American Philosophy

2008-01-21T22:17:00.000-05:00

Remembrance of Peter Hare

Over at the Buffalo Philosophy blog, Randall Dipert has a long and spot-on remembrance of Peter Hare (here).

2008-01-03T21:54:00.000-05:00

Peter Hare (1935-2008)

I just received word that Peter Hare died yesterday.

Peter was a professor of philosophy at the University at Buffalo, where he taught from 1962-2001.

It is hard to find words that do him justice. Peter was a tireless champion of American philosophy. He was also an incredibly decent human being: always encouraging, always positive, always supportive. He was generous with his time and his concern and he was always looking for ways of bringing people together. But again none of these descriptions can really do him justice.

In short, Peter was an exemplar of what a modern American philosopher should be.

[This article describes two gifts Peter made to the University at Buffalo just before his retirement.]

2007-12-09T21:39:00.001-05:00

Experimental Philosophy and the Armchair

Kwame Anthony Appiah has a good piece in the NYT (here) on experimental philosophy -- or the movement that uses empirical research (think surveys) to determine what intuitions people really have about philosophical problems.

No doubt, experimental philosophy is a lot of fun: it's fascinating to read how people's intuitions ebb and flow based on small changes in a particular thought experiment (and Appiah has a couple classic examples).

In addition, experimental philosophy has shown (conclusively, I think) that professional philosophers' intuitions often aren't shared by the general public. Now, that may be because the general public hasn't thought as hard about these issues. But there is also the risk that professional philosophers operate in a kind of echo chamber where our intuitions become increasingly divorced from reality.

The alternative to experimental philosophy is "armchair philosophy" which Appiah ultimately comes down in favor of -- he argues that the results of surveys require interpretation, and deciding on the right interpretation is ultimately an armchair endeavor.

I agree with Appiah, mostly. As exciting and fun as experimental philosophy is, it strikes me as basically psychology and I don't yet see how it solves any philosophical problems.

Having said that, I thin Appiah also downplays one of its major strengths. In passing, he notes that experimental philosophy can enforce a kind of modesty -- again, the reminder that our intuitions aren't universal.

But that's actually a big deal. This was brought home to me in an Epistemology course last year. We'd read some feminist epistemology and many of the students would reject it immediately as patently absurd. Later we read some experimental philosophy -- making essentially the same point about the contingency of our intuitions, and everyone thought it was completely obvious. So, for better or worse, experimental philosophy can break down resistance to new philosophical ideas.

2007-12-05T22:58:00.000-05:00

Philosophy Journals

From Lemmings, this link to Jonathan Kvanvig's data on the rejection rates and scholarly impact of philosophy journals (here).

It's depressing reading, at least for me, for a couple of reasons. First, the rejection rates for nearly all the journals listed is 90%. Nobody likes to play a game where the success rate is 1 in 10.

I look at those numbers and wonder, too, if they are a self-fulfilling prophecy: i.e., a paper is frequently cited not because of its worth but because of where it was published. After all, we cite papers for all kinds of reasons. One reason has nothing at all to do with the worth of the paper but because we want to signal that we've done our homework, and one way of doing that is to sprinkle in a few references to work in certain journals.

Given these kinds of questions, questions which beg for further study, I get particularly sad when I read that these indices of scholarly impact are used in tenure decisions. Until I hear more, that sounds like an attempt to cloak these decisions in a veneer of pseudo-scientific respectability.

2007-12-04T10:30:00.000-05:00

Evolution and Neutrality

From The New York Times, this story about the Texas Education Agency's director of science, Christine Castillo.

Castillo, it seems, was fired for advertising a talk that would be critical of intelligent design.

She was told that the evolution/creation debate was a "subject on which the agency must remain neutral."

That's a pretty incredible statement. Intelligent design has been pretty well exposed as pseudo-science (really, it has) and there's no reason for a state agency to remain "neutral" when the issue is science vs. pseudo-science.

Darwin, Charles

Darwin, Australia

2007-11-30T10:41:00.000-05:00

Greatest American Philosopher?

A student recently asked me who I thought was the Greatest American Philosopher. Of course I didn't have an answer -- how could there be? -- but it did get me thinking.

First, what counts as an American philosopher? Would it have to be someone working in the American Philosophical Tradition? Or could it be someone who is simply American and a philosopher?

And who counts as a philosopher? What about Benjamin Franklin, e.g.? Or Jefferson? Or Elizabeth Cady Stanton?

And what about living vs. dead? Or contemporary vs. classical?

My favorite American philosopher is Dewey, and I think he is pretty "great", too.

Among contemporary philosophers, I'm just not sure.

But if I had to put money on who I think will be read 400 years from now*, I'd bet on William James.

Who else: which American philosophers will our great great great great great great grandchildren still be reading?

*Avrum Stroll makes a claim somewhere that Wittgenstein is probably the only 20th century philosopher who'll still be read 400 years from now.

2007-11-29T10:25:00.000-05:00

Women Ph.D.s in Philosophy

Evelyn Brister has some new figures on the number of women receiving Ph.D.s in Philosophy each year in the U.S.

A couple of years ago the number cracked 30% for the first time (that is, of the Ph.D.s in philosophy awarded that year, 30% went to women).

But now that looks like an aberration, and the number has slipped back into the high 20s, where it's been since at least the early 1990s.

This is bad news on a number of levels. But what makes it especially distressing is that I can't think of a single initiative to increase the number of women in philosophy. I certainly can't think of any high profile initiative.

In other fields this would be a cause for grave concern. Look at what computer science and engineering programs do to attract women. Look at what professional organizations in the sciences, e.g., do to increase women's participation. But what has the American Philosophical Association done to address this problem?

The problem isn't just at the Ph.D. level -- it's also a problem, obviously, at the undergraduate level where women students aren't choosing to be philosophy majors. But, again, I wonder what has been done--either at the level of the APA or at the level of particular departments--to address this problem.

2007-11-28T12:46:00.000-05:00

The Purpose of Rankings

So what purpose do rankings of philosophy departments serve?

As I mentioned earlier, I don't think they do a whole lot of good for students choosing graduate schools.

I can imagine, in some cases, that they can help particular departments bargain with university administration.

