quest for referees

My husband recently had lunch with the editor-in-chief of an international, peer-reviewed journal (not in philosophy), who says it's getting increasingly hard to find referees. When he began as editor, he needed to contact about 3 to 4 people to find 2 referees. Now he needs to contact on average *16* people to get 2 (or more and more, only 1) referee(s). One result of this is that authors for this journal now have to wait substantially longer to get a decision, even though the system is now fully automatized with an online submission system. Annoyingly, there is also an increasing tendency for referees to back out of commitments they made weeks ago, which again results in longer waiting times. If this trend can be generalized, it is increasingly hard to find referees. Perhaps motivation to referee is decreasing as faculty are confronted with higher teaching loads, more pressure to publish, etc. Also, while one may feel some sense of obligation to accept referee invitations, refereeing has limited payoffs. It doesn't count (or barely counts) on the cv, and one is not acknowledged for having refereed, except as one in a long list of referees published in the journal (though there are exceptions to this: I once refereed for a cognitive science journal that publishes the names of the reviewers together with the paper if it's accepted, and you even get the opportunity to briefly comment). Eric has suggested earlier that already publishing names of referees of accepted papers would help as well (it would also address concerns like potential cronyism in refereeing, and improve the quality of refereeing).

The man who hand-draws mathematical fractals

One of the subjects I work with, JP, has acquired synesthesia and acquired savant syndrome. This happened as a result of a brutal assault in 2002, during which he was kicked and hit on the head. He was subsequently diagnosed with a bleeding kidney and an unspecified head injury. What the doctors didn't know was that JP no longer saw the world the way he used to. Objects suddenly did not have smooth boundaries. Things no longer moved smoothly. Motion took place in picture frames. It looked like someone paused and unpaused the flow of the world very rapidly. Even more amazing: JP was suddenly able to see vivid fractal images of objects with a fractal structure (such as, broccoli).

JP's response to his new way of seeing the world was to withdraw from it. He spent the following three years in his apartment and refused to leave unless it was strictly necessary. After three years in complete isolation JP figured that he would try to draw what he saw, so he could make people understand him. He started drawing. And he continued. He drew and drew and drew, using only a pencil, a ruler and a compass. The results were beautiful hand-drawn fractal-like images. JP didn't know then that he was the first in the world to hand-draw mathematical fractals and that he would later win prizes for his drawings. He didn't even know what he was drawing, except that it was what he saw.

French film-maker loses trial

Catarina called attention to Sophie Robert's documentary which heavily criticizes psychoanalytic approaches to autism in France. Three French psychoanalysts went to court and won their case against Robert. According to the Flemish newspaper, De Standaard, she needs to remove the material of these three analysts from her film and pay 36,000 Euros fine. (Thanks to Rogier de Langhe via facebook.)

Quote of the day: Philosophy as language acquisition...

"[W]e can see the philosopher at work here. He lets himself be led into various corners by the authors he is considering; he then finds his way out of these corners and into his own conceptual space. He arrives, perhaps, where he might not have arrived without this working through the other's thoughts. In this respect, what he says about the problem of intersubjectivity and language applies equally to the philosophical process. Philosophy is in some way a kind of language acquisition -- not in the simple sense of picking up a vocabulary, but in the sense of being guided along by the language that others have used, and then formulating an expression of something that goes beyond that. As Merleau-Ponty sometimes puts it, the child does not acquire language so much as language acquires the child. The same can be said of the philosopher and ideas."--Shaun Gallagher commenting on Merleau-Ponty.

Brazilian music on Fridays: '16 toneladas'

I had promised Julian Kiverstein to finally write a post on Baden Powell this week, but I am in Munich at the moment with very precarious internet connection. So I’ll have to postpone the Baden Powell post to next week. For this week, here are two renderings of the Brazilian version of ’16 tons’ – thanks to Bryce Huebner for making me think of it! Unlike the original version in English, the Brazilian lyrics make no reference to hardship or exploitation; instead, the song is about how impossible it is not to dance to it! (Typical…)

Social Conservatives are not the only ones with a pessimistic view of human nature

A paragraph in this interesting review caught my attention:

The articles by Savulescu and Greely are fascinating but, I think, troubling. Although they reply to objections from social conservative critics of the practices that they (with some qualifications) endorse, there is no substitute for having social conservatives speak for themselves. I find the articles in this volume insufficiently skeptical of the ability of human beings to react beneficently under conditions of unprecedented power and moral uncertainty. A rejoinder from a social conservative would be a welcome addition to the volume.

