Philosophy and Disciplinary Boundaries

Interesting.

Should philosophy have something to say to non-philosophers? Should philosophy be pursued only by those trained in philosophy? Should academic teachers of philosophy consider themselves philosophers in virtue of the fact that they teach philosophy? And should analytic philosophers deny that continental philosophers are philosophers at all, or acknowledge that they represent different modes of philosophizing? Cogito poses some big questions to four prominent British and US philosophers.

That last was a bit of a leading question, though Jonathan Barnes offered an amusing response:

Well, most philosophers who belong to the so-called analytical tradition are pretty poor philosophers. (Most academics who do anything are pretty poor at doing it; and philosophy, or so it seems to me, is a subject in which it is peculiarly difficult to do decent stuff. A modestly competent historian may produce a modestly good history book; a modestly competent philosopher has no reason to publish his modest thoughts.) But there's a big difference between the analyticals and the continentals: what distinguishes the continental tradition is that all its members are pretty hopeless at philosophy.

See also Barry Stroud on alternative written forms:

Poems and aphorisms do not seem to me appropriate forms for carrying out philosophical work, even if they might be used to express or summarize certain philosophical conceptions developed by other means. Dialogue is a very good way to write philosophy, but it is difficult to do convincingly. I don't see much loss in trying to write philosophy in clear, connected, sharply focused prose. I wish more philosophers would try it.

And, on a more serious note, Raymond Geuss discusses the 'compartmentalization' of philosophical sub-fields:

The question is not whether a moral philosopher should or should not be interested in logic. Of course, in an ideal world moral philosophers would pay close attention to what all other philosophers said and wrote. They would also pay close attention to advances in biology, new forms of legislation, world history, economic theory, cosmology, and literature. We do not live in such an ideal world and so for us the real question is: given the limitations on human time and attention, what is the most useful thing for a philosopher who has a primary interest, say in political philosophy, to study? Is it more useful to study logic than economic history? To say that we know that this is the case a priori, by virtue of the fact that logic "belongs" to philosophy and economics does not, is to fetishize disciplinary boundaries that have no absolute standing.

That is one quote I wholeheartedly agree with. I'm no fan of strict distribution requirements, but I suspect many grad students would benefit from faculty advisors encouraging them to take appropriate courses in related "non-philosophy" disciplines. What do you think?

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Instituting Informal Peer Review

[Update: Moved to front from 13/3. I've created a wiki to continue the planning and discussion. Click here to sign up and begin editing.]

I want to say a little more about how academics might hope to take advantage of the shift to a 'publish, then filter' world.

The first thing to note is that we already solicit and offer each other informal feedback (i.e. outside of the journal peer review process) in a number of ways -- sending drafts to friends, presenting at conferences, etc. But these opportunities are predictably and unfortunately limited by the constraints of face-to-face social networking (e.g. geography: I never could have spoken with all the wonderful people I'm now surrounded by, back when I lived in New Zealand).

So it would seem desirable to take this informal process, and expand and enhance it by means of appropriate online infrastructure. We could create a website - a global database - to which philosophers could submit their draft papers in exchange for reviewing and rating others' submissions. (Authors could respond to these reviews in turn, either by revising their paper or explaining why they consider the criticisms misguided; the reviewers may subsequently revise their ratings. It's a dynamic process.)

Such feedback could be valuable to the authors. Insightful reviews could be reputation-enhancing for the reviewers. And, emerging from of all this public give-and-take, readers end up with a searchable database of cutting-edge philosophical research, complete with a (rough) metric of quality, to help us find especially interesting and important new papers. (One might variously browse by rating, download popularity, number of reviews/comments, etc.)

As you can probably tell, I like this idea a lot. Unfortunately, I don't have the technical know-how to set up such a thing. (Oisin suggests Drupal?) But I'd be willing to look into it further -- and see if I can get institutional support, etc. -- if there's sufficient interest out there to make such a project worthwhile. Any takers?

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Publish Then Filter

A common theme in analyses of the Internet is the transformation from a 'filter then publish' to a 'publish, then filter' world. The high costs of publishing previously forced the former model on us: anyone who wanted to see their work in print first had to win over the gatekeepers (editors of newspapers, journals, etc.). But now anyone and his dog can publish for free over the Internet. So the contemporary challenge is post-publication filtering, i.e. how to find the gems in the torrent of information out there.

One option is to turn to the old gatekeepers for guidance. Anyone can self-publish, but not everyone can publish in the pages of the NY Times or Nous. So we can keep ourselves in a world of informational scarcity if we limit our attention to particular locations which impose pre-publication filtering.

That's fine as far as it goes, but it is an extremely conservative response to the new information ecology. It makes us no worse off than before, at least. But it's worth raising the question: might we have an opportunity now to improve the way we do things? I've already mentioned open-access, which is of course a no-brainer. But that is just a minor tweak, still firmly within the old 'filter then publish' paradigm. To be clear: I think there is an important place for this, at least for the foreseeable future. But I wonder whether we could supplement this with some form of more widely distributed post-publication peer review.