I can also imagine, in some cases, that they might help individuals bargain with administrators.

But, for the rest of us, the purpose is, I think, a lot more obvious and a lot less high-minded.

The main purpose, as far as I can see, is that the rankings give us a little secret thrill when we professional philosophers look to see where our graduate department is ranked. (If you're teaching at a graduate department, then you get an additional little secret thrill -- but most of us aren't.) I'll admit that I get that thrill, though I'm not proud of it.

It's like looking at the polls for college football and basketball teams. Who's moved up? Who's moved down? Who's higher? Your university or mine?

And, of course, the philosophy rankings share some of the same weaknesses of football rankings. Some universities will get a boost even if their team (or department) isn't that strong. Other universities won't ever be able to crack the top 10, no matter how good they are.

Fans of college football often argue that the AP and Harris polls are flawed. That's why there are computer models that are supposedly more objective. That's also why some fans call for a playoff to determine who is #1.

Maybe there's a lesson here for how the philosophy rankings could be improved. It's easy to imagine a computer ranking that would take into account, say, number of books/faculty member over a given year along with a lot of other data. Maybe in place of one team beating another, it could look at faculty members who leave one university for another. It could also measure citations. There's lots of that data out there.

If that fails there's always the playoff option.

2007-11-27T22:22:00.000-05:00

Philosophy Department Rankings

Noelle McAfee has been raising questions recently about the methodology of the Leiter Report ranking graduate departments of philosophy.

I think a more basic question is: what is the purpose of the Leiter Report? Its stated purpose is to provide undergrads with information so they can make informed decisions about where to apply and attend graduate school. But Leiter, to his credit, admits that the information it provides is incomplete: while the rankings are about faculty "reputation" and "quality" they don't say anything about the climate or education in these departments.

So how does this incomplete information help undergrads? Well, I can imagine it would help undergrads who are debating about whether to apply or attend Pitt or NYU or Rutgers or Princeton, say, but aren't getting good advising from their undergraduate professors.

But how many of those students are there? I certainly wasn't one of those students. Like a lot of people, I think (and hope!), I was praying to get just one acceptance. Two or more would have been hopelessly confusing. Having to choose between Princeton or Rutgers? Well, I can't imagine how hard that must be.

The simple fact is that most of the people who attend the top graduate departments come from the top undergraduate departments -- undergraduate departments stocked with recent Ph.D.s from the top graduate departments. For that reason I have a hard time believing that these students don't have access to good advising.

And that brings me back to my question: what purpose does the Leiter report really serve?

2007-07-19T22:51:00.000-04:00

Rorty Video

From Phillip McReynolds, a fascinating and thoughtful discussion of Richard Rorty:

2007-06-10T23:38:00.001-04:00

NYT Obituary of Rorty

The NYT obituary of Rorty appeared earlier today. My favorite quote:

[H]e relied primarily on the only authentic American philosophy, pragmatism, which was developed by John Dewey, Charles Peirce, William James and others more than 100 years ago. “There is no basis for deciding what counts as knowledge and truth other than what one’s peers will let one get away with in the open exchange of claims, counterclaims and reasons,” Mr. Rorty wrote. In other words, “truth is not out there,” separate from our own beliefs and language. And those beliefs and words evolved, just as opposable thumbs evolved, to help human beings “cope with the environment” and “enable them to enjoy more pleasure and less pain.”

First, I smiled at the description of pragmatism as "the only authentic American philosophy." I agree, but I'm not sure I'd ever say it. So it is nice to see it said.

Second, the rest of the paragraph is just a mish-mash. The idea that "what counts as knowledge and truth" = "what one's peers will let one get away with" is not something that Peirce, James or Dewey would have agreed with, nor is it a recognizably pragmatic idea. And, in addition, the idea that truth is "what one's peers will let one get away with" doesn't equal the idea that the "truth is not out there." You can agree with the latter without agreeing with the former. (Truth may be non-transcendent yet still not socially relative.) And, finally, the last sentence makes Rorty sound much more like a naturalist than he ever was.

2007-06-09T23:30:00.000-04:00

Richard Rorty 1931-2007

According to the Leiter Report linking to Telos Press Richard Rorty died on Friday. (I haven't been able to find any other notice of Rorty's death, though someone did update his Wikipedia page.)

This is sad news and it will be interesting to see how philosophers and others react in the coming days. Rorty deserves a lot of credit for bringing pragmatism back into vogue yet he was also the target of constant attacks from pragmatist scholars (and others) for peddling a dumbed down, relativized version.

A few recollections and reactions:

I heard Rorty speak twice and both times it was a powerful experience. I only vaguely remember the topics but what stood out was his delivery: probably the best I have ever heard, or very, very close. At the time he reminded me of no one as much as John Chancellor, the former NBC news anchor. Rorty read his remarks with a clarity and fluidity that most people cannot match when they speak off the cuff. Despite reading, he conveyed his thoughts in a manner as if he was speaking across the dining room table from you and it was very, very, effective.

Second, I remember being very struck by a remark of Charlene Haddock Seigfried's: speaking before a group of American philosphers 10+ years ago she encouraged us to remember that "Rorty was not the enemy" and she recalled how Rorty had supported feminists long before others had. She was right: it was too easy to dismiss Rorty for not getting Dewey right and failing to deal with him on his own terms.

My own experience of reading Rorty was that 90% made me want to stand up and cheer and 10% made me want to bury my head in my hands. That may sound bad but, now that I think about it, it's a better cheering-to-burying ratio than most of the other philosophers I read.

2007-05-21T22:42:00.000-04:00

Telling It Like It Is

This article in the NYT is more depressing than uplifting, but it had one glimmer of hope.

The article is about Kenneth Willard, a Kansas creationist, who is in line to be the next President of the National Association of State Boards of Education. Not a good thing.

But one passage in the article surprised me. Here it is:

There is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on earth. Courts have repeatedly ruled that creationism and intelligent design are religious doctrines, not scientific theories.

Now that shouldn't be so surprising since it is, after all, the simple truth. Yet it stood out for me in this age of "objective" journalism in which journalists give credibility to any opposing viewpoint, no matter how absurd. It's refreshing to see a mainstream newspaper call out creationism for what it is.

