The Splintered Mind

The Base Rate of Kant

2012-01-26T14:45:00.000-08:00

People sometimes say that increasing specialization within philosophy means that there could never be another figure like Locke or Hume or Kant -- a figure with giant impact across a broad range of philosophical subdisciplines. The massive growth of the research university has created armies of specialists in each subfield whose copious volumes one must master to become a major player in the subfield; and no one person could master the work of a broad range of subfields.

Let's consider the merits of this theory.

First: Is there any need for a theory to explain the recent lack of Kants? Well, what's the base rate of Kant? We could calculate rate per century or we could calculate rate per professional philosopher.

Consider by century: It seems plausible that no philosopher of at least the past 60 years has achieved the kind of huge, broad impact of Locke, Hume, or Kant. Lewis, Quine, Rawls, and Foucault had huge impacts in clusters of areas but not across as broad a range of areas. Others like McDowell and Rorty have had substantial impact in a broad range of areas but not impact of near-Kantian magnitude. Going back another several decades we get perhaps some near misses, including Wittgenstein, Russell, Heidegger, and Nietzsche, who worked ambitiously in a wide range of areas but whose impact across that range was uneven. Going back two centuries brings in Hegel, Mill, Marx, and Comte about whom historical judgment seems to be highly spatiotemporally variable. In contrast, Locke, Hume, and Kant span a bit over a century between them. But still, three within about hundred years followed by a 200 year break with some near misses isn't really anomalous if we're comparing a peak against an ordinary run.

(I don't mention Descartes despite his huge importance because he didn't have the same kind of impact in ethics/political as did the other three. Also, here is evidence that my judgments about importance aren't too idiosyncratic.)

If we consider the rate of Kants per thousand working professional philosophers, it does seem to be vastly higher in the early modern era than recently. But field-changing ideas can only occur so fast -- probably not much more than once per generation per subfield, since few philosophers are going to be ready to retool every ten years for the newest thing. Probably Kant rate per generation, in cultures with lively enough philosophical communities, is a better way to conceptualize the denominator of the expected base rate.

Thus, I don't think that the recent lack of Kants is a fact so anomalous that it cries out for explanation. There's only so much space at the top for heroes and field definers. Inevitably, Kants will be rare.

But maybe it's still true that the size of the community in each subfield makes it impossible for any one philosopher in the foreseeable future to have a huge impact across the subfields? Maybe a new Kant simply couldn't arise in a discipline as populous as 21st century philosophy? I see two reasons for skepticism about that theory.

(1.) People with huge impact are sometimes young. This was true historically (e.g., Hume was 26 when he finished the Treatise) and it seems to be still true (e.g., Lewis did much of his most influential work when he was in his 20s and 30s). If Lewis (or Kripke, or Chalmers, or...) could master enough of one subfield in 10 years to have a huge impact by age 30, then by age 60 -- and philosophers are by no means washed out by age 60 -- they ought to be able to master, well enough to potentially have a huge impact, several disparate subfields. Nor does it seem that there should be substantial barriers to this in practice. Although sociologically it would be difficult to leap from math to philosophy to physics to have huge impacts in all three fields -- so maybe there will never be another Descartes -- philosophy is not so sociologically divided. Setting aside language-driven divides, the sharpest sociological divide seems to be between "value theory" fields (ethics/aesthetics/political) and "LEMMings" fields (language/epistemology/metaphysics/mind plus logic). But even that divide is quite permeable. There are plenty of philosophers with interests and ambitions on both sides of the divide, and no one finds it odd.

(2.) Across academia as a whole, field-transforming contributions are sometimes achieved by adopting a novel angle or method and then applying it fruitfully both to traditional problems and to new previously unthought-of problems. In philosophy, this means having a new (implicit or explicit) metaphilosophy. Although none of the metaphilosophical revolutions of the past hundred years have generated a Kant, I think we can imagine how they might have, had things played out somewhat differently. Had there been a single dominant figure in the linguistic turn who managed to compellingly apply early linguistic-turnish thoughts to both metaphysics and epistemology and to ethics and political philosophy, that person might have had approximately Kant-sized influence. I see no reason to think such a scenario implausibly unlikely. Similarly, there could have been, I think, a Kant-sized ordinary language philosopher or logical positivist. More recently -- in my opinion! -- philosophy has received a charge of new ideas from the methods and results of empirical psychology, now that psychology has matured past Freudian and behaviorist strictures. People like Jesse Prinz and Shaun Nichols have been able to master enough of the literature in disparate areas of philosophy to have impact in those areas partly through applying methods and ideas from psychology. So I see no reason a great philosopher couldn't arise with a fresh angle, a new approach, applied compellingly to a broad range of the biggest issues, with a consequent Kant-like impact. We won't see it coming in advance -- but that's just us, stuck in our paradigms. Although it is impossible to have encyclopedic mastery of the ever-increasing existing literature across a wide range of subfields of philosophy, such encyclopedic mastery has never been a prerequisite of field-changing genius.

Caveats:

* This isn't to say that I'm particularly fond of Kant! I'm just making a sociological point, and he seems the best example. (See here and here for rough criticism.)

* One way in which it might be harder now to have a broad impact across subfields with a new approach is that once that approach catches on in one subfield, there will be a larger pool of people than there used to be who might quickly adopt it to other subfields, attenuating the aspiring Great Philosopher's direct impact on those subfields.

* Our perspective on the past is probably distorted by the Winnowing of Greats. Appropriately winnowed, maybe David Lewis (or whoever) will some day stand out like Kant. (And yes, I know that much of this post in is conflict with much of that earlier post. I take an appropriately Whitmanian attitude.)

Broad-Ranging Interview on My Work

2012-01-20T08:29:00.000-08:00

by Richard Marshall, here at 3:AM Magazine. Rereading the interview now, I find myself pretty happy with it, other than that I probably should have given somewhat briefer answers to the first few questions.

This interview does a nice job of motivating and tying together, in an accessible way, the various themes of my work, which might otherwise seem to be unconnected (history of psychology, Chinese philosophy, the moral behavior of ethicists, science fiction, the untrustworthiness of philosophical intuition...).

Kant Meets Cyberpunk

2012-01-19T17:19:00.000-08:00

In 1992, my first year of graduate school, I read William Gibson's cyberpunk classic Neuromancer and, by chance, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason at the same time. It seemed to me that the two were intimately connected, but various older grad students in my Kant class pooh-poohed my ideas about this and I lacked the intellectual confidence to pursue it farther.

But the thought has stayed with me. In Neuromancer, like in Tron, there's an artificial environment that one can travel in virtually. One "enters" it by jacking into a neural interface. Also like Tron, but unlike The Matrix, the artificial environment of Neuromancer substantially differs in its basic structural features from the real-world environment. Derived from early computer graphics programs, Neuromancer's cyberspace matrix is composed of lines of light arranged into geometrical figures in simple colors; space is experienced in discrete units and movement is in rectangular clicks. As I seem to remember having imagined it, and as we might as well imagine it for present purposes (though now looking through the text, this not accurate), everything is laid out rectilinearly and the only colors are simple primaries.

So now imagine that you were born jacked into such a matrix. You might think that objects were necessarily laid out in straight lines at right angles and possessed of only primary colors, and that space came in discrete units. But this would be a feature, not of things as they are "in themselves", but rather of how your mind processes the structured input it is given. We might even imagine (and maybe it's true) that a human mind that developed in such a matrix couldn't even conceive of curves, oblique angles, tertiary colors, or continuous space. For such a mind, objects as presented in the cyberspace matrix would be the only empirically available reality, and what we non-cyberspace-embedded folks consider to be the real world would be an incomprehensible "noumenal realm" behind those appearances. Conversely, we might imagine -- though it's impossible to depict vividly in a novel -- this matrix-grown strange baby to have new sensory modalities and new basic ways of cognizing the world that are unfamiliar to us, especially if its brain is artificially enhanced (a fourth "spatial" dimension for matrix-informational layout would be a conservative start).