I imagine, for example, the Philosophy Papers Online database could be expanded to allow registered philosophers to rate and/or review the papers found therein. (If measures are needed to 'guard the guardians', these reviews themselves could be subject to peer review -- Slashdot style -- and weighted accordingly. Other online communities have already solved the technical question of how to create a software infrastructure that supports peer production. All we have to do is implement it.)

This would make PhOnline a vastly more valuable resource, since users could browse the most highly rated papers, using these peer ratings as a guide to the most important new scholarship. (At present, users may search by author, title, or date, but there is no way to gauge quality.) This would only work if other philosophers put in the effort to review their colleagues' work. But we already do this for journals, so I don't see why we wouldn't also do this for each other. Depending on how it's set up (i.e. not anonymous review), there could be additional incentives to perform this service, as quality reviewers would benefit from reputational gains within the profession. It could even be technologically enforced, e.g. by requiring that users offer a few reviews before they are allowed to submit another paper of their own to the database.

(In that case, perhaps it would be best to start this project from scratch, rather than trying to build upon an already existing database of papers.)

John Holbo offers a variation on this sentiment (but restricted, I take it, to work that has already passed through the old channels of official credentialing -- I would want to expand this to "unpublished" drafts):

If overproduction is inevitable, which I grant, the primary question is not how to fund it but how to ameliorate the damage it does us. (Having gone overboard by describing excess scholarship as 'effluent' I should probably add: producing things no one wants to read is perfectly harmless so long as these undesired things do not collectively block the road.) The question is how to overproduce with intellectual dignity?

The answer, I think, is that a supplement is needed to a pre-publication peer review process that inevitably hyper-produces hypertrophic 'conformist excellence within the heuristic contraints ...' The supplement should be a hyper-efficient post-publication peer review process that tells you what you might actually want to read.

A simple normative principle. Every scholarly book published in the humanities should be widely read, discussed and reviewed - should have it's own lively blog comment box, not to put too fine a point on it. Because any scholarly book incapable of rousing a modest measure of sustained, considerate, intelligent chat from a few dozen souls who specialize in that area shouldn't have been published as a book - i.e. after several years labor and an average production cost of $25,000. Turning the point around: any book worth that time and expense, that fails to be widely read, discussed and reviewed - that is not given it's own blog comment box - has been dramatically failed by the academic culture in which it was so unfortunate as to be born. [...]

Why is this really quite low normative standard of healthy discussion not presently met? The technological barriers are non-existent, the financial barriers negligible. It's cultural dysfunction. Sheer institutional sclerosis.

The Real Circulation Problem - of which low book sales are a symptom - concerns ideas, not paper. The academic humanities have simply never grown hyper-efficient networks for post-publication peer review that are remotely adequate to the excessive volume of peer-reviewed scholarship generated, especially in just the last few decades. This is the real scholarly argument for moving aggressively online, although it is bolstered by many economic arguments. As I have written before, the beast has poor circulation. The only way to get the blood of ideas moving is to rub its sorry limbs vigorously with ... conversations. Intelligent, bloggy bookchat by scholars, to label this crucial ingredient as the essentially unpretentious thing it is. That isn't scholarship; but - in a world with too much scholarship - it may be an indispensable complement to scholarship.

Cf. Tyler Cowen, for a more radical long-term projection:

I don't envision the free access system as the status quo but free. Papers would be ranked directly in terms of status and popularity rather than ranked through the journals they are published in. Ultimately there wouldn't be journals and this would make a big difference as journals are the current carrier of selective incentives and status rewards...

I'm not sure about this -- what about blind review? We'll presumably want to retain this somehow, if not by journals than via some similar formal means of competition. (Though others have suggested that googling spells the doom of blind review, in which case it's hard to imagine why journals would survive in the long term.) In any case, journals certainly aren't going anywhere in the short term. So I'm really proposing a supplementary system (not a replacement) that I think we'd all benefit from right away.

Update: I've shifted discussion of my specific proposal to a new post.

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Open Access Publishing

Crooked Timber has an interesting discussion about publishing in open access journals, and what it would take to get people to make the switch.

For an even better read, see the old Leiter Reports thread: 'Time to End For-Profit Journals?' As Tim Crane wrote:

In the age of online publication, there is no reason why publishers should make so much money from our work. We don't need publishers in order to have peer-reviewed quality journals. We don't need paper publication for journals. Philosophers' Imprint has shown how you can have an excellent free e-journal which is peer-reviewed, and the Notre Dame Philosophical reviews is now one of the leading places for book reviews. Of course, these projects cost money too -- but it would be a better use of libraries' budgets to administer e-journals which are free for the whole world, than to fill the bank accounts of Springer, Elsevier and the like.

I couldn't agree more. The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (which I've heard is now also open for discussion notes) also deserves a mention. Are there any other open access philosophy journals of similar (top) quality?

These successes aside, it can be difficult for new journals to become established. So it seems the thing to do would be for the academic community to force the old journals to switch to open access. Cf. Laura Schroeter's comment:

The Springer journals pricing policy is egregiously out of line with even the most expensive philosophy journals. But it's hard to support a boycott of the journal, since Phil Studies is one of the best run philosophy journals in terms of editorial policy, turnaround times, volume and quality of published articles.