2007-04-16T22:08:00.000-04:00

Pragmatism and Tragedy

A common criticism of pragmatism is that it doesn't adequately account for the tragic. I don't have references at hand, but I'm reasonably sure that Cornel West has made this point and I've heard other versions over the years. Generally, the criticism comes down to this: that pragmatism, with its "let's roll up our sleeves and get to work" attitude can't really do justice to truly tragic events.

Oddly, every time I've heard this criticism the author brings forward a fictional event to illustrate tragedy. So maybe its Hamlet or Anna Karenina or whatever. And maybe it is true that being a better pragmatist wouldn't have helped Hamlet or Anna Karenina. But a pragmatist should, I think, shrug at this: after all, these are fictional events and pragmatists are interested in the real world. So how does pragmatism deal with real-life tragedy?

I've been thinking about this for two reasons. One is that we've been reading a book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer that tells the story of a young 9 year old boy dealing with his father's death on 9/11. It's a really fine book, I've convinced myself, and one of the reasons it's so fine is that it personalizes this tragedy by refocusing our attention away from well known images of collapsing towers and toward the simple fact that a boy has lost his dad. It's a fictional case, again, but it is grounded in real life events.

Another reason I've been thinking about this has to do with something that strikes closer to home: a friend who lost his 14 year old son last week.

I'm still not sure how pragmatism can address real-life tragedy but I think part of it has to do with recognizing the real concrete losses. In the case of Foer's book again, the tragedy is not that the Dad died a horrific death in a horrendous event. The tragedy, instead, is that a young boy will never know his father, never have a chance to grow old with him.

Somehow we do seem capable of overcoming incredible tragedy. There's a well known survey which shows that people who have lost limbs aren't that much unhappier a year after their loss; likewise, people who win the lottery aren't that much happier a year later, either.

That may be, but I also wonder about the effect on loved ones. That is, an amputee may get over the loss of her limb, but what about her mother or father? Are they able to return to normal as easily?

2007-03-26T23:45:00.000-04:00

Philosophy, Literature, and Good Writing

A course I'm co-teaching has forced me to think more about the relationship between philosophy and literature. For one thing, since the course is historical, it's highlighted how some writing doesn't fall neatly into one category or the other. Emerson's essays are one example.

It's also made me think about questions of style in philosophical writing. One question I ask colleagues is whether they can name a philosopher that they just enjoy reading: a philosopher you'd read no matter the topic, someone who is just a good writer, plain and simple.

I have to confess that my list is pretty short: I get a kick out of reading J.L. Austin; I think William James has his moments; J.J. Thomson has a style that I think is pretty terrific; I'd probably also mention Cheryl Misak, Arthur Fine, and...then I begin scratching my head. I've probably missed a few philosophers, but I don't think I've missed many. And sometimes I've managed to convince myself that Dewey is a good writer, but then I usually recant.

Maybe I've missed some others, but there aren't many philosophers whom I'd say have style.

2007-02-18T19:19:00.000-05:00

More on Rankings

I've been thinking more about rankings after reading some comments on Berit Brogaard's blog.

One question is whether there's an alternative to the Leiter Report. Now, some people do love the Leiter Report, but others find it hopelessly biased.

Here's some food for thought. I hadn't heard of this Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index before. It measures productivity by # of books and articles published and also by the # of citations. The methodology looks sound to me. Or at least as sound as these things go.

So what are the highest ranking philosophy departments? Here they are:

1. Michigan St.
2. CUNY
3. Princeton
4. UVA
5. Rutgers
6. UC San Diego
7. Penn State
8. Texas
9. SUNY Stony Brook
10. Rice

That list doesn't look anything like the Leiter list. Of course one response is to argue that Princeton philosophers may publish less but what they do publish is higher quality than, say, Michigan State. But that won't entirely hold up. The survey also measures "Percentage of Faculty With Journal Article Cited By Another Work." This would seem to be a measure of quality (orat least it normally taken to be). Michigan State's percentage? 33%. Princeton's percentage? Hold on to your hats: 7%

2007-02-03T07:23:00.000-05:00

Generation Gap

This is neither here nor there, but it jumped out at me a couple of days ago.

A couple days ago the New York Times ran an AP article about "gangsta" parties thrown by white college students. The parties feed on racial stereotypes, and so the question is whether the white college students realize that, well, these parties are pretty offensive.

At the end, the story quoted a researcher who suggested that the students were just oblivious to the existence of racism:

''This is a new generation who grew up watching `The Cosby Show,''' Picca said. ''They have the belief that racism isn't a problem anymore so the words they use and the jokes they tell aren't racist.''
Picca said she found it ''heartbreaking'' to see so many well-educated students perpetuating the stereotypes.

That leapt out at me, because I thought I was part of the generation that grew up watching The Cosby Show. (I never actually watched it, but never mind.) And a quick check of Wikipedia confirmed my suspicion: The Cosby Show ran from 1984-1992. That means it went off the air 15 years ago. In other words, it went off the air when today's 21 year old college student was 6 years old. And that means they could hardly have grown up watching the show. (Yes, I know this discounts reruns, but then you might as well also say that they also grew up watching "I Love Lucy" or any other once-popular sitcom.)

This is a mistake that we college professors risk making all the time: referring to some cultural touchstone that, actually, isn't a touchstone for our students. Usually that just makes us look dated and fusty. But here it can also show how little we really understand our students' lives.

2007-01-17T23:47:00.000-05:00

What Makes a "Good" Philosophy Department?

The New York Times had an article about the Philosophical Gourmet Report. It focuses primarily on Rutgers' high ranking which, I suppose, might surprise some people who are more familiar thinking of Rutgers as New Jersey's state university. (People at my high school in New Jersey would always say, condescendingly, about Rutgers "Oh, that's a good school" when what they really meant was that they wouldn't be caught dead going there.)