The analogy to Kant is imperfect. Kantian purists will, I suppose, cringe at the comparison. Time, causation, three-dimensionality, and many other properties are shared by the Neuromancer matrix and the reality outside of the matrix. And the features of the matrix available to the embedded mind might not be given "a priori" in a strict Kantian sense (whatever Kant's sense is). I'm sure there are other important disanalogies too. But as a way of getting a toehold on the Kantian picture, I still rather like the comparison. We are born into naturally given matrixes that necessarily structure our experiential encounter with the world, and out of which we cannot break, even in imagination. All this that I see and hear is just user interface.

Such thoughts are doubly apt, perhaps, if we are actually already living in a giant computer simulation.

Consciousness Online

2012-01-17T17:40:00.000-08:00

Consciousness Online is an online consciousness conference now in its fourth year, organized by Richard Brown. It will be happening February 17 to March 2. The program has a terrific line-up of speakers. Check it out!

The Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind: Short, Folksy Version

2012-01-16T18:21:00.000-08:00

Crazyism in the metaphysics of mind, as I define it, is the view that something bizarre and undeserving of credence -- something "crazy" -- must be among the core truths about the metaphysics of mind.

On December 3, I presented a short, folksy version of this idea as a TEDx talk for the first of hopefully many TEDxUCR events. (Thanks, TEDxUCR organizers!) If you want more than a blog post but less than a 40-page manuscript (plus references), you might be interested to see the (poor quality but audible) TEDx video or prepared text.

For All X, There's Philosophy of X...

2012-01-09T09:21:00.000-08:00

... one only needs to plunge to the foundation. The issues at the foundation are always the same: What there really is, how we know about it, what separates the good from the bad.

If one delves deeply enough, with sufficient generality and abstraction, the foundational issues about X will reveal their kinship with foundational issues in other areas. Discussion of them can thus be illuminated by knowledge of how similar issues are treated in other areas -- the philosopher's special expertise.

Consider the philosophy of hair, for example. At the foundation: What is a haircut, really? How much does it depend on the intent of the hairdresser? What makes a haircut good or bad? For example, must it please its bearer? Is it relative to fashion, and if so how locally? How, if at all, can we settle disputes about the quality of a haircut? A true philosopher of hair will have informed opinions about such matters. The answers to these questions might differ from the answers to similar questions about, say, painting as an art or about the morality of charitable giving, but a family resemblance should be evident, along with the possibility of cross-fertilization.

Consider also: The philosophy of Coke cans, the philosophy of starlight, the philosophy of football, the philosophy of birds, the philosophy of siblinghood.

To the person with the right turn of mind, perhaps, all thought becomes philosophy.

Is Solipsism Simple?

2012-01-05T16:25:00.000-08:00

Solipsism is the view that nothing exists but one's own stream of conscious experience. In The Problems of Philosophy (1912), Bertrand Russell says that although it's logically possible that solipsism is true, solipsism should be rejected as less simple than the hypothesis that an external world exists. But is realism about the external world really simpler than solipsism?

On the face of it, you might think solipsism is simpler. After all, it involves radically fewer entities. That's the great Ockhamesque beauty of it. Solipsism may be crazy, but at least it's simple!

Russell employs two arguments against the simplicity of solipsism. First:

If [a] cat exists whether I see it or not, we can understand from our own experience how it gets hungry between one meal and the next; but if it does not exist when I am not seeing it, it seems odd that appetite should grow during non-existence as fast as during existence (p. 23).

Second:

When human beings speak -- that is, when we hear certain noises which we associate with ideas, and simultaneously see certain motions of lips and expressions of face -- it is very difficult to suppose that what we hear is not the expression of thought, as we know it would be if we emitted the same sounds (p. 23-24).

Thus, he concludes, "every principle of simplicity urges us to adopt the natural view, that there really are objects other than ourselves" (p. 24).

Now, I'm inclined to think that Russell's argument here is very inadequate. But let me quickly say that I've found it surprisingly difficult to uncover what I'd consider to be better arguments against solipsism in the philosophical literature. Plus, Russell is famous! So let's take him seriously.

To see the core problem with Russell's argument, consider dreams. In dreams, cats can grow quite quickly hungry between appearances, despite their nonexistence in the interval. And the voices and faces seen in dreams reveal the real existence of no other independent mind. It seems no great violation of simplicity to suppose that, in a dream, the appearances of the cat and the voices and faces are concocted on the spot by me. No need to posit a giant, really existing universe, light-years upon light-years wide! And the solipsist, it seems, can just treat waking experiences the same way. Simple!

Russell is of course aware of dream skepticism, addressing it thus:

But dreams are more or less suggested by what we call waking life, and are capable of being more or less accounted for on scientific principles if we assume there really is a physical world (p. 24).

I think one might just as easily turn this argument on its head. If we assume solipsism rather than realism, we can invoke principles explaining why cats and people seem to behave as they do: They are imperfect projections of me upon my imagined world, based on what I know from introspection about myself. That theory is of course sketchy and incomplete, but so is the current scientific account of the content of dreams!

Now it might seem that postulating an external world behind appearances can at least explain correlations that must remain unexplained in solipsism. For example, if there is a real penny that I'm both looking at and manually rotating, the real existence of arm and coin explains why such-and-such changes in visual experience co-occur with such-and-such changes in tactile and proprioceptive experience.

I see two obvious replies for the solipsist:

First, why can't it simply be a law of my experience that such-and-such tactile and proprioceptive experiences will tend to co-occur with such-and-such visual experiences? Surely there's a theoretically discoverable structure to such co-occurrences -- a structure not so different, perhaps, and probably simpler, than that employed in the realist's account of tactile and visual perception and motor control and its relation to external objects. After all, realists' psychological theories, if they're really going to explain the relation among the experiences, require complicated overlapping and competing brain mechanisms for determining, among other things, visual shape and orientation from optical input.

And second, if simplicity really favors the theory with fewer unexplained coincidences, won't solipsism win hands down, even if it leaves a few things unexplained that the realist can explain? The small world of the solipsist will have vastly fewer such coincidences in total, and vastly fewer free parameters, than the enormously large, fine-textured, and richly populated world of the realist.

Call for Papers: Consciousness and Moral Cognition

2011-12-27T09:41:00.000-08:00

The editors at Review of Philosophy and Psychology invite submissions for a special issue on consciousness attribution in moral cognition. Guest authors include: Kurt Gray (Maryland), Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh) and Justin Sytsma (East Tennessee State), and Anthony I. Jack (Case Western Reserve) and Philip Robbins (Missouri).

Submissions are due March 31, 2011.

The full CFP, including relevant dates and submission details, is available here.

Abbreviated CFP: When people regard other entities as objects of ethical concern whose interests must be taken into account in moral deliberations, does the attribution of consciousness to these entities play an essential role in the process? In recent years, philosophers and psychologists have begun to sketch limited answers to this general question. However, much progress remains to be made. We invite contributions to a special issue of The Review of Philosophy and Psychology on the role of consciousness attribution in moral cognition from researchers working in fields including developmental, evolutionary, perceptual, and social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy.