The fact that Springer owns the title to Phil Studies puts it in a position of power. But it does seem like philosophers could have some important leverage here. One radical solution would be to arrange to transfer the entire editorial board associated with Philosophical Studies to a university-sponsored online journal called, say, New Philosophical Studies. I don't know if there would any be legal problems with this sort of move. There would certainly be plenty of practical difficulties. But it seems clear that such a move would be in the long term interest of the academics who actually use the journal.

What do you think?

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Distribution Requirements

Should graduate coursework be subject to distribution requirements? I certainly approve of having wide-ranging interests and a broad philosophical background. But I'm not so sure it's a good idea to force this on graduate students. Some may want to focus exclusively on, say, epistemology, and I'm not sure why we should want to deny them that option. (Faculty advisers may strongly encourage branching out into related areas that they believe would make their student a better and/or more employable philosopher. But shouldn't the student have the final say? The alternative seems awfully paternalistic. And I certainly wouldn't expect one-size-fits-all departmental requirements to be more reliable than the individual students themselves when it comes to determining their educational needs.)

I know some students who are happy with (some) requirements, as they provide the necessary 'prod' to get them to do work in other areas they value which they might not otherwise get around to. So this may make the case for so-called 'soft paternalism', i.e. setting things up so that the default path is to do a bit of everything. But it should still be possible for any students who don't appreciate the requirements to opt out of them.

This seems to be the approach favoured by Princeton:

Students who wish to do especially intensive work in one area of philosophy through extra work either in the Department of Philosophy or in related areas in other departments may be granted variances permitting them to do less than the norm in some other areas of philosophy, if this is required to allow them to pursue their special interests. Such variances will require approval of the department.

(Though I'm not sure how often such requests are granted.)

Question: what do you think is the educational upshot of distribution requirements? What would you expect a metaphysician to gain from studying ethics, or a contemporary philosopher to gain from studying history of philosophy? Answering this question seems vital for crafting appropriate and worthwhile distribution requirements. For example, if you think it is important for students to have a broad knowledge of the history of philosophy, or to appreciate a whole system of thought, merely requiring them to write a unit paper or two on specific historical topics is not going to serve this end at all. (Better, perhaps, to have them attend a broad survey course and pass a multiple choice exam at the end, as a friend of mine suggested.)

I know a lot of people - including myself - who are especially unsure about what they can expect to gain from doing history of philosophy. But I also know that many readers of this blog are very sympathetic to historical philosophy. Do you think that everyone should be doing it? If so, I ask you: why? What good is history to me? In particular, why might you expect it to be better for me than doing additional work in contemporary ethics or metaphysics?

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"Protesting" Philosophy

Hmmm.

The work done on disability by most bioethicists breeds contempt for disabled people and fosters condescending, dismissive and patronizing responses to their testimonials and subjective accounts about their own lives. Imagine what it is like to be a disabled undergraduate or graduate student trying to endure a semester of lectures in which you are given the message that your life is not worth living and should be prevented, that you are deluding yourself about the quality of your own life and the extent of your misfortune. I often wonder why more feminist philosophers are not protesting the fact that this blatant bigotry and prejudice is being written and taught in their departments.

I really detest these sorts of politicized anti-academic complaints. For the sake of the truth, intellectuals must be free to pursue lines of inquiry that some may find offensive. We grant academic freedom because we recognize that this is important, and beneficial in the long run. So if you want to criticize academic work, you should appeal to truth-indicative considerations, i.e. evidence that the claim being made is false or groundless, not sanctimonious moralizing about how "offensive" it is to assert some claims (whether they be true or not).

In this case, surely nobody really denies that a disabled life may well be worth living. But it is an interesting philosophical question whether disabilities in future generations ought to be prevented (through genetic screening and the like). It's an important moral question, and one we should want to learn the truth about. Hence the need for free inquiry. Prima facie, I would think there's a reasonable case to be made for screening out disabilities. If that's true, it can hardly be "bigotry" or "prejudice" to say so. To bandy about such accusations just seems intellectually dishonest -- an attempt to use the moral high ground to bully one's interlocutors into submission without doing the hard work of actually arguing against their position. Most distasteful.

It's a strange mindset - and one which has no place in academia - that would have us respond to philosophical opponents with "protests" rather than counterarguments.

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'Misfit' is a relative term

Some commenters here complain about how "Social misfits are really rife in philosophy." It can certainly be discomforting when the people around you do not share your social norms and expectations. But isn't it a bit quick to just assume that it's their fault (and so call them 'jerks', 'boors' and so forth)? Lack of fit is a symmetrical relation, after all. Consider the following complaint:

How many times as a female professor have I gone out to dinner parties with visiting speakers where there were several philosopher’s wives present (my other colleagues mostly being males), where the entire dinner table conversation was devoted to philosophical issues that excluded them? As a woman, I or perhaps simply as someone socialized to be more polite and empathetic, I face the choice then: should I try to join in with “the guys” and prove my mettle, thus ignoring half the people present at the table, or should I attempt to be more congenial and polite and talk to the women?