The article also touches on the fact that some departments, at good universities, aren't ranked by the Gourmet Report, or rank very low. And so there's this quote from John J. Stuhr, from Vanderbilt:

“Schools like Rutgers and N.Y.U. emphasize analytic philosophy, and most of the evaluators emphasize that, so schools like Vanderbilt and Northwestern and Penn State, which don’t, aren’t going to do as well,” said John J. Stuhr, a philosophy professor at Vanderbilt. “It’s like asking about the best painters of all time. If you asked Cubists, you would get a list of Cubists; Impressionists, the same thing. I’m sure Rutgers has a good department. It just doesn’t emphasize what we do.”

Brian Leiter responds to this as follows:

But most breathtaking is John Stuhr's idiotic comment that Rutgers "doesn't emphasize what we do," where "we" means Vanderbilt. It is true that Rutgers doesn't much emphasize history of philosophy or Continental philosophy (that's why NYU is #1, and Rutgers #2), but how could that explain why Vanderbilt has never been close to the top 50 and barely rates in any historical areas? The difference between Rutgers and Vanderbilt isn't "emphasis": it's that Vanderbilt has a weak faculty, even in most of the areas it purports to "emphasize" like post-Kantian Continental philosophy. (Rutgers, by the way, is obviously much stronger in the history of ancient and early modern philosophy than Vanderbilt; only in American pragmatism does Vanderbilt have an edge.) One would need only ask the dozens of philosophers specializing in those areas who completed the PGR surveys, after all.

I think that's pretty incendiary, actually.

I'm not quite sure what Stuhr meant when he referred to "what we do" at Vanderbilt. And I don't have any inside knowledge of the Vanderbilt department. But I do get suspicious with statements like "Vanderbilt has a weak faculty."

The Gourmet Report is a measure of faculty quality. Here's what that means:

"Faculty quality" should be taken to encompass the quality of philosophical work and talent represented by the faculty and the range of areas they cover, with the two weighted as you think appropriate. Since the rankings are used by prospective students, about to embark on a multi-year course of study, you may also take in to account, as you see fit, considerations like the status (full-time, part-time) of the faculty; the age of the faculty (as a somewhat tenuous guide to prospective availability, not quality); and the quality of training the faculty provide, to the extent you have information about this.

So to say that Vanderbilt has a weak faculty is to say, for the most part, that their faculty produce work that is not high quality.

When Stuhr said that Vanderbilt doesn't "do" what Rutgers does, that could mean a couple of different things. First, it could refer to more than just what the faculty publish. Maybe faculty at Vanderbilt approach their jobs differently, maybe they try to create a different atmosphere...there are lots of possibilities. Second, it could mean that, while Vanderbilt and Rutgers cover the same topics, they do it differently, perhaps with different methodologies or guiding assumptions.

Again, I don't claim to know what Stuhr meant -- but I think there are ways of reading his statement that are more charitable than Leiter's interpretation. What he says isn't obviously "idiotic" to me.

And, of course, this raises the question of how the departments in the Gourmet Report are ranked. The danger is that the Report is just an echo chamber. A good department gets a high ranking -- and what makes it a good department? Well, its high ranking, of course.

One problem with the Report is that everyone has a horse in the race. Even though you can't rank your own department, or the department where you earned your degree, we all have reasons (maybe unconscious) for wanting to give a bump to some department or other. Maybe a friend teaches there, etc., etc. And while I suppose philosophers are best able to judge other philosophers, we're also the most likely to bring bias to the exercise. Again, we all have horses in this race.

One idea I've been wondering about is how other academics would rank philosophy departments. If you asked some sociologists, or physicists, or literary theorists, or political scientists which are the best philosophy departments, you might get a measure of how well regarded a department is outside of philosophy. That's a ranking I'd be very interested in seeing, since it would be an antidote to the excessive navel-gazing to which much academic philosophy is prone. Maybe it would correspond to the Gourmet rankings, but I'm not at all sure it would. (Of course, some of the philosophers who've had the most influence outside philosophy are no longer members of philosophy departments. That's a sad reality, and the topic of another post.)

2007-01-06T12:41:00.000-05:00

Changing Perceptions of "Pragmatism"

I've been struck by how often Gerald Ford has been described lately as a "pragmatist." This is usually in the context of his pardoning Nixon: that this was the pragmatic thing to do, and it was good that Ford did it. I'm not sure it was a good thing to do, but I'm glad to see Ford's pragmatism treated as a virtue.

Now, I'm not sure I can back this up, but I don't think it was always so. When I started getting interested in pragmatism, in the mid-1990's, I think pragmatism was sort of a pejorative. If someone was pragmatic, that meant they didn't have strong convictions or principles. I remember Stephen Breyer being described as a pragmatist when he was a new Supreme Court Justice, and it wasn't meant positively.

I'm not sure, either, what has changed. Has the meaning of "pragmatism" changed in the last 10 years? Or has the meaning stayed the same, but not our attitude toward it?

Of course, there's also a difference between pragmatism, used colloquially, and pragmatism, the philosophical method. But there's enough overlap that when the former becomes a virtue, it may bode well for the latter, too.

P.S. I've been thinking a little more about this and I think my original thoughts may have been naive. Another way of looking at it is that "pragmatism" is good when Republicans embrace it but bad when Democrats do. So the recent mentions of Ford's "pragmatism" would be little more than another example of hypocrisy.

2007-01-01T16:53:00.000-05:00

Job Interviews and a Great Idea

I just got back from the APA Eastern meeting in Washington D.C. As usual, it was focused around the job market. That's a bad thing because a) it puts a lot of pressure on the people being interviewed and b) it detracts from the conference because i) lots of people don't have time to attend sessions and ii) the main topic of conversation is the job market. At least that's been my impression.

Finally I came up with a good--no, great--solution: doing interviews through video conferencing. This would have a lot of advantages. First, there wouldn't be the same hassles for people interviewing:

1) the expense and hassle of traveling between Christmas and New Year's
2) the pressure to glad-hand at the "smoker" after interviews
3) the frustration of seeing and being surrounded by your competition

Second, this would also be easier on the interviewers: again, no need to travel between Christmas and New Year's, to go to a conference where one will spend 12-15 hours interviewing.

Finally, I think the technology is just about where it needs to be so that video interviews wouldn't be that hard to do.