Why would the "social conservative" have a monopoly on being "skeptical of the ability of human beings to react beneficently under conditions of unprecedented power and moral uncertainty?" Let's leave aside the empirical fact that there are plenty of social conservatives that end up endorsing social engineering projects of various kinds and let's grant that some non-social conservatives remain optimistic about human nature endowed with absolute power. But non social conservatives discovered, say, Liberalism of Fear (Berlin, Shklar, etc) a while ago.

On dealing with high prices of academic journals

After a high profile mathematician got the ball rolling again (and he does not pull his punches ["The journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals is a notorious example of a journal that is regarded as a joke by many mathematicians, but which libraries all round the world must nevertheless subscribe to"]!), our friends at Crooked Timber are calling for a boycott of Elsevier journals because of its pricing practices. This is an issue we return to regularly at NewAPPS (here and here). This call to action will probably fail, too, because as we learned in the Synthese debacle (a Springer journal) and from the rigged ESF rankings (again, involving Springer journals) too many powerful academics benefit from the status quo. (I have named names on these issues, but this is not just a European problem.) Given the the way academics are evaluated and advanced, it pays to "capture" an established journal for one's intellectual niche(s) come what may. I predict: we will only see a change if the influential folk that protect the status quo are bribed in the right way, oops, I mean brought along in advance.

Privilege and "Common Sense"

In a recent article in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik provides a useful example of how class and racial privilege can function as epistemic barriers, preventing otherwise intelligent people from understanding a situation in which they are keenly interested.

Gopnik begins his article, “The Caging of America,” with an admirably concise account of the current US prison epidemic and its historical roots in two approaches to incarceration: the Northern penitentiary system, dedicated to reform and rehabilitation, and the Southern legacy of plantation slavery, which continues to shape carceral policies focused on punishment and retribution.

But Gopnik’s argument takes a curious turn when he begins to reflect on the “real background to the prison boom,” which he identifies as “the crime wave that preceded and overlapped it.”  Gopnik does not cite sources or statistics to support this “reality”; rather, he appeals to his own traumatic recollection of the sixties and seventies, which “those too young to recall” may be tempted to dismiss as “mere bogeyman history.”  But there is a palpable difference between the mean streets of New York in 1980 and the relative safety of New York in 2012; Gopnik can feel it.  What could explain this change for the better?

More on the "work for hire" front

Kevin Smith, an attorney and academic librarian who is Duke's Scholarly Communications Officer, offers three reasons why OUP's insertion of "work for hire" language, which vests authorship with OUP rather than with the real author (previously discussed here and here at New APPS, following up on the initiative of Steven Shaviro) is likely to backfire.

First, nothing is more surely designed to make faculty authors angry than to tell them they are not the authors of the scholarship they offer to publishers.  As a group, faculty authors have been pretty docile toward publishers for a long time, but foolish and tone-deaf moves by publishers have begun to stir faculty anger toward presses they once considered friends and colleagues.  If a claim like this, which denies the fundamental dignity of authorship to scholars, becomes widespread, that slow rebellion will speed up very quickly.

Weekly Philo of economics: Dragons live forever

[This post is dedicated to Scaliger, for whom Mary Trivers lives forever.]

"A dragon lives forever but not so little boys/Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys./One grey night it happened, Jackie paper came no more/And puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar./ His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain/Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane./Without his life-long friend, puff could not be brave,/ So puff that mighty dragon sadly slipped into his cave..."

 

New APPS Interview: Tommie Shelby

Today’s New APPS interview is with Tommie Shelby, Professor of Philosophy and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University. 