Now, from my perspective, the whole point of a bunch of philosophers going out to dinner with a visiting speaker is to discuss philosophy. That's what they're there for. To complain that "the entire dinner table conversation was devoted to philosophical issues" seems as bizarre to me as complaining that the entire seminar was dedicated to philosophy when some of the students might rather have discussed the local sports team. The problem does not necessarily lie with the topic of conversation; it could just be that the sports fans are in the wrong place.

More generally, it's nice to accommodate people and make them feel comfortable. But given that the lack of fit between 'nerds' and 'normals' is symmetrical, it's not clear why the norms of the latter group should always take precedence. I mean, there's no surer way to make me uncomfortable than to put me in a situation where one is expected to engage in small talk. That's just a fact about me and how I relate to others. Many people (outside of academia) seem to be just the opposite: uncomfortable with serious discussion, comfortable with small talk. That's a fact about them and how they relate to others. Each of these two personality types may find it difficult to relate to the other. Objectively speaking, that's the end of the story. But in practice the extroverts are socially dominant, so they lay fault on the nerds and introverts for failing to conform to their preferred (arbitrary) norms. What they don't seem to realize is that they are equally failing to conform to our preferred norms.

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Biased Accommodations

As a society we tend to be much more accommodating of some commitments (e.g. religious or familial) than others (hobbies, etc.). Is this fair? Infinite Injury offers an example from UC Berkeley:

The clear sense these rules convey is that the instructor is expected to bend their rules if they might create difficulty or hardship for someone who wishes to respect a religious obligation but that a student who is going to be absent for some other extra-curricular activity undertakes a greater obligation if they want to miss class. Now one might justify such a policy on the grounds that some athletes or musicians are going to be out of town on a large number of dates or that religion is more important to people. However, it would be easy to give every student a certain number of absences they can exercise using the easier standard and there are many students who are more casual about the religious observances they ask to be excused for then athletes are about their games...

The things that we [non-believers] may really really care about get no accommodation while just someone has a ridiculous belief about some historical event we have to bend over to accommodate them. Now I fully understand that the potential for religious discrimination is great but if we weren’t implicitly endorsing religion as something more important than say a rocketry hobby we would use some fully neutral policy that gave everyone the chance to do what they really cared about.

That seems exactly right to me. For a more controversial example, then, consider the view that we ("society", i.e. employers and institutions) ought to make a special effort to accommodate those who choose to raise children. I'm sympathetic to this view. But is it biased? Why is the choice to raise children more worthy of accommodation than the choice to write a novel or compose a symphony in one's spare time? Perhaps we ought to be more accommodating in general, not singling out 'family support' as a uniquely worthy form of support. Fairer, perhaps, to enable individuals to pursue whatever projects are most important to them -- and for many this will happen to be childrearing, but for others it may not.

What is the best argument for singling out childcare? (I would look for consequentialist considerations, e.g. the impact that parenting has on the next generation. But let's bracket that for now.) Feminists sometimes claim that lack of support for women who want to both work and raise children is sexist. But it isn't entirely clear why this is so. (We can't always get everything we want. That's an annoying fact of life, not necessarily a sign of oppression.) Back to II:

The arguments given about the problems for women with babies in academia all focused on the extra time and energy women put into childcare. Now if women put more effort into children simply because they find raising children more rewarding (relative to men) the fact more women than men drop out to raise children is actually the desired outcome. It’s what would result from perfectly fair mutually beneficial trades. On the other hand if you think that the extra effort women put into childrearing isn’t the result of fair deals then the target should be on encouraging women to put less effort into childrearing, not making the unfair division of labor slightly less bad for women.

And a thought-provoking analogy:

Men are underrepresented in K-12 teaching. The reason most men abandon teaching is the difficulty of taking a high paying job in business and being a teacher. Therefore we should provide special benefits and accommodations to let men teach while still working as businessmen in the day. Obviously this argument is fallacious. If people are leaving some profession because they’ve found a better offer they don’t deserve special treatment as a result and it should only be fixed if luring them back provides a good value. Thus whether or not this is a leak we should be plugging is an empirical economic question and it’s only in the face of real data on marginal costs and productivities that we can answer whether or not we should address the ‘problem’.

Perhaps childrearing and religion are presupposed as normal components of the good life, and so it is thought that they should not be subject to trade-offs in the manner of our (other) chosen values. Writing a novel is a choice you make, and a somewhat peculiar one at that; having kids, on the other hand, is simply par for the course in a 'normal' life. This difference in normality may be thought to underwrite the special obligation to accommodate the one choice more than the other. But why should normality matter?

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Exclusive Philosophy

Prof. Anita Allen offers some provocative comments on the discipline:

“I have not been able to encourage other people like me to go into philosophy because I don’t think it has enough to offer them. The salaries aren’t that great, the prestige isn’t that great, the ability to interact with the world isn’t that great, the career options aren’t that great, the methodologies are narrow. Why would you do that,” she asks, “when you could be in an African American studies department, a law school, a history department, and have so many more people to interact with who are more like you, a place where so many more methods are acceptable, so many more topics are going to be written about? Why would you close yourself off in philosophy? I feel that philosophy is hoisting itself by its own petard. Its unwillingness to be more inclusive in terms of issues, methods, demographics, means that it’s losing out on a lot of vibrancy, a lot of intellectual power.”