Against Increasing the Power of Grant Agencies in Philosophy

2011-12-23T14:17:00.000-08:00

Clark Glymour has an opinion piece urging philosophers to reach out beyond their disciplinary circles and encouraging the pursuit of big-dollar grants. Adam Briggle and Robert Frodeman say much the same thing. (Glymour emphasizes philosophy of science and Briggle & Frodeman applied ethics.) I agree that philosophers as a group should reach out more than they do. But I think the increasing emphasis on grant-getting in academia is a disease to be fought, not a trend to be encouraged.

Academic research scientists spend a lot of time applying for grant money. This is time that they are not spending doing scientific research. I've often heard that applying for an NSF grant takes about as much time as writing a journal article. Now, most scientists need money to do their research and there should be mechanisms to fund worthy projects, so maybe for them passionate summers of grant application are a worthy investment. But do philosophers need to be doing that? I doubt philosophy is best served by encouraging philosophers to spend more time thinking up ways to request money.

Furthermore, for both scientists and philosophers I think a better model would be a hybrid in which it is possible to apply for grants but in which, also, productive researchers could be awarded research money without having to apply for it. Look, V.S. Ramachandran is going to do something interesting with his research money no matter what, right? Philip Kitcher too. Let them spend their time doing what they do best and monitor the funds post facto. Let us all have a certain small amount of money to attend (and sometimes organize) conferences, without our having to manufacture elaborate bureaucratic pleas in advance. The same total funding could go out, with much less time wasted, if grant writing were only for exceptional cases and exceptional expenses.

A very different type of reason to resist the increasing academic focus on grant-getting is this: Grant-driven bureaucracy decreases the power of researchers to set their own research agenda and increases the power of the grant agencies to set the agenda. Maybe that's part of what Glymour and Briggle & Frodeman want, since they seem to distrust philosophers' ability to choose worthy topics of research for themselves. But philosophy in particular has often been advanced by people working outside the mainstream, on projects that might not have been seen as valuable by the well-established old-school researchers and administrators that tend to serve on grant committees. In ancient Greece, the sophists were the ones getting grants, while Socrates was fightin the powa.

If you want to apply for grants, terrific! I have no problem with that. Get some good money to do your good work. Organize an interesting conference; fly across the world to thumb through the archives; get some time away from teaching to write your book. Absolutely! But let's not try to push the discipline as a whole more into the grant-getting game than it already is.

Frege's Puzzle and In-Between Cases of Believing

2011-12-15T12:49:00.000-08:00

There's a huge literature in philosophy of language on what's called "Frege's puzzle" about belief reports. Almost all the participants in this literature seem to take for granted something that I reject: that sentences ascribing beliefs must be determinately true or false, at least once those sentences are disambiguated or contextualized in the right way.

Frege's puzzle is this. Lois Lane believes, it seems, that Superman is strong. And Clark Kent is, of course, Superman. So it seems to follow that Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent is strong. But Lois would deny that Clark Kent is strong, and it seems wrong to say that she believes it. So what's going on? There are several standard options, but all lead to trouble of one sort or another. (If you don't like Superman, try Twain/Clemens or Unabomber/Kaczynski.)

On a dispositional approach to belief of the sort I favor, to believe some proposition P -- the proposition, say, that that guy (variously known as "Superman" or "Clark Kent") is strong -- is to be disposed to act and react, both outwardly and inwardly, as though P were true. (On my version of dispositionalism, this means being disposed to act and react in ways that ordinary people would regard as characteristic of belief that P.) Lois has some such dispositions: For example, she's disposed to say "Superman is strong". But she notably lacks others: She's not disposed to say "Clark Kent is strong". She's disposed to ask Superman/Clark Kent to lift her up in the air when he's in costume but not when he's in street clothes.

Personality traits also involve clusters of dispositions, so consider them as an analogy. If someone is disposed to be courageous in some circumstances and not courageous in other circumstances, it might be neither quite right to say that she is courageous nor quite right to say that she isn't. "Courageous" is a vague predicate, and we might have an in-between case, in which neither simple ascription nor simple denial is entirely appropriate (though there may also be contexts in which simple ascription or denial works well enough -- e.g., battlefields vs. faculty meetings if she has battlefield courage but not interpersonal courage). Compare also "Amir is tall", said of a man who is 5'11". Lois's belief about Superman/Clark Kent might similarly be an in-between case in the application of a vague predicate.

You'll probably object that Lois simply and fully believes that Superman is strong, and it's not an in-between case at all. I have two replies. First, that way of putting it -- in terms of Superman rather than Clark Kent -- highlights certain aspects of Lois's dispositional profile over others, thus creating a conversational context that tends to favor believes-strong ascription (like a battlefield context might favor ascription of courage to a person who has battlefield courage but not other sorts of courage). Second, consider a version of the case in which the belief ascriber doesn't have the name "Clark Kent" available, but only the name "Superman". The ascriber and his friend are looking through a window at Superman/Clark Kent in street clothes. The ascriber's friend, who doesn't know that Lois is deceived, asks, "Does Lois believe that Superman is strong?" What should the ascriber reply? He should say, "Well, um, it's a complicated case!" I see no point in insisting that underneath that hedge there needs to be a determinate metaphysical or psychological or (disambiguated [update Dec. 16: e.g., "de re / de dicto"]) linguistic fact that yes-she-really-does (or no-she-really-doesn't), any more than there always has to be a determinate fact about whether someone is tall simpliciter or courageous simpliciter.

Now this is a heck of a mess in philosophy of language, and I haven't thought through all the implications. I'm inclined to think that excessive realism about the identity of propositions is part of the problem too. I don't claim that this is a full or non-problematic solution to Frege's puzzle. But it seems to me that this general type of approach should be more visible among the options than it is.

[HT: Lewis Powell on Kripke's Puzzle.]

Descartes, Moore, Whatevs!

2011-12-10T16:11:00.000-08:00

On Nature's website:

“Descartes said that if there's something you can be certain of in this world, it's that your hand is your hand,” says Ehrsson.

Um, whoops! Descartes said that what he couldn't doubt was his own thinking. It was G.E. Moore who famously said it would be absurd to suggest that he didn't know that "here is a hand".

Descartes, G.E. Moore, whatever! It's only philosophy, after all -- not something worth bothering to get right in the the flagship journal of the natural sciences.

(If I sound prickly, maybe it's because I'm currently on hold with AT&T, about to talk to my eleventh representative in two months about being double billed for internet service.)

Update, Dec. 15: The author of the piece has now corrected the error. It turns out that philosophy is worth getting right after all!

Creativity and Dishonesty

2011-12-08T11:21:00.000-08:00

A recent paper by Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely suggests that relatively creative people are more likely to be dishonest than are relatively less creative people because they are better at concocting rationalizations for potential dishonesty. I can't say I'm entirely swooned by Gino & Ariely's methodology, which measures dishonesty by seeing whether people will give wrong answers in psychology laboratory studies when they are paid to give those wrong answers. (If psychologist says: "Roll a die, I'm not going to check the outcome, but I'll pay you $1 if you say it's a 1 and $6 if you say it's a 6", how exactly should the participant react to what's going on here?) I'd rather see more naturalistic observations of behavior in real-life situations, or at least better cover stories. Nor do I think Gino & Ariely do a terrific job of establishing that ability to creatively rationalize is the real mediator of the apparent difference in honesty.

Nonetheless, the conclusion is interesting, the mechanism plausible, and the results at least suggestive. And their picture fits nicely with my favorite hypothesis about the apparent fact that professional ethicists behave no morally better than do socially similar non-ethicists. Philosophical moral reflection, I'm inclined to think, rather than being inert, is bivalent: On the one hand, it highlights the moral dimension of things and can help you appreciate moral truths; but on the other hand, people who are skilled at it will also be skilled at finding superficially plausible rationalizations of attractive misconduct which might then allow them to feel freer to engage in that misconduct (e.g., stealing a library book). Professional ethicists develop their creativity in exactly an area in which being creative brings substantial moral hazards.