The interesting question is this: if it weren't for the job market, how many people would come to the Eastern APA? My theory is this: so significantly fewer that it would make sense to move the conference to another time. Mid-November? Another problem solved.

In fact, the more I think about this the harder it is to find reasons not to do the interviews over the web. I honestly can't think of one reason why the present system is better for the people being interviewed.

2006-12-17T06:58:00.000-05:00

Influential Americans

The current issue of The Atlantic has a list of the 100 most influential Americans of all-time. The top three are Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson. Here's where some American philosophers (other than Jefferson) stack up:

19. Thomas Paine
30. Elizabeth Cady Stanton
33. Ralph Waldo Emerson
40. John Dewey
43. W.E.B. DuBois
47. Frederick Douglass
51. Margaret Sanger
53. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
62. William James
64. Jane Addams
65. Henry David Thoreau
89. Walter Lippmann

I don't know if Lippmann, Sanger, or Holmes should be called "philosophers" but I think their writings are philosophically interesting and important for understanding American thought, so I listed them.

The list is biased toward dead people, but perhaps that's fair given that influence ebbs after one's death. It's also biased toward people who had a good influence.

Who's missing from this list? I didn't see Robert Ingersoll, Malcolm X, Vannevar Bush, and I'm probably missing some others.

2006-12-05T22:30:00.000-05:00

Stuhr on American Philosophers

I've been reading John Stuhr's Pragmatism, Postmodernism and the Future of Philosophy, thinking about assigning it for a class. So far it's an interesting read.

One passage early on grabbed my attention, and struck a nerve. Stuhr writes:

At this point you know the routine, I know the routine, we all know the routine. You do know the routine: A writer steeped in pragmatism calls attention to, and bemoans, current educational problems [or, I'd add, philosophical problems]; trots out favorite, familiar quotations; refers to favorite pragmatist authors as resources for dealing with these problems; concludes by urging that we make use of these resources, apply pragmatic theory to practice, render practice more intelligent and meaningful; and everybody (with a home) goes home, happy that another chapter is done. (10)

I'm certainly guilty of doing that; in fact, I'm guilty of doing it last week. That's why this passage struck a nerve.

Stuhr really has a point. Those of us who are fans of American Philosophy, and of the great American philosophers, aren't necessarily doing this tradition a favor by trotting out the same story lines. Then it just becomes a self-congratulatory echo-chamber, and that doesn't do philosophy, American philosophy, or those who might benefit from philosophy, much good.

2006-12-02T12:39:00.000-05:00

Translation: Ancient French

I've been reading Book I of Plato's Republic, which I'm assigning in my Critical Thinking class. The translation is a good one -- very readable -- I think, but there's also this:

Socrates: "And isn't it the case that the raison d'être of a branch of expertise is to consider the welfare and interest of each party and then procure it?

Something about that jarred me: it seems weird for Socrates to be dropping some French into his conversation.

Of course the whole book is in translation, and I have no trouble suspending my disbelief and reading it as if Socrates is speaking English. But there was something about him also speaking French that just didn't seem right: almost as if instead of talking about "horsemanship" the translation had him talking about "auto repair." Or if at some point he said, "Jesus Christ! Thrasymachus do you know what you're saying?"

Dropping a French phrase into the conversation somehow seems anachronistic. It's not as if Socrates' point is lost, but it does make the translation less fluid. Especially since I think you could use the English word "purpose" in the above translation and it would mean the same.

2006-11-24T20:08:00.000-05:00

Expertise, Again

Over at Knowledge and Experience there's a post about fetal monitoring, which happens all the time, even though its value hasn't ever been demonstrated. This is in the news since The New England Journal of Medicine just published a study showing that fetal oxygen monitoring makes no difference to the health of the baby. And this study will probably be the end of fetal oxygen monitoring, one of the few times when a technology hits the dust bin.

But as the post points out, fetal heart monitoring is nearly omnipresent even though its value is equally dubious. In the case of fetal heart monitoring, its use became so widespread so quickly that everyone was doing it before its value could be studied. And no it is too late to turn back.

The post links to an editorial noting the limits of fetal heart monitoring. The limits are well known - its no better than listening to the fetus with a stethoscope - so why is it still done?

The editorial gives a few reasons. One is that physicians simply aren't trained to use stethoscopes to listen to babies. So they have to rely on the fetal monitor instead. Another reason is fear of lawsuits - but as the editorial points out, doctors who rejected fetal heart monitors in favor of more old fashioned methods could still argue that they are meeting current recommendations.

A final reason, the one that interested me the most, is that some physicians claim that the fetal heart monitors do provide valuable information - it just takes an expert to properly interpret the results.

This interests me because of the book I recently finished teaching: Bishop and Trout's Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment. Bishop and Trout argue in favor of algorithms that can do a better job than experts in diagnosing disease, determining which parolees are likely to commit more crimes, etc. In turns out that experts aren't nearly as good as they think they are. Worse, when this is pointed out to them, and they are supplied an algorithm that will improve their results, the experts still find reasons for deviating from what the algorithm recommends.

On a psychological level this makes perfect sense. We'd hate to think that a stupid algorithm can do better than we can, and we'll also think that we can recognize special circumstances where the algorithm will fail. Unfortunately, both of those beliefs are false. The algorithm can do better than we can and, on the whole, when we deviate from the algorithm we do worse than if we hadn't.

The case of fetal heart rate monitoring seems to be a perfect example of this. So some doctors continue using the monitors, knowing full well that studies have shown their limitations. But they continue to use the monitors claiming that they have special expertise in reading the results. As Bishop and Trout argue, we should be especially skeptical of such claims.

2006-11-11T19:46:00.000-05:00

American Philosophy

The 2006-2008 Leiter rankings just came out. Naturally, I was interested to see the rankings of departments strong in American Pragmatism. The rankings are here.

A couple points. First, as I noted earlier, it's odd that the overall history of philosophy rankings don't include American Pragmatism (or even American philosophy more generally), even though it is listed as a specialty.

Second, the rankings made me think about the Leiter rankings in general. For one thing, I think there's a halo effect as far as where departments are ranked.

For example, the top rankings in American Pragmatism (Miami, Sheffield, Toronto) go to departments that are also ranked in the Leiter report. The next tier of departments (Southern Illinois, Vanderbilt, SUNY Buffalo) aren't ranked in the Leiter report at all.