It's hard to know what to make of this. I tend to think that almost any topic can benefit from being thought about in a philosophical way (that's why I blog!), so I'm all in favour of topical inclusivity. But philosophy is already by far the most topically diverse discipline, spanning everything from applied ethics to formal logic. Perhaps the worry is that within these subfields, there are a limited number of issues that one's academic colleagues will find interesting. But what is the complaint, exactly? Is everyone else obliged to share one's idiosyncratic interests?

I guess I'm more partial to the 'marketplace of ideas' metaphor: academics should simply pursue their personal passions, and communicate the grounds for their excitement to others, and the best will tend to rise to the top. There's no obligation to support academic work you find uninteresting or otherwise not so worthwhile. There's something to be said for quality control, after all. (One should be receptive to new work, of course, but not uncritically accepting.) The only legitimate complaint I can imagine in this vicinity would be if non-mainstream ideas were not receiving a fair hearing, as opposed to being heard and just not especially well-liked.

So much for issues. Should we be more methodologically inclusive? Well, that surely depends on what new methods are being proposed. In general, I don't see that anything is gained by taking non-philosophy and calling it "philosophy". If you want to do history, for example, there's already a place for that. I wouldn't consider it a gain for philosophy if we attracted new students precisely by changing the discipline into something it's not. (It's like curtailing civil liberties in the fight for freedom.) I certainly wouldn't want to see rational argumentation replaced by wishful thinking, or political convenience, etc., as the standard against which we assess claims. Or, for a less straw-mannish example, I have my doubts about experimental philosophy. But it really depends on the specific proposal. If, for example, there are valid inferences that philosophers traditionally haven't recognized as such, then by all means bring that to our attention.

Finally, is philosophy as a discipline really "unwilling" to be "more inclusive in terms of... demographics"? I simply can't imagine anyone in this day and age willing to sacrifice "intellectual power" for the sake of maintaining white male hegemony. I mean, that's just crazy. It's another thing to be suspicious of affirmative action, but that's precisely because it seems to be elevating concern for demographics over intellectual merit, and it's the latter we care about. So, again, I'm not quite sure what to make of the criticism.

As for her earlier remarks, I think Nick at the Feminist Philosophers blog hit the nail on the head:

This is an odd list. Consider salary and prestige. If these are reasons to avoid philosophy, they’re reasons to avoid most academic disciplines. But is this right? We should encourage black women to avoid the academy because the pay is only middle-class and the prestige is only so-so? That hardly seems right.

And who says the career options aren’t that great? They’re not that great if you don’t love philosophy. But if you do, then what career options are better? Being an investment banker? Not for me, I think (and thank God).

Can anyone else make better sense of Allen's complaints?

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Job Sharing

Academic careers can be difficult to reconcile with family life. The job market is tough enough for a single philosopher -- the chances of a couple securing work at the same institution are generally very slim. So, that sucks.

The best solution I've heard of is 'job sharing', which is just what it sounds like: two people, one job. It's a great deal for the institution: the couple applicant may have twice as many areas of specialization and teaching competence than usual, for example. And they may be expected to do twice as much research -- or perhaps even more, since each of the two individuals has only half the usual teaching load to bear. Yet they cost only a single salary.

Why does this not happen more often? Do you think job sharing is likely to become more common in future?

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Well, we can't have that now, can we?

Dr. Ben Barres, a neurobiologist at Stanford, said in reference to Dr. Bailey’s thesis in the book, “Bailey seems to make a living by claiming that the things people hold most deeply true are not true.”

- Criticism of a Gender Theory, and a Scientist Under Siege (HT: Macht)

Because we all know that "the things people hold most deeply true" must never be questioned.

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Advancing the Discipline

What constitutes "progress" for philosophy as an academic discipline? Where is it aiming to end up, and how can we help it get there? Jack writes:

I see philosophy as a young discipline (still young, like Elizabeth Taylor). What we need are more theories, not a verdict on which of the four that we have is superior/least inferior. This is not a call to abandon our scruples and jot down anything bordering on consistent. Theory proliferation needs to be bridled by our reflective judgments and our common sense. But in too many fields we have yet to cut the issue at the joints. In the dialectic we are far nearer to the brainstorming part than the conclusion-in-unanimity part.

At the end of the day, we presumably want knowledge and understanding of important issues. But philosophical exploration may be what we really need for now. If the existing options are inadequate, we shouldn't necessarily want everyone to converge on the "least inferior" one. This would seem to justify some degree of dogged perseverance even in the face of stronger arguments, at least if you think that further refinements to your position could prove fruitful. The risk, of course, is that becoming personally invested in a position could undermine your ability to recognize when it has turned into a dead-end.

Thoughts?

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Getting the Most Out of Grad School

Show me the argument points to a recent survey of responses to the question, "Knowing everything that you know now, what advice would you give others entering or in the early years of graduate school?" Most of it concerns the admissions process. With that behind me, I'm now more interested in the question of how to get the most out of grad school once I'm there. For example, should I take as many classes as I can fit in, or focus more on individual research? (What's the best balance of seminars, reading, and writing?) Is it worth attending seminars in other disciplines? (Generalize or specialize?)

Any advice welcome!