The Baby Boom Philosophy Bust

2011-12-06T07:59:00.000-08:00

In 2010, I compiled a list of the top 200 most-cited contemporary authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (By "contemporary" I mean born in 1900 or later.) One striking feature of this list is the underrepresentation of baby boomers, especially near the top.

Let's compare the representation of people born 1931-1945 (the fifteen years before the baby boom) with those born in 1946-1960 (the bulk of the baby boom), among the top 25.

Among the pre-baby boomers, we find:

David Lewis (#1)
Saul Kripke (#6)
Thomas Nagel (tied #7)
Jerry Fodor (#9)
Daniel Dennett (tied #10)
Frank Jackson (tied #10)
Robert Nozick (tied #13)
John Searle (tied #13)
Gilbert Harman (#16)
Ronald Dworkin (#18)
Joseph Raz (tied #19)
Bas Van Fraassen (tied #19)
Fred Dretske (tied #22)
Peter Van Inwagen (tied #22)
Alvin Goldman (tied #24).

Among the baby boomers we find:

Martha Nussbaum (tied #19)
Philip Kitcher (tied #24).

These numbers seem to suggest that the depression-era and World War II babies have had a much larger impact than the baby boomers on mainstream Anglophone philosophy.

You might have thought the reverse would be the case. Aren't there more baby boomers? Haven't baby boomers been culturally dominant in other areas of society? So what's going on here?

One possibility is that the boomers haven't yet had time to achieve maximum influence on the field. Someone born in 1940 has had ten more years to write and to influence peers and students than has someone born in 1950. Although I think there is something to this thought, especially for the younger boomers, I suspect it's not the primary explanation. A boomer born in 1950 would be sixty years old by 2010. The large majority of philosophers who have a big impact on the field achieve a substantial proportion of that impact well before the age of sixty. Certainly that's true of the top philosophers on the list above -- Lewis, Kripke, Nagel, and Fodor. Their most influential work was in the 1960s to early 1990s. The boomers have had plenty of time to generate the same kind of influence, if it were simply a matter of catching up from a later start. In fact, contemporary Anglophone philosophers seem to have their average peak influence from about age 55-70, declining thereafter. On average, the baby boomers should be enjoying peak citation rates right now, and the depression babies should be starting to wane.

Here's an alternative diagnosis: College enrollment grew explosively in the 1960s and then flattened out. The pre-baby-boomers were hired in large numbers in the 1960s to teach the baby boomers. The pre-baby boomers rose quickly to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s and set the agenda for philosophy during that period. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, the pre-baby-boomers remained dominant. During the 1980s, when the baby boomers should have been exploding onto the philosophical scene, they instead struggled to find faculty positions, journal space, and professional attention in a field still dominated by the depression-era and World War II babies.

This started to change, I think, with the retirement of the depression babies and the hiring boom of Gen-Xers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It remains to be seen if history will repeat itself.

Is it Psychologically Possible for the Skeptic to Suspend All Belief?

2011-11-30T14:14:00.000-08:00

I keep bumping into this question. Casey Perin gave a talk on it at UCR; Daniel Greco has a forthcoming paper on it in Phil Review. Benj Hellie launched an extended Facebook conversation about it. Can the radical skeptic live his skepticism? I submit the following for your consideration.

First, a bit about belief. I've argued that to believe some proposition P is nothing more or less than to be disposed to act and react in a broadly belief-that-P-ish way -- that is, to be disposed, circumstances to being right, to say things like "P", to build one's plans on the likelihood of P's truth, to feel surprised should P prove false, etc. Among the relevant dispositions is the disposition to consciously judge that P is the case, that is, to momentarily explicitly regard P as true, to endorse P intellectually (though not necessarily in language). Dispositions to judge that P often pull apart from the other dispositions constitutive of belief, for example in self-deception, implicit bias, conceptual confusion, and momentary forgetting. (See here and here.) To believe that P is to steer one's way through the world as though P were the case. One important part of the steering, but not the only part, is being disposed to explicitly judge that P is the case.

Okay, now skepticism. My paradigm radical skeptics are Sextus Empiricus, Montaigne (of the Apology), and Zhuangzi (of Inner Chapter 2). When such radical skeptics say they aim to suspend all belief, I recommend that we interpret them as really endorsing two goals: (a.) suspending all judgment, and (b.) standing openly ready, with equanimity, for alternative possibilities.

Arguments that it's impossible to suspend all belief tend to be, at root, arguments that it's impossible to refrain from action and that action requires belief. Perhaps it is impossible to refrain from all action. No skeptic advises sitting all day in bed (as though that weren't itself an action). Sextus advises acting from habit; Zhuangzi seems to endorse well-trained spontaneity. (Of course, they can't insist dogmatically on this, and Zhuangzi actively undermines himself.) If the runaway carriage is speeding toward the skeptic, the skeptic will leap aside. On my account of belief, such a disposition is partly constitutive of believing that the carriage is heading your way. So the skeptic will have at least part of the dispositional profile constitutive of that belief. This much I accept.

But it's not clear that the skeptic needs to match the entire dispositional profile constitutive of believing the carriage is coming. In particular, it's not clear that the skeptic needs to consciously judge that the carriage is coming. Maybe most of us would in fact reach such a judgment, but spontaneous skillful action without conscious judgment is sometimes thought to be characteristic of "flow" states of peak performance; and Heidegger seems to have valued them and regarded them as prevalent; and perhaps certain types of meditative practice aim at them. Suspension of judgment seems consistent with action, perhaps even highly skilled action. Though suspension of judgment isn't suspension of the entirety of the dispositional profile characteristic of belief, it's suspension of an important part of the profile -- perhaps enough so that the skeptic achieves what I call a state of in-between believing, in which there's enough deviation from the relevant dispositional profile that it's neither quite right to say he believes nor quite right to say he fails to believe.

The skeptic will also, I suggest, stand openly ready, with equanimity, for alternative possibilities. The skeptic will leap away from the carriage, but she won't be as much surprised as the non-skeptic would be if the carriage suddenly turns into a rooster. The skeptic will utter affirmations -- Zhuangzi compares our utterances to the cheeping of baby birds -- but with an openness to the opposing view. The skeptic will be less perturbed by apparent misfortune (for maybe it's really good fortune in disguise) and thus perhaps achieve a certain tranquility unavailable to dogmatists (as emphasized by both Sextus and Zhuangzi). The skeptic stands humbly aware, before God or the universe, of his flawed, infinitesmal perspective (as expressed by Montaigne).

Judgment is stoppered; action still flows; there's a humility, openness, tranquility, lack of surprise. None of this seems psychologically impossible to me. In certain moods, I even find it an appealing prospect.

The Empirical Use of History of Philosophy

2011-11-22T13:20:00.000-08:00

I conceptualize the history of philosophy as, in part, the source of interesting empirical data about the psychology of philosophy. Nietzsche and Dewey also conceptualized the history of philosophy this way, but I don't think many other philosophers do. There's a lot of untapped potential.

Here are some ways I've put the history of philosophy to empirical use:

* As evidence that it is impossible to construct a detailed, thoroughly commonsense metaphysics of mind-body dualism.

* As evidence for a relationship between culturally available metaphors for visual experience and views of the nature of visual experience.

* As evidence for a relationship between culturally available metaphors for dream experience and views of the nature of dream experience.

* As evidence that philosophical expertise doesn't diminish the likelihood of being swept up in noxious political ideologies.