This seems odd, since at least Southern Illinois and Vanderbilt have built their departments around American Philosophy; they may not have the perceived strengths across the board that Miami, Sheffield, and Toronto have, but as far as American Pragmatism goes, the departments in the second tier seem at least as good as the ones in the first. And maybe a graduate student is more likely to get a job coming out of, say, Toronto, than Southern Illinois, but even that I'm not sure of, and I'm not sure it should matter to the rankings.

This also raises a more general question: what makes a department a good place to study American Pragmatism (or any other subdiscipline)? In the case of even some of the top-ranked departments, it's just one or two professors -- who don't focus exclusively on American Pragmatism.

But if that's all it takes, then there are lots of places where one could study American Pragmatism. My own graduate experience is an example: I was fortunate enough to attend a university where there was enough expertise to write a dissertation on American Pragmatism, even though none of my committee members, I suspect, would have listed it as a specialty.

What mattered, and what made it a good place to write a dissertation on American Philosophy, was instead the character and support of my committee members -- which of course is not something the Leiter rankings measure.

2006-11-09T20:47:00.000-05:00

Haslanger on Knowledge

I should have blogged about this a few weeks ago. One of the papers I assigned was Sally Haslanger's "What Knowledge Is and What It Ought to Be." The .pdf is here.

Haslanger's approach is pragmatic: she defends an epistemological approach that starts with the question "what use is knowledge?" She calls this the "analytic" approach (a clever bit of rhetoric).

One of the advantages of this starting point is that it bypasses a bunch of standard epistemological problems: the proper analysis of "knowledge", the problem of skepticism, etc.

Haslanger's answer is that knowledge is a precondition for moral agency, and moral agency is intrinsically important for creatures like us. I like this approach (and not just because it bypasses skepticism) because it emphasizes the connection between the concept of knowledge and actual practice. Again, this is a pragmatic point: as Peirce and Dewey would have asked, "why do we have this concept at all? what difference does it make?"

These questions are all too often shunted aside, but they are desperately important.

My point in talking about Haslanger is that her argument fits in nicely with the conclusion of Bishop and Trout's Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment. Like Haslanger, Bishop and Trout emphasize the practical importance of epistemology and the concept of knowledge. Moreover, the point of theorizing about knowledge isn't to arrive at a Gettier-proof definition, but rather to recognize both the practical importance this concept has and the importance of improving our ability to pursue, recognize, and defend the truth.

2006-11-07T16:48:00.000-05:00

Election Day

Rob at Helpy-Chalk has a post about mechanical voting machines. We still have them in New York, though probably not for long. You go into a booth, close the curtains, and pull levers indicating your choices. When you open the curtains your vote is recorded.

It's a great system. As Rob points out, there's a satisfying feeling in pulling the lever. I've used punch cards and I much prefer this sysytem. At the end of the day, I believe, the judges open the back of the machine and read the number of votes for each candidate, like reading an odometer.

Already today there have been reports of problems with electronic voting machines. Here's one. And this makes me like the mechanical machines all the more. I'm not even sure if they need electricity to run. In addition, when we asked the judges what they thought of them, they were unanimous: they think these machines are great, too. For one thing, there just aren't the same concerns about fraud or hacking.

This is one of those places, I'm convinced, that the low-tech solution is miles ahead of the high-tech system. I'll be sad when New York moves to another, most likely inferior, system.

2006-11-06T16:43:00.000-05:00

"The Troubles With Standard Analytic Epistemology"

Bishop and Trout in their book Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment make a withering indictment of what they call "Standard Analytic Epistemology" (or "SAE"). I'm about 95% in agreement with their claims; 5% of me wants to believe that there is still some good in SAE, particularly out at the contextualist margins.

Anyway, here are some choice quotes. Their point is that SAE really only reports on the intuitions of academically-trained philosophers; as a result, its usefulness in the real world is just about nil:

So what is SAE geared to tell us about? We suggest that it tells us about the reflective epistemic judgmnets of a group of idiosyncratic people who have been trained to use highly specialized epistemic concepts and patterns of thought....The conservative goals and methods of SAE are suited to the task of providing an account of the considered epistemic judgments of (mostly) well-off Westerners with Ph.D.'s in Philosophy. (107)

And on the question of whether SAE can better account for the justification of beliefs than their alternative:

What about the belief recommended by SAE? Its main advantage seems to be that it is the belief that is deemed justified by a bunch of really smart philosophers who have reflected seriously on thier notion of justification. (117)

2006-10-31T22:28:00.000-05:00

Code, Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich

A quick story to relate, then out of town for a few days. Several weeks ago we read Lorraine Code's "Taking Subjectivity Into Account" in my epistemology class. The reception, to put it nicely, was frosty. Many students took exception to her claim that mainstream epistemology represents the biases of wealthy white males (which is pretty much the wording she uses).

Then a couple of weeks ago we read this article by Jonathan Winberg, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich. It's entitled "Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions" and it's received a lot of attention. I like the article a lot, too.

The last sentence of their article is:

We think that the best reaction to the High-SES [High-SocioEconomic Status], Western philosophy professor who tries to draw normative conclusions from the facts about “our” intuitions is to ask: What do you mean “we”?

That it pretty much exactly what Code was arguing about 20 years ago. So you'd think there would be a similar outcry in class -- but there wasn't. Why not? Well, part of it might be rhetoric: Weinberg et al. conducted surveys to arrive at their conclusion; Code didn't. But that didn't seem to be a factor for my students. A few of them said they thought the surveys were either poorly designed or just foolish: of course people will have different epistemic intuitions.

Maybe people had come around to what Code was saying in the intervening weeks. I think that might be possible. But I think the real reason was that people responded with hostility to a piece that was clearly in the vein of feminist epistemology. They were much more receptive, even blase, about a more straightforward, apparently value-neutral article.

Of course I don't mean to single out my students. What goes for them goes for the philosophical profession as a whole. I like both of these articles, but it's sort of dismaying to see the same point made 20 years later, and receive a lot of attention, when it was made just as well by Lorraine Code.