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Perpetuating Gender Norms

Brit Brogaard, summarizing Elizabeth Minnich, writes:

[T]he problem of the status of women in philosophy... wouldn't have been solved if there were 50% women but the 50% felt pressured to behave like men and do male-style philosophy.

While I agree in part (see below), I don't like the implication that there is a particular way that "men" behave, or a peculiarly "male style" of philosophy (or anything else, for that matter). Such labels risk perpetuating existing gender norms, which impose oppressive expectations on men and women alike.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that women shouldn't be forced into becoming analytic metaphysicians, or participating in "the 'old-boy's' network of drinking & smoking and forming bonds", as a precondition for career success in philosophy. But my objection is that it's not essentially a gender issue. Nobody -- male or female -- should have to conform to a parochial mould.

The virtue of "difference feminism" is that it casts a critical eye on previously unquestioned norms, exposing their parochial nature. This is hugely valuable. But while the lens of gender may prove a useful investigative instrument in this regard, it may distort our subsequent evaluations if we're not careful. Uncritical relativism should be avoided -- for example, if logic and violence are gendered as "male", that doesn't make either illogic or violence defensible. Gender is fundamentally irrelevant; the underlying norms should be assessed on their own merits. And if found to be unreasonable, they shouldn't be imposed on anyone.

Related posts: on affirmative action in academia, the liberal case against "diversity", and indirect or "implicit" discrimination.

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Affirmative Action in Academia

There's some interesting discussion at the Leiter Reports over the role of race and gender in philosophy department hiring.

I'm tempted to say that it all comes down to the empirical question of whether the relative scarcity of female and non-white faculty causes otherwise promising students to feel unwelcome in the philosophical community. For if so, that would be really awful, and Weatherson's argument for affirmative action in hiring looks entirely reasonable (i.e. for the sake of "providing an environment where all students feel encouraged to do philosophy."). I'm pretty skeptical of the empirical claim, though.

Other underrepresented groups include conservatives, meat-eaters, and religious people, as Christopher Pynes points out. Should we thus endorse Horowitz's calls to hire more Republicans? I guess it's possible, but I'd expect that there are more important factors besides sharing group affiliations with faculty members that influence students' decisions here! [But what if many students really do feel (perhaps irrationally) discomfort on this basis? Should hiring committees accommodate student prejudices? This seems to be opening Pandora's box...]

Having said that, race and gender do seem to be especially salient characteristics in our society. That's really unfortunate. It'd be much better, I think, for everyone to generally disregard such traits in the same way as we would for (say) eye colour. But given that this isn't where we're at as a society, what is the best way to proceed? Should we act 'colourblind', and hope that students and others follow suit? Or should we play the "identity" game, and hope that we eventually reach a stage where it's no longer necessary?

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Research Interests

Some philosophical projects or topics I'd like to pursue further someday...

[N.B. The list is of course non-exhaustive. And I expect I'll develop all sorts of new interests and ideas in my early years of grad school. But here's what immediately springs to mind...]

1) Rational normativity, especially as it relates to:
(a) the foundations of normativity
(b) indirect utilitarianism and the rationality of rule-following
(c) constructing (synthetic?) a priori truth

2) a priori justification more generally

3) Ethical holism more generally, e.g. developing an institutional conception of rights.

4) Deliberative Democracy: in particular, developing the theory from the foundational value of civic respect.

5) Metaphysical holism, especially as it relates to:
(a) ontological deflationism: the fundamental existent is the entire actual world. All other "things" are in some sense derivative, perhaps abstracting from the whole world in various ways.
(b) philosophy of science, or how we understand the links between various "levels of explanation" (cf. microphysical vs. common-sense causal explanations). In particular, by taking the whole as being more fundamentally real than its parts, physical particles may again be seen more as 'abstractions' than as genuinely fundamental 'building blocks'.

6) Units of ethical consideration: what entities most fundamentally matter (or are subject to harms and benefits) -- worlds, communities, persons, or their momentary time-slices?

7) Corporate agents - dues and responsibilities (e.g. cross-generational reparations). Liberal individualism vs. communitarianism.

8) Philosophy of information/media, especially as it relates to:
(a) metaphysics, e.g. what is information? Is it created or discovered?
(b) ethics, e.g. intellectual property issues.

9) Philosophy of law, insofar as it relates to indirect utilitarian or "rule-following" considerations, abstraction and universalizability.

Hmm, perhaps I should look for a dissertation topic at the intersection of value theory and metaphysics? And the various "holisms" are curious -- quite a change in my philosophical dispositions from a couple of years ago!

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Choices

Wow, I'm feeling incredibly spoilt. I've received offers from Princeton, NYU, Rutgers, Michigan Ann Arbor, UNC Chapel Hill, and Arizona. [Update: Harvard too.]

(For completeness: I was turned down by Stanford, haven't heard from waitlisted at Yale, and Harvard won't decide till next week.)

So. Which grad school should I pick? Bearing in mind that my main interests are in ethics and political philosophy, but with side interests in metaphysics and, well, pretty much everything...