* As evidence of the diversity of philosophical opinions that can be held by presumably reasonable people (especially on the character of conscious experience and the metaphysics of mind).

I can't resist also mentioning Shaun Nichols's observation of the suspicious lack of historical occupants of one theoretically available position regarding free will.

These analyses are mostly not quantitative, but that doesn't make them less empirical. In all cases, the fact that some philosophers claimed X (or X1... Xn) or did Y is treated as empirical evidence for some different hypothesis Z about the psychology of philosophy.

Maybe empirically oriented philosophers typically don't regard themselves as expert enough in history of philosophy to write about it. But I think we hobble ourselves if we allow ourselves to be intimidated. The standard of expertise for writing about Descartes or Kant in the context of a larger project -- a project that isn't just Descartes or Kant interpretation -- shouldn't be world leadership in Descartes or Kant interpretation. It should be the same standard of expertise as in writing about a contemporary colleague with a large body of influential work, like Dennett or Fodor.

A Million Hits

2011-11-18T10:10:00.000-08:00

Sometime last week, my blog and academic website passed a million hits since I started tracking in 2006.

Empirical Evidence Against My View of Dream Reports

2011-11-16T11:43:00.000-08:00

Nowadays, most Americans report dreaming in color. In the 1950s, most Americans reported dreaming in black and white. In a series of articles I have argued that the reason for this change is not that people used to dream in black and white and now dream in color. Rather, I argue, people over-analogize dreams to movies. Thus, as movie technology shifts, people's dream reports shift, though their dreams themselves remain the same.

(Two pieces of evidence for this view: (a.) The use of color terms ("brown", "orange", etc.) in dream diaries seems to have been consistent since the 1950s. (b.) Color dream reporting correlates with group history of black-and-white media exposure across socioeconomic groups in China.)

A new study by Hitoshi Okada and colleagues in Japan calls my research into doubt. In 1993, Okada and colleagues had found that young Japanese respondents tended to report colored dreaming while older respondents tended to report not dreaming in color -- a result entirely in accord with my hypothesis, due to respondents' presumably different histories of black-and-white vs. colored media exposure. Now in 2011, Okada at al. find almost exactly the same pattern of responding. Thus, the cohort of respondents that was in their 20s and 30s in 1993, and who reported mostly colored dreaming back then, reports relatively infrequent color dreaming now. Twenty years of (presumably) colored media exposure appears not to have shifted them toward reporting more colored dreaming -- if anything, the opposite.

Maybe these results can be reconciled with my view. For example, maybe older Japanese regard as the archetypal movie the old-fashioned high-art black-and-white movies of Kurosawa and others. But that doesn't seem especially likely.

Another possibility (as always!) is that Okada's research is open to interpretations other than its face-value interpretation.

The following is Okada et al.'s entire description of their questionnaire:

The participants were required to check one of five categories describing the frequency with which color occurred in their dreams during the past year: 1 (always), 2 (sometimes), 3 (occasionally), 4 (seldom), or 5 (never) (p. 216).

In English, I don't know that "sometimes" implies higher frequency than "occasionally", but I trust that this is just an infelicity of translation from the original Japanese.

One worry is that this measure has no denominator. So here's one possible explanation of the Okada et al. results: Older Japanese people report dreaming less in general than do younger Japanese, so they report less frequent colored dreaming too. This would be consistent with their self-reported ratio of black-and-white to colored dreaming being about the same. (In my own work on the issue, I ask some respondents about absolute frequency or colored dreaming and others about the proportion of colored to black-and-white dreams.)

Another potential concern is non-response bias. Okada et al. state that their participants were "students in Bunkyo University, Jissen Women’s University, and Iwate University, or members of their families" (p. 215). They don't indicate the response rates of the family members, but it's possible that only a minority of family members who heard about the questionnaire chose to respond. If so, those family responders would mostly be people with higher-than-average interest in the issue of black-and-white vs. colored dreaming. And we might reasonably worry that such people would not have views on that question that are representative of the population as a whole. (This is, of course, the notorious problem with online polls.)

I'd be very interested to see a follow-up study addressing these concerns.

Four Accounts of Philosophical Moral Reflection

2011-11-15T15:44:00.000-08:00

What happens to your moral behavior and moral attitudes when you reflect philosophically? Philosophers all seem to have opinions about this, but those opinions diverge and there's very little serious research on the issue.

Here are four possibilities:

(1.) The booster view: Philosophical moral reflection leads to the discovery of moral truths – either general moral truths that people tend to not to endorse absent such reflection (such as, perhaps, that eating meat is morally bad) or particular moral truths about specific situations that would not otherwise have been properly morally appreciated (such as that some particular behavior would be objectionably sexist). Such discoveries have a significant positive overall impact on moral behavior – though perhaps only on average, to a moderate extent, and in some areas. Furthermore, since it reveals connections between specific instances of moral behavior and general moral principles, philosophical moral reflection tends to increase the overall consistency between one’s broad moral attitudes and one’s practical moral behavior.

(2.) The epiphenomenalist view: Philosophical moral reflection is virtually powerless to change moral behavior or moral attitudes, either for better or for worse – though it may produce decorative linguistic justifications of what we would have thought and done in any case.

(3.) The rationalization view: Philosophical moral reflection tends to increase the consistency between attitudes and behavior, as the booster suggests, but it does so in the opposite causal direction than the booster suggests: The ethically reflective person’s attitudes shift to match her behavior rather than her behavior shifting to match her attitudes. The philosophically reflective person’s practical behavior may be unaffected by such rationalizations (the inert rationalization view); or the tendency to rationalize may morally worsen philosophically reflective people by freeing them to act on immoral impulses that are superficially but unsatisfactorily justified by their reflections (the toxic rationalization view). On the inert rationalization view, for example, one will either steal or not steal a library book as a result of psychological processes uninfluenced by one’s philosophical reflections, and then one will shape one’s moral attitudes to justify that incipient or recently past behavior. On the toxic rationalization view, one might feel an inclination to steal the book and act on that inclination as a consequence of a spurious moral justification for the theft.

(4.) The inert discovery view: Philosophical moral reflection tends to lead to the discovery of moral truths (as also suggested by the booster view). However, such discoveries have no material consequences for the practical behavior of the person making those discoveries. Philosophical reflection might lead one to discover, for example, that it is morally wrong to eat the meat of factory-farmed mammals, but on this view one would continue to eat factory-farmed meat at virtually the same rate as one would have done absent any philosophical reflection on the matter.

Any wagers?

The Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind

2011-11-07T14:10:00.000-08:00

... a new essay of mine, now in circulating draft. Comments welcome, either on this post or by email.

Abstract:
Crazyism about X is the view that something it would be crazy to believe must be among the core truths about X. In this essay, I argue that crazyism is true of the metaphysics of mind. A position is "crazy" in the intended sense if it is contrary to common sense and we are not epistemically compelled to believe it. Views that are crazy in the relevant sense include that there is no mind-independent material world, that the United States has a stream of conscious experience distinct from the experiences of the individuals composing it, that chimps or the intelligent-seeming aliens of science fiction fantasy entirely lack conscious experience, that mental events are causally inefficacious. This is by no means a complete list. Well developed metaphysical theories will inevitably violate common sense, I argue, because common sense is incoherent in matters of metaphysics. No coherent and detailed view could respect it all. With common sense thus impaired as a ground of choice, we lack the means to justifiably select among several very different metaphysical options concerning mind and body. Something bizarre must be true about the mind, but which bizarre propositions are the true ones, we are in no good position to know.

Is the United States Conscious?

2011-10-31T13:38:00.000-07:00

I wrote a bit about this issue last May, and it's still really bugging me. Let me try another angle in.