2006-10-29T21:35:00.000-05:00

Bishop and Trout: Epistemology and The Psychology of Human Judgment

We've started reading the above book in my epistemology course. I'm quite a fan of it, liking the authors' discussion of "Standard Analytic Epistemology" and their replacement project which can be called either "ameliorative psychology" or "applied epistemology." It's a really good book, and a complete breath of fresh air.

Bishop and Trout make a big deal of "Statistical Prediction Rules" or SPRs that, they argue, outperform experts on particular tasks. So, for instance, there's an SPR that tells you whether a convict is likely to commit another crime. And these SPRs are usually better at these kinds of questions than the experts.

Of course, no one likes to hear this. We like to think we're better than a stupid rule, and we'd like to think that we have special insights that make us more reliable than, say, a neophyte who follows a rule, but doesn't really understand. Sadly, we may be wrong about this. As Bishop and Trout argue, when people deviate from an SPR (thinking they have additional knowledge that undermines its validity in a particular case) they usually do worse than if they'd continued following the SPR.

But several good ideas did come out of our discussion. One was this: while we may not object to SPRs on epistemic grounds, we may object to them on other grounds. Consider this: perhaps there's an SPR that will tell you who's most likely to hijack an airplane. And that SPR may say that you should use racial profiling: don't waste your time on the grandmothers; instead focus on the young unmarried men of Arab descent. Would we be justified in using the SPR? The thought in class was that there would be other considerations that would trump the epistemic value of using the SPR: specifically, considerations of justice and fairness. That seems like a fair point to me.

Thus, while we may be wrong to defect from an SPR on epistemic grounds, we may be justified defecting on other grounds, including grounds of justice and ethics.

2006-10-24T21:32:00.000-04:00

Back to Blogging

It's been a busy month, and blogging has been low priority. So I'm hoping to get back in the swing with a few short posts. This one struck me just a few days ago:

The Leiter Report (always a source of ideas) has been previewing the results of the latest Gourmet report. Last week, it reported the rankings of departments in the history of philosophy. The link is here.

According to the Leiter report, "History of Philosophy" refers to the following:

Ancient Philosophy; Medieval Philosophy; Early Modern Philosophy: 17th Century; Early Modern Philosophy: 18th Century (excluding Kant); Kant and German Idealism; 19th-Century Continental Philosophy After Hegel; History of Analytic Philosophy (including Wittgenstein); 20th-Century Continental Philosophy.

I was sorry to see that "American Philosophy" appeared nowhere on that list. It's a special shame since some of the departments listed do have strengths in American Philosophy (Toronto, e.g., but others, too).

It's a shame on a number of levels: first, that we don't appreciate our own philosophical heritage; second, because American Philosophy isn't included in the rankings, there's no incentive for departments to emphasize it in hope of moving up a notch or two. In short, there's no penalty for completely ignoring American Philosophy -- when it actually has a lot to offer in contemporary philosophical debates.

2006-09-25T23:12:00.000-04:00

Lorraine Code: Taking Subjectivity Into Account

Two thoughts occurred to me after today’s discussion of Code’s article “Taking Subjectivity Into Account.”

The first is that her point can be boiled down to a very plausible set of claims, something like the following: It’s a mistake to define objectivity in terms of value neutrality. Why? Because perfect value neutrality is impossible. This means that attempts to be value neutral are doomed to failure. What’s worse, we’ll think we’re being value neutral when really we aren’t. And there’s no way to discover our remaining biases when we think we’ve already achieved value neutrality. Finally, the situation is exacerbated when we surround ourselves with people who think like us. So what’s the solution? It’s to listen to people who don’t think like us: that’s an effective way of weeding out persistent bias.

That seems so plausible it almost doesn’t bear comment. Of course, in class, Code received a lot of flak. In particular, lots of people were upset with her use of the word “feminist.” And it finally dawned on my why.

So, second, I’d forgotten that her essay is directed primarily at other professional philosophers. And we don’t have any problem with feminism, since it just refers to gender equality: who could be against that? Of course, in class, “feminism” has a lot of other connotations for the students reading her essay. And they objected to it not so much because they themselves are opposed to feminism but rather because they find it an inflammatory word and are worried, somehow, by how others will react to it. An analogy would be the word “liberal” which has a particular meaning for academics, referring to the liberal political tradition that pretty much encompasses both the left and right in US politics. But if you’re not thinking in these academic terms, then “liberal” has a more popular meaning that has successfully been turned into a pejorative.

2006-09-18T22:53:00.000-04:00

Misak and Pragmatism and Deflationism

Today we discussed an article by Cheryl Misak in my epistemology class. The essay is “Deflating Truth: Pragmatism vs. Minimalism” (The Monist, 1998) and it’s one of my favorites. It discusses many of the same themes as Misak’s book "Truth, Politics, Morality" (2000) but very efficiently and succinctly.

I especially like the argumentative structure: starting with the basic platitudes of disquotationalism and deflationism, and then grafting on a quasi-Peircean theory of truth (quasi-Peircean because Misak avoids talking about a hypothetical “end of inquiry” and instead treats truth as a property of beliefs that will never disappoint us).

The last section of the article discussed whether truth can be applied to moral discourse; Misak concludes that it can. She writes:

Moral discourse has the requisite basic discipline; it is full of candidates for truth. We aim at getting things right, we distinguish between thinking that one is right and being right, we criticise the beliefs, actions and cognitive skills of others, we think that we can make discoveries and that we can make discoveries and that we can improve our judgments, and we think that it is appropriate, indeed required, that we give reasons and arguments for our beliefs....Such phenomena are marks of objectivity; they are indications that an area of inquiry aims at or aspires to truth.

I think that just about nails it on the head. Certainly one of the advantages of the theory Misak proposes is that it can be extended to moral discourse. After all, it’s on questions of morality that I most want to get things right. As I tried to articulate in class, if I’m mistaken about my scientific beliefs that’s something I can live with; but being wrong about what is morally right or wrong is truly distressing. That’s where the question of truth becomes especially pressing, and an adequate theory of truth needs to recognize this. Misak’s does, and that’s a powerful reason in its favor.