All of these schools have pretty great faculty [PGR top 15] and placement records, so I assume none can be ruled out on those grounds. I guess it then comes down to more subtle differences: which offer a more collegial atmosphere, a friendly student environment, quality teaching and supervisor support, etc.? In short, where would be the most enjoyable and rewarding place for me to study over the next five years?

Or is there a big difference between the top 5 and, say, UNC or Arizona? Is the prestige of an Ivy especially valuable? (Might it, for example, help my efforts outside of academia, if I wanted to become a public intellectual or influence policy-makers, etc.? Or would the first-hand experience of public philosophy offered by UNC actually be more valuable? Do the more prestigous private universities offer anything comparable?)

(I also note Leiter's assessment that NYU could become "the top department by a wide margin", if all five of its recent faculty offers are accepted. One has been already.)

I'll hopefully get a better feel for it all when I visit each campus later this month. But in the meantime, any comments/advice welcome. Sensitive information may instead be emailed to me at r.chappell@gmail.com -- at a time when all the schools are putting on their best appearances, it would be helpful to hear of any negative experiences too, in addition to the good. Thanks in advance!

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Chomsky on Academia

There are inherent dangers in professionalization that are not sufficiently recognized in university structure. There is a tendency, as a field becomes truly professionalized, for its problems to be determined less by considerations of intrinsic interest and more by the availability of certain tools that have been developed as the subject matures. Philosophy is not free from this tendency, of course. In part, this is of course not only unavoidable but even essential for scientific progress. But it is important to find a way, in teaching even more than in research, to place the work that is feasible and productive at a certain moment against the background of the general concerns that make some questions, but not others, worth pursuing....

I think that in most academic fields a graduate student would benefit greatly from the experience, rarely offered in any academic program, of defending the significance of the field of work in which he is engaged and facing the challenge of a point of view and a critique that does not automatically accept the premises and limitations of scope that are to be found in any discipline. I am putting this too abstractly, but I think the point is clear, and I think it indicates a defect of much of university education.

-- Noam Chomsky (1968), 'Philosophers and Public Policy', Ethics 79.

What do you think?

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• academia
• metaphilosophy

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AAPC Summary: Part II

Continuing from Part I...

Alan Hajek introduced the Pasadena Paradox, which arises because the expected value of a 'Pasadena game' is given by a conditionally convergent series, and thus the terms can be rearranged to yield any sum whatsoever. In the absence of any reason to privilege any particular ordering of the terms, we are left with a perfectly well-defined game (with well-defined payoffs) that has no expected value. So decision theory can't tell us how much we should be willing to pay in order to play this game, or, say, whether to accept if offered a million dollars to give it a go. Very puzzling.

An interesting distinction Hajek raised was between "undefined" terms, e.g. 1/0, for which there can be no possible value, as opposed to cases where there is "no fact of the matter" (NFM), but perhaps because they can amount to any value. The latter cases are slightly less troublesome, as they allow for supervaluation. For example, if someone offers you a choice between (i) the Pasadena game or (ii) the Pasadena game plus $100, then clearly the latter choice is preferable. We can make sense of this because whatever ordering of the terms you choose, (i) will then have an expected value of x (for any real x, depending on the ordering you chose), whereas (ii) will have the greater expected value of x+100. But nothing like this works for undefined terms. There's no sense to be given to the claim that 1/0 + 100 is any more than 1/0. Undefined terms are completely incommensurable, because they can't be assigned any value at all, so there's nothing to compare. NFM terms, by contrast, can be assigned any value whatsoever, so you can make the comparison for each particular case and then supervaluate to the general (NFM) case. I thought that was kinda neat.

I've already blogged about Lauren's talk on epistemic defeaters, Adrian Walsh on thought experiments, and Heather Dyke on the Representational Fallacy.

Charles Pigden gave a fun talk in defence of conspiracy theories. He pointed out that many people do in fact conspire so it is unreasonable to dismiss a theory just because it makes claims of a conspiracy. Al Qaeda conspired to carry out the 9/11 attacks. We all accept this conspiracy theory. Bush, Blair & co. previously held to a conspiracy theory about why inspectors could find no WMD in Iraq (they thought Saddam was conspiring to hide them). Turns out they were wrong, but I doubt they would have been swayed at the time by someone pointing out that they were holding to a (shock horror) conspiracy theory. Indeed, it seems odd to even label it as such. Typical usage of the term "conspiracy theory" is usually reserved for theories which allege conspiracy on the part of Western governments. Yet history tells us that Western governments are not always ethical or trustworthy, and have been known to conspire against their enemies, so again, it isn't clear why "conspiracy theories" are necessarily illegitimate.

Emily Gill offered a "response-dependent" (or dispositional) theory of explanation, suggesting that S explains D iff epistemically virtuous agents would judge that S explains D. One oddity about this is that it collapses the distinction between true and apparent explanations, making it impossible to be faultlessly mistaken in one's judgment whether S explains D. I guess the sense of "explanation" she had in mind is the more subjective one, perhaps tied to the notion of a hypothesis or what I would call a possible explanation of the phenomenon. But my linguistic intuitions are pulled towards a more objective or factive sense of the word, whereby "S explains D" entails "D because S". Explanations provide "reasons why", and as I understand it, "S explains D" means that S is in fact a reason why D occurred, and not merely that S could or would (counterfactually) be a reason why D. On my view, false (attempted) explanations are no explanation at all. Put another way, not all possible explanations are actual explanations.