It would be bizarre to suppose that the United States has a stream of conscious experience distinct from the streams of conscious experience of the people who compose it. I hope you'll agree. (By "the United States" here, I mean the large, vague-boundaried group of compatriots who sometimes act in a coordinated manner.) Yet it's unclear by what materialist standard the U.S. lacks consciousness. Nations, it would seem, represent and self-represent. They respond (semi-)intelligently and self-protectively, in a coordinated way, to opportunities and threats. They gather, store, and manipulate information. They show skillful attunement to environmental inputs in warring and spying on each other. Their subparts (people and larger subgroups of people) are massively informationally connected and mutually dependent, including in incredibly fancy self-regulating feedback loops. These are the kinds of capacities and structures that materialists typically regard as the heart of mentality. Nations do all these things via the behavior of their subparts, of course; but on materialist views individual people also do what they do via the behavior of their subparts. A planet-sized alien who squints might see individual Americans as so many buzzing pieces of a diffuse body consuming bananas and automobiles, invading Iraq, exuding waste.

Even if the U.S. still lacks a little something needed for consciousness, it seems we ought at least hypothetically to be able to change that thing, and so generate a stream of experience. We presumably needn't go nearly as far as Ned Block does in his famous "Chinese nation" example -- an example in which the country of China implements the exact functional structure of someone's mind for an hour -- unless we suppose, bizarrely, that consciousness is only possible among beings with almost exactly our psychology at the finest level of functional detail. If we are willing to attribute conscious experience to relatively unsophisticated beings (frogs? fish?), well, it seems that the United States can, and does sometimes, act with as much coordination and intelligence, if on a larger scale.

The most plausible materialistic attempt I have seen to confine consciousness within the skull while respecting the broadly functionalist spirit of most materialism is Andy Clark's and Chris Eliasmith's suggestion that consciousness requires the functional achievements possible through high bandwidth neural synchrony. However, it's hard to see why speed per se should matter. Couldn't conscious intelligence be slow-paced, especially in large entities? And it's hard to see why synchrony should matter either, as long as the functional tasks necessary for intelligent responsiveness are successfully executed.

Alternatively, one might insist that specific details of biological implementation are essential to consciousness in any possible being -- for example, specific states of a unified cortex with axons and dendrites and ion channels and all that -- and that broadly mammal-like or human-like functional sophistication alone won't do. However, it seems bizarrely chauvinistic to suppose that consciousness is only possible in beings with internal physical states very similar to our own, regardless of outwardly measurable behavioral similarity. If aliens come visit us tomorrow and behave in every respect like intelligent, conscious beings, must we check for sodium and calcium channels in their heads before admitting that they have conscious experience? Or is there some specific type of behavior that all conscious animals do but that the United States, perhaps slightly reconfigured, could not do, and that is a necessary condition of consciousness? It's hard to see what that could be. Is the United States simply not an "entity" in the relevant sense? Well, why not? What if we all held hands?

In his classic early statement of functionalism, Hilary Putnam (1965) simply rules out, on no principled grounds, that a collection of conscious organisms could be conscious. He didn't want his theory to result in swarms of bees having collective conscious experience, he says. But why not? Maybe bee swarms are dumber and represent less than do individual bees -- committees collectively act and collectively represent less than do their members as individuals -- but that would seem to be a contingent, empirical question about bees. To rule out swarm consciousness a priori, regardless of swarm behavior and swarm structure, seems mere prejudice against beings of radically different morphology. Shouldn't a well developed materialist view eventually jettison unprincipled folk morphological prejudices? The materialist should probably expect that some entities to which it would seem bizarre to attribute consciousness do in fact have conscious experience. If materialism is true, and if the kinds of broadly functional capacities that most materialists regard as central to consciousness are indeed central, it may be difficult to dodge the conclusion that the United States has is own stream of conscious experience, in addition to the experiences of its individual members.

(Yes, I know this is crazy. That's the point.)

Sorry, Cal State Students, No Princeton Grad School for You!

2011-10-27T08:36:00.000-07:00

As I remarked several years ago in my series of posts about applying to PhD programs in philosophy, it seems to be extremely difficult to gain admission to an elite PhD program in philosophy if you're not from an elite undergraduate institution. Inspired by a comment on a recent post, I decided to look at this a bit more systematically.

Here's what I did. First, I looked to see which of the top ten Leiter ranked philosophy PhD programs consistently displayed undergraduate institution information for their graduate students. Two did: Princeton and Berkeley. Of the 121 graduate students listed on their websites, 119 had undergraduate institution information listed. Of these, 25 were from foreign universities -- typically elite universities (especially Oxford). Excluding the foreign students leaves a pool of 94 students with US undergraduate university listed (21 also listed some graduate work, typically an MA). I then looked at the US News and World Report rankings of their undergraduate institutions.

Twenty-seven students (29%) come from just eight universities: The US News top 10 National Universities, excluding MIT and CalTech (Chicago, Columbia, Duke, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale).

Another seventeen (18%) come from the universities ranked 11-25 (Berkeley, Brown, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Rice, UCLA, USC, and Vanderbilt being represented).

Ten more (11%) come from universities ranked 26-50. And of these ten, seven are from universities with elite graduate programs in philosophy: Three from NYU (Leiter ranked #1 in the U.S.), 1 from Michigan (Leiter ranked #5), 2 from UNC Chapel Hill (Leiter ranked #9), and 1 from Tufts (Leiter ranked as the #1 master's program in the U.S). So, really, these universities are more elite in philosophy than their US News ranking would suggest. Rounding out the mix are Brandeis, UC Santa Barbara, and UW Madison. [Revised 10/28]

Only three universities ranked 51-100 are represented: Two students from Rutgers (whose PhD program is Leiter ranked #2), one from Northeastern (though this student took an MA from Minnesota first), and strikingly four students from Colorado (which has a mid-ranked PhD program: Leiter rank #26).

Many of the remaining students are from elite schools in the US News category "National Liberal Arts Colleges". Eight (9%) are from colleges in the top ten (Amherst, Claremont McKenna, Middlebury, Pomona, Swarthmore, and Williams represented), and seven more from those ranked 11-50 (Bates, Franklin & Marshall, Kenyon, Mount Holyoke, Oberlin, and Wesleyan represented).

Only eighteen students (19%) come from all the remaining universities in the United States combined. And even this number overestimates the number of students with genuinely nonelite backgrounds: Three are from Reed College, which though only ranked #57 among liberal arts colleges has a very strong tradition in philosophy; and at least another nine supplemented their undergraduate work with master's degrees or other work at elite schools or places with strong master's programs. Represented are: Arizona State, Biola, Catholic University, Cincinnati, Florida State, Houghton, Indiana-South Bend, Kalamazoo, Nebraska, North Carolina State, Reed, St John's College Santa Fe, St Vincent, and U Mass Boston.

To help give a sense of how thin a representation this is of nonelite schools, consider that there is not a single student on this list from the two biggest public university systems in the country: the Cal State system (412,000 students) and the SUNY system (468,000 students, but that number includes students in two-year colleges and technical institutes). Even the UC system is poorly represented once we exclude the two most elite universities (Berkeley and UCLA): The remaining campuses (Davis, Irvine, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz) are represented by only a single student from Santa Barbara.

I don't conclude that admissions committees are being unfair, much less explicitly elitist. Maybe students from Harvard and Columbia really are that much better. Or maybe the epistemic task of discerning the genuinely most promising applicants is so difficult that committees need to play the odds and the odds almost always say that the Harvard student is more likely to succeed than the Cal State student. Or maybe so much turns on the credibility of the letter writers that students whose letter writers aren't well known can't really be fully evaluated. Or, or, or, or.