Thanks very much for doing this interview with us today, Tommie. Let’s start with your personal practice of philosophy. What are the pleasures and pains of philosophy for you?

I’ve always enjoyed the solitary side of philosophy--the reflection, reading, and writing. It’s fair to say that I live much of my life inside my head, often getting lost in thought when I should really be focusing on my wife, kids, or some practical task. I’d say I find philosophy most painful when I’ve worked long and hard on a problem only to discover that I’ve barely scratched the surface or that my solution won’t work.

How about your collaborations?

Vagueness in the wild: how do we decide what is and isn't a face?

Vagueness is a philosophical problem that continues to generate discussion, especially in formal epistemology. But the question of how we deal with vague information in the wild remains a largely unexplored empirical domain. When do we decide, for example, whether or not something is a face? As Guthrie (1993, Faces in the clouds) pointed out, humans are prone to detect faces in such objects like clouds, rock formations, and plugs. Jesus' face is regularly discovered in a slice of pizza or a fishstick. Guthrie speculated it is evolutionary advantageous for us to see more faces (more agency in general) than is warranted - we err on the side of caution. But clearly, unless we are delusional, we don't see faces everywhere. Not every passing cloud is interpreted as a face. So the question is: how does our mind decide what is and isn't a face?

Russell, Bradley, and St Stephen's

Eric wonders about St Stephen's College, philosophy, and the remnants of British imperialism in 1960s India.

St Stephen's was the College of the Cambridge Mission, an Anglican college in Delhi University. It's main court was called Andrews Court, after C. F. Andrews, the "Charlie" of Richard Attenborough's film of Gandhi. Those who remember that film will know that Andrews was an important figure in the Indian independence movement, and a close friend of Gandhi, who nonetheless felt compelled to send him back to St Stephen's because it did no good to have an Englishman be a main advisor to the Indian National Congress. Like its academic rival, Hindu College, across the road, St Stephen's aimed to educate Indians who would govern India. In many ways, it was a vestige of English culture, but in no way did it represent a phase of British imperialism.

Compulsory philosophy for Brazilian high-school students

This is probably the must-read philosophy link of the day, perhaps of the week: Carlos Fraenkel’s article in the Boston Review on the compulsory teaching of philosophy in Brazilian high schools (linked for example by Leiter, among others). Since 2008, it became a federal law, but before that it had already been implemented in several states (education is mostly a state affair in Brazil).

Why the Bradley/Russell dispute matters

Mohan encountered Bradley's Appearance and Reality at St. Stephen's College in Delhi in the Summer of 68. Perhaps this suggests that the "moral and spiritual mission" of "British imperialism's late phase," with which Bradley's work had been associated (Candlish The Russell/Bradley Dispute, 183) ended late in some parts of India? For anybody interested in Mohan's intellectual trajectory, it might be worth learning more about the intellectual background of The Head of Philosophy at St. Stephen's and the visions with which he (she?) tried to instill in his young recruits to philosophy. It is probably no accident that Mohan encountered Bradley in Delhi and that once encountered, the alternative was Russell for a man with a physics background. For, in his philosophic prophecies, Russell systematically set himself against "Hegel's modern disciples” and as preparing the way for a scientific philosophy (“On Scientific Method In Philosophy”).

Psychoanalysis and autism in France

Almost a year ago I wrote a post on the dubious scientific status of psychoanalysis. One might think that this is an old and dated Popperian question, but in view of the influential position still occupied by psychoanalysis at least in some quarters, it remains a topical issue. In effect, via the Feminist Philosophers I came across this NYT article on a documentary which heavily criticizes psychoanalytic approaches to autism in France.

According to the article, psychoanalysis remains the standard approach to autism there, but not for particularly good reasons. In fact, the results seem to be quite discouraging (for example, a much smaller percentage of children with an autism diagnosis are sufficiently autonomous to be able to attend school in France than in e.g. the UK), and yet the grip of psychoanalysis remains strong – needless to say, arguably to the disadvantage of the children in question and their caregivers.

In the Feminist Philosophers’ post there is also a link to the documentary; it is well worth watching, but also quite depressing.