Matthew Minehan tackled the intersection of ethics with metaphysics. It was an interesting and novel approach, though I found his arguments unconvincing. First he argued that consequentialism has a "supervenience problem", because two identical actions might have different moral status depending on their disparate consequences. But the obvious response for the consequentialist is to point out that the two actions actually have different non-moral properties too. For example, one might have the property of 'producing more happiness than any available alternative action', when the other does not. Such differences are what explains the moral difference in the actions.

Minehan's other main argument was that consequentialism collapses into ethical egoism under trope theory. Consequentialism states that we should maximize goodness, which is unproblematic if 'goodness' is a universal shared by all lives. But if each 'goodness' is an abstract particular (trope) then (the argument goes) 'goodness' is a different thing for each person, and consequentialism will just tell us to maximize that particular which is 'goodness' for us. But this doesn't follow. There's no reason why consequentialism couldn't simply tell us to give moral consideration to all the particular 'goodness' tropes (in relation to their 'weight'), without regard for whose they are.

Finally, Dave Chalmers argued that some ontological questions (e.g. whether there are mereological sums of arbitrary objects) might not have any determinate answers. He distinguished between "ordinary" and "ontologial" assertions, mirroring Carnap's internal/external distinction. For example, we might ordinarily say that Santa lives at the North Pole (speaking within the Christmas mythology framework), or that Santa doesn't exist (within the framework of actual concrete objects), but philosophers might argue about whether fictional beings exist (perhaps abstractly) in some 'absolute' sense.

Now, the problem for ontology is that the world might not come with a built-in "absolute domain" which exhaustively specifies all the objects in the world. And if not, then we can't apply the existential quantifier to it, or make existence claims with determinate truth values. Instead, Chalmers suggests, we need to add a "furnishing function" which maps from worlds to domains. Some of these will be 'inadmissible' (for whatever reason), but perhaps there are multiple 'admissible' functions that could associate our world with a domain. If so, then supervaluation might yield at least some determinate answers (say, if no admissibly furnished worlds contain concrete unicorns, then we can hold "concrete unicorns exist" to be determinately false). But in other cases the answer may be indeterminate, e.g. if one admissibly furnished world contains numbers, and another doesn't, then there's simply no fact of the matter whether numbers exist in our bare world. Interesting stuff.

Categories:

• Philosophy
• Academia
• MetaPhilosophy
• metaphysics
• logic

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AAPC Summary: Part I

A few thoughts on some of the AAPC talks I went to...

David Ward's Presidential Address on Saturday evening offered an analysis of 'fun' as 'amusement born of rational detachment'. We may enjoy becoming engaged in more serious activities, but a game isn't really "fun" (in the playful sense) unless we aren't too heavily invested in the outcome. To enable such detachment, Ward suggested that an element of chance or randomness is important, to provide an excuse for losing.

Sunday began with Justine Kingsbury and Tim Dare arguing that differential distributions of the burden of proof between disputants in rational discourse are generally unwarranted. Most apparent cases to the contrary (e.g. where someone postulates entities unnecessarily, such as ghosts or deities) are simply ones where the one side already has reasons on their side (say, reasons of parsimony, or the general success of the naturalistic worldview), rather than being a case where one side was genuinely the "default" position in the sense of not needing the weight of (even existing) reasons to support it. Other cases, where we appeal to "common sense" - say against the radical skeptic - may be more a matter of bailing out of the debate, rather than engaging the opposition but demanding stronger reasons of them. As a couple of us pointed out in quesiton time, this methodological position (that unequal BoPs are unwarranted) seems to beg the question against epistemological conservatism (the view that there is a presupposition in favour of our existing beliefs, or "common sense"). But perhaps that's no great loss.

Canterbury's own Cynthia MacDonald spoke about introspection. An interesting question there is whether (some of) our introspective beliefs are somehow indubitable, infallible, or incorrigible. It touches on issues of subjectivity which I've tackled before. For example, it seems that any sincere utterance of "It seems to me that X" couldn't possibly be false. But perhaps we need to distinguish between actual seemings (the objective version) and seemingly actuals (the subjective version), where only the latter judgments are infallible -- since only there do the judgments themselves constitute the fact. The difference is brought out by imagining a case of memory manipulation. You have a false belief about the way things actually seemed at the time, but it nevertheless truly seems actual to you now.

Next, Otago grad students Charles Boulton and Ian Lawson argued for a metaphysics informed by physics (a project I'm certainly sympathetic to). They focussed on the metaphysics of time in particular, outlining arguments against presentism like the one I've made here. An additional point they made was that, though the presentist can avoid the objection by insisting that there is some privileged or 'absolute' frame of reference which determines "true" simultaneity and thus existence, we have no reason to think that it is our (Earthly) frame. Given all the alternative possibilities, it seems more likely that the presentist would end up having to deny that all the things that seem simultaneous and real from our point of view really are so. (I should add that Charles was generous enough to billet several of us Canterbury students while we were there, and is an all-round great guy.)

More to come...

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• Academia
• MetaPhilosophy

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