But regardless how innocent the explanation, it's a shame.

Update, 5:44 pm:

Very interesting discussion in the comments! Let me clarify two points:

First: I interpret these results as applying only to the very most elite PhD programs -- roughly the Leiter top ten. There is plenty of evidence that lower-ranked PhD programs (like UCR, ranked #30) admit a substantial proportion of their students from nonelite schools (though I suspect there still is a large pedigree advantage). However, that fact is less consoling than it might seem if it's the case, as I suspect it is, the top ten PhD programs are vastly more successful than lower-ranked schools in placing their students into the sorts of elite research-oriented jobs and elite liberal-arts-college teaching jobs that many graduate students covet.

Second: I somewhat regret the impression that the title of this post might give that there is simply no chance to be admitted to an elite program from a Cal State or similar. There are a few exceptions, as should be evident from the data included in the post. At least some of the off-list schools are comparable in prestige to the Cal States and SUNYs. Whether these exceptions are frequent enough to constitute any practical chance even for awesome students from such schools, I'm not sure.

Update, October 28:

A reader compiled some data for me from Stanford. This list is not strictly comparable to the Princeton/Berkeley list, since it is list of last institution prior to Stanford, whether undergrad or graduate, but it's still probably somewhat comparable.

To my eye, the results look similar, with 28% (out of 40 total US students) from the top ten universities, and another 48% from the top 11-50 universities and top 1-50 liberal arts colleges. Only one student is from a university ranked 51-100, and that university, Pittsburgh, has an elite PhD program (Leiter ranked #4). 23% of the students (9 total) are from all the remaining universities in the US; and at least three of those are from well-regarded MA programs at those universities (to judge from those universities' MA placement lists: Cal State LA, Georgia State, and Texas Tech), while one more student is from a university that although not generally elite has a very strong PhD program in philosophy (Arizona, Leiter ranked #13). The remaining five students are from Illinois Wesleyan, Nevada-Las Vegas, Northern Arizona, Northern Iowa, and South Florida.

19%-23% representation from nonelite universities might not seem very skewed, but I think that would be a false impression. Many more students graduate from nonelite universities than from elite universities. Their low odds of admission are better seen looking up from the bottom than down from the top, as it were. If we take an arbitrary selection of nonelite schools, say all of the dozens of Cal States and SUNYs, we see not a single undergraduate from these schools in any of these three departments. (Caveat: Stanford has a CSLA MA student, and to judge from the comments section and private emails, at least two or three Cal State students have recently cracked other top ten departments; I haven't yet heard good news about any SUNY students.) Also if we look at the very good / marginally elite universities ranked 51-100 on the US News list -- schools which one might think could contribute substantial numbers of students to elite PhD programs -- we still see only very thin representation: Combining Princeton, Berkeley, and Stanford together, only four of those 50 schools are represented; only two if Rutgers and Pitt are reclassed as elite due to their top-ten rankings in philosophy. In contrast, almost all of the top 25 schools are represented, often multiply represented.

Here's another way of thinking about the distribution: In a typical smallish Princeton-Berkeley-Stanford class of six students, four will be from elite undergrad institutions, one will be from a (probably elite) foreign institution, and only one will be from any of the hundreds of good but nonelite US institutions -- and that one student as likely as not spent some time in some capacity either visiting an elite institution or at one of the top MA programs.

Obfuscatory Philosophy as Intellectual Authoritarianism and Cowardice

2011-10-19T16:48:00.000-07:00

I've been told that Kant and Hegel were poor writers whose impenetrable prose style is incidental to their philosophy. I've also been told that their views are so profound as to defy expression in terms comprehensible even to smart, patient, well-educated people who are not specialists in the philosophy of the period. I've heard similar things about Laozi, Heidegger, Plotinus, Derrida. (I won't name any living philosophers.) I don't buy it.

Philosophy is not wordless profound insight. Philosophy is prose. Philosophy happens not in mystical moments, but in the creation of mundane sentences. It happens on the page, in the pen, through the keyboard, in dialogue with students and peers, and to some extent but only secondarily in private inner speech. If what exists on the page is not clear, the philosophy is not clear. Philosophers, like all specialists, profit from a certain amount of jargon, but philosophy need not become a maze of jargon. If private jargon doesn't regularly touch down in comprehensible public meanings, one has produced not philosophy but merely a fog of words of indeterminate content. There are always gaps, confusions, indeterminacies, hidden assumptions, failures of clarity, even in great philosophical prose stylists like Hume, Nietzsche, and David Lewis. Thus, these philosophers present ample interpretative challenges. But the gaps, confusions, indeterminacies, hidden assumptions, and even to some extent the failures of clarity, are right there on the page, available to anyone who looks conscientiously for them, not shrouded in a general fog.

If a philosopher can convince the public to take him seriously -- or her, but let's say him -- being obfuscatory yields three illegitimate benefits: First, he intimidates the reader and by intimidation takes on a mantle of undeserved intellectual authority. Second, he disempowers potential critics by having a view of such indeterminate form that any criticism can be written off as based on a misinterpretation. Third, he exerts a fascination on the kind of reader who enjoys the puzzle-solving aspect of discovering meaning, thus drawing from that reader a level of attention that may not be merited by the quality of his ideas (though this third benefit may be offset by alienating readers with low tolerance for obfuscatory prose). These philosophers exhibit a kind of intellectual authoritarianism, with themselves as the assumed authority whose words we must spend time puzzling out. And simultaneously they lack intellectual courage: the courage to make plain claims that could be proven wrong, supported by plain arguments that could be proven fallacious. These three features synergize: If a critic thinks she has finally located a sound criticism, she can be accused of failing to solve the interpretive puzzle of the philosopher's superior genius.

Few philosophers, I suspect, deliberately set out to be obfuscatory. But I am inclined to believe that some are attuned to its advantages as an effect of their prose style and for that reason make little effort to write comprehensibly. Perhaps they find their prose style shaped by audience responses: When they write clearly, they are dismissed or refuted; when they produce a fog of words that hint of profound meaning underneath, they earn praise. Perhaps thus they are themselves to some extent victims -- victims of a subculture, or circle of friends, or intended audience, that regards incomprehensibility as a sign of brilliance and so demands it in their heroes.

Graduate School Application Advice

2011-10-18T08:38:00.000-07:00

Readers interested in graduate school in philosophy might be interested to see my seven-part series on PhD admissions, collected here. It's time to start thinking about the application process, if you're aiming to begin a PhD program in fall 2012.

For advice on applying to Master's programs, see the guest post by Robert Schwartz of University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

My impression is that admissions are somewhat more competitive in recessions than in boom times, since there are fewer options outside of academia to draw top students out of the applicant pool. Regarding the job market for newly minted philosophy PhDs, we should probably think of the period from about 1999-2007, bruising and competitive though it was, as boom times unlikely to be replicated in the near future. So don't be misled by departments' placement records from that period. On the other hand, the horrible job market of the past two years is probably also an aberration.

David Lewis, Anesthesia by Genocide, and a Materialistic Trilemma

2011-10-13T13:35:00.000-07:00

In his famous 1980 essay, "Mad Pain and Martian Pain", David Lewis tries to thread the needle between a flat-footed functionalism and a flat-footed neural-state identity theory about the mental. Flat-footed neural-state identity theory equates mental states, like being in pain, with possession of particular neural states. Thus, counterintuitively, it implies that beings who are behaviorally similar but internally very different, such as (hypothetically) Martians, can't feel pain. Flat-footed functionalism equates mental states with causal/functional roles. Being in pain, on such a view, is just being in a state that is caused by things like tissue stress and that tends to cause things like wincing, avoidance, and self-ascriptions of pain. This view, counterintuitively, implies the impossibility of "madmen" who feel pain for unusual reasons and have unusual reactions to it.

Lewis's solution is to say that some entity X is in pain if and only if X is in the state that occupies the causal role of pain for the "appropriate population". The "appropriate population", he says, might be (1.) us, since it's our term, (2.) a population that X belongs to, (3.) a population in which X is not exceptional, and (4.) a natural kind such as a species. In the normal case, all four criteria are met. In the Martian case, 2-4 are met though 1 is not, which is good enough. In the mad case 1, 2, and 4 are met though 3 is not, which is also good enough. Since mad Martian pain also seems possible, 2 and 4 alone will be sufficient for pain on Lewis's account.

Now the funny thing about these criteria is that they are all extrinsic or relational , and you might have thought that whether X is in pain or not should depend entirely on what is going on within X; you might have thought that pain would, in today's jargon, "supervene locally". The weirdness can be made vivid with further thought experiments. Criterion (3), for example, can be altered by genocide. Suppose that X is in a state that plays the causal role of pain for most of the population but the causal role of hunger for him and maybe a few others -- a "madman" case. On Lewis's account he will be experiencing pain. Now suppose that X is desperate to end his pain. On Lewis's account he might end his pain by perpetrating genocide upon all the non-mad people of the world. Voila, condition (3) flips, and X's pain has changed to hunger! This is anesthesia by genocide. We could similarly produce anesthesia by reproduction or speciation.

Real advocates of physical-state identity theory are hardly ever as flat-footed as those imagined by Lewis (as Lewis explicitly acknowledges). Like Lewis, they tend to embrace accounts on which to be in pain (or any other mental state) is to be in a state of a certain physical type, where the relevant physical type can vary between different types of being. What type of physical state is identical to what type of mental state, for beings of your type, then depends on facts about the particular causal or functional role of that state in members of your group or on the causal or functional history of that physical state in members of your group and/or in your own evolutionary or developmental past. Such type classifications are extrinsic or relational. Thus, such views have the bizarre consequences that flow from the denial of local supervenience. They allow anesthesia by genocide, or by speciation, or by hypothetical differences in past history that have no neural trace in the present.

We might thus see the mad pain-Martian pain issue as a trilemma in which each horn has bizarre consequences: Either accept the bizarre consequences of a strict functionalism (no mad pain), accept the bizarre consequences of neurobiological chauvinism (no Martian pain), or accept the bizarre consequences of denying local supervenience (anesthesia by genocide or speciation). Can a plausible materialist metaphysics dodge this trilemma? (I set aside hand-waving appeals to yet-to-be-identified intrinsic properties, a la John Searle.) I'd be very interested if you think you can point me to an example!

If all the options are bizarre, as I think, then something bizarre must be true. (Yes, dualism is also bizarre.) The problem is in figuring out which bizarre view to accept! If none of the various bizarre options merits credence, then crazyism follows.

Dualists' Troubles with Common Sense

2011-10-05T14:42:00.000-07:00

Is there a psychology of metaphysics? Yes! And one of its high-profile results seems to be this: Ordinary people (or at least the less scientific among them) are metaphysical substance dualists. They think that material bodies are one thing and immaterial souls quite another. Paul Bloom argues for this on cross-cultural and developmental grounds. Brian Fiala, Adam Arico, and Shaun Nichols propose a cognitive mechanism to explain it. And it certainly seems to fit with widespread belief in God, the afterlife, etc. You are an immortal soul "fastened to a dying animal".

But if you've read your history of philosophy, you might wonder this: If dualism is just common sense, why are dualistic metaphysical systems always so bizarre? Leibniz sees a universe of "monads" that move in pre-established harmony with each other but do not causally interact. Malebranche thinks nothing has any real causal power except for God, who constantly creates the universe anew at every moment. Descartes, whose "causal interactionist" dualism might initially seem a reasonable candidate for common sense, held that nonhuman animals were mere mindless machines, incapable of conscious experience. (It's hopefully not true that Descartes tossed a cat out of a window in Leiden to illustrate his belief in this.) "Common sense" philosopher Thomas Reid attributed immaterial souls to vegetables and denied that material objects had the power even to cohere into shapes without the regular intervention of immaterial souls on their behalf.

Here's my explanation of the bizarreness of dualist metaphysical systems: Commonsense opinion is not straightforwardly substance dualist. Rather, commonsense opinion about the metaphysics of mind is an incoherent mess. Thus, it's impossible to develop a detailed, coherent dualist metaphysics that respects all the inclinations of common sense.

There are at least two broad issues on which dualistic metaphysical systems have repeatedly stumbled against common sense: the causal powers of the immaterial mind and the class of beings with immaterial minds.

The causal powers issue can be posed as a dilemma: Does the immaterial soul have the causal power to affect material entities like the brain? Both yes and no answers lead to trouble. If yes, then physical entities like neurons must be regularly and systematically influenced by immaterial events. A neuron must be caused to fire not just because of the chemical, electrical, and other physical influences on it but also because of immaterial happenings in spiritual substances. Either events in the immaterial realm give it some physical or quasi-physical push that leads it to behave other than it would without that immaterial push -- which seems to violate our commonsense ideas about nonmiraculous causes of physical movement (and a minimal commonsensical deference to mainstream physics and neuroscience) -- or the immaterial causal influence somehow operates on the physical despite the fact that the physical would behave no differently absent that influence, which seems an equally strange view. Suppose, then, the other horn of the dilemma: The immaterial soul has no causal influence on physical events. If immaterial souls do anything, they engage in rational reflection. On a no-influence view, such rational reflection would have no power to causally influence the movements of the body. You can't make a rational decision that has any effect on the flow of the physical world, including the movements of your own body. This again seems bizarre by the standards of ordinary common sense.

The scope-of-mentality issue can be posed as a quadrilemma: Either (a.) among Earthly animals, only human beings have immaterial souls and they have those souls from birth (or maybe conception), or (b.) there are sharp boundaries in phylogeny and development between ensouled and unensouled creatures, or (c.) whether a being has an immaterial soul isn't a simple yes-or-no matter but rather a gradual affair, or (d.) panpsychism is true, that is, every being has, or participates in having, an immaterial soul. Each possibility violates common sense in a different way. Since on a substance dualist metaphysics of mind, the immaterial soul is the locus of mentality and conscious experience, option (a) denies dogs and apes mentality and conscious experience, contrary to what seems to be the clear opinion of most of humankind. Option (b) requires sudden saltations in phylogeny and development, which seems bizarre given the smooth gradation of differences in behavioral capacity, both developmentally and across the range of non-human animals, and given the work the immaterial soul must do if it's not to be otiose. Option (c) appears incomprehensible from a commonsense point of view: What would it mean to sort of, or kind of, or halfway have an immaterial soul? (Would you sort of go to Heaven? Even Dog Heaven, which might be a "sort of" Heaven, seems to require dichotomously either that dogs are materially instantiated there or that they have some immateriality that transcends the grave.) And despite a certain elegance in panpsychism, the idea, in option (d), that even vegetables and bacteria and proteins and thermostats have immaterial souls, or alternatively that they participate in a single grand immaterial soul, seems bizarre on the face of it, by the standards of ordinary common sense.

Any well developed metaphysical substance dualism must make choices on such matters. And all the choices seem weird. If you think otherwise, I suspect philosophy has dulled your sense of what's weird. But weird does not imply false! We have good independent reasons to think, on physical and cosmological grounds, that the world is a pretty weird place, not well matched with our commonsensical intuitions about what must be so.