2006-09-04T22:38:00.000-04:00

Truth and the Future

We had the first meeting of my upper level epistemology course today. Among other issues we're taking up theories of truth. So one of the questions I posed was whether a statement about the future can be true at the time it is uttered.

A number of people said no, and I think the reasoning is something like this: a statement can't be true in the absence of the fact that makes it true, and since statements about the future are about events that have not yet happened, it is impossible for these statements to be true until those events come to pass.

That makes a certain amount of sense, but I still disagree: if statements about the future cannot be true, then that means it is impossible to have knowledge about the future (since knowledge requires truth) and that's too much of a sacrifice to make. Any theory that denies we have knowledge of the future, it seems to me, is a reductio ad absurdum.

In addition, and this should come as no great surprise, this line of thinking points in the direction of a pragmatic theory of truth (or so I think). After all, the line of thought described above links truth to specific facts that make a statement true. A pragmatic theory, on the other hand, might say that a statement is true if it would stand up to scrutiny for as long as you please. On the pragmatic theory it's no mystery how statements about the future can be true: to say they are true is just to say that they would stand up to scrutiny. Problem solved.

2006-08-28T23:24:00.000-04:00

Soames on Analytic Philosophy in America

Scott Soames has posted a piece on the history of analytic philosophy in the U.S. (here). There's been some discussion of it on the Leiter blog, as well.

At first I was going to write a critical post, but then I read some of the comments on the Leiter blog and decided not to play that game.

So here's one thing I like a lot about Soames' piece, and a couple of points where he gets things wrong.

First, I appreciate the space he devotes to pragmatism as laying the foundation for analytic philosophy in the U.S. The affinities between pragmatism and analytic philosophy all too often get short shrift.

But, second, my points of disagreement.

1) Soames says that "Peirce had little patience with...grand metaphysical systems." Well, not quite: Peirce wasn't above metaphysical system building of his own (his essay "Evolutionary Love", e.g., is an especially wacky example).

2) Soames passes over James' theory of truth way too fast. Soames leaves us with the impression that James believes that truth = what is beneficial to believe. But that's an over-simplification, as even James realized.

3) Soames also misrepresents Dewey's theory of truth, writing that for Dewey truth = warranted assertibility. There's a lot more to say on this point, but again this over-simplifies matters. Dewey claimed that warranted assertibility served the same function in inquiry that had, traditionally, been assigned to truth. He didn't equate the two.

4) Soames shies away from discussing the political pressures that led to analytic philosophy's dominance in the U.S. This has led to some sharp words on the Leiter blog - but it certainly deserves explanation how philosophy became depoliticized in the U.S.

5) Finally, it's worth emphasizing how pragmatism remains a resource for analytic philosophy. E.g. Quine, Putnam, and Rorty all identify themselves as pragmatists - and you'd have to place those three high on your list of influential American philosophers. Strangely, though, Rorty isn't even mentioned in Soames' piece.

2006-08-15T21:56:00.000-04:00

Evolution and Cognitive Dissonance

There's an interesting article in this week's Science about evolution. The article compares acceptance of evolution across nations (focusing on Europe, the US, and Japan). Sadly, the U.S. comes at the bottom of the list, just above Turkey and just below Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania and Bulgaria.

The article's authors examine a number of reasons for this result. One reason is the U.S.'s unique form of Protestant fundamentalism. In other countries there isn't the same tension between conservative Protestantism and the theory of evolution.

Another reason is that many Americans just don't understand contemporary biology and genetics. And this leads people to hold inconsistent beliefs. E.g., according to this article 78% of U.S. adults will agree with a description of evolution that doesn' use the word "evolution." At the same time 62% of U.S. adults believe that God created humans in their present form, without evolution. Obviously these two beliefs are inconsistent. And that means that a lot of people are in a state of cognitive dissonance when it comes to evolution.

I teach a "Critical Thinking" course pretty regularly, and I always emphasize the importance of getting one's belief-system consistent. It seems simple, but people have inconsistent beliefs all the time: it's just that they are about personal matters that would never register on a survey. It's nice, for that reason, to see such a clear example where people do hold inconsistent beliefs. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

2006-08-06T14:49:00.000-04:00

Richard Hofstadter

Sam Tanenhaus has a review of a new biography of Richard Hofstadter, in the New York Times. Hofstadter is a favorite of mine, for two of his books: Social Darwinism in American Thought and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Not only are they impressive pieces of historical scholarship, but they remain relevant today.

To wit, we might have thought that Social Darwinism petered out in the 1930's but, of course, it didn't. One only has to look at the domestic policies of Ronald Reagan and Bush II to see that Social Darwinism still influences policy makers.

Likewise, Anti-Intellectualism is as much a problem today as when Hofstadter wrote in the early 1930's. While I don't agree entirely with that book (in particular, his treatment of some of the pragmatists), there's no question that Anti-Intellectualism is well entrenched in American culture. Not only is it well-entrenched, it's even glorified and often rewarded. On a practical and political level, we see this whenever politically appointed ideologues reject the expertise of career government employees (at NASA, the CIA, EPA, etc.)

2006-08-03T14:43:00.000-04:00

Democrat/Democratic

This week's New Yorker has an excellent piece by Hendrik Hertzberg. It's about the tendency of many conservatives to refer to the Democratic Party as "the Democrat party".

Now on one level this is just playground tactics: refusing to call your adversary by its real name and instead using a name that is somehow mocking or derogatory. Hertzberg does a nice job of tracing this practice back to the 1920s and through the Cold War period (McCarthy liked to do it). It's interesting, too, to see that William F. Buckley has written against conservatives who substitute "Democrat" for "Democratic".

I'd add one point to what Hertzberg writes. One advantage the Democrats have is that their name means something to most people. Its sort of a truth in advertising issue. If you're a Democrat then you must be in favor of democracy, and everyone knows what that is, right? (Well, not right, I guess, but everyone thinks they know what democracy means, and that's what matters here.)

But what if you're a Republican? How many people, off the top of their heads, can say that being a Republican means being in favor of a republican government and that means a government where supreme power is held by the people and not by a monarch (say)?

The problem for Republicans is that the name of their party doesn't really convey all that much. And it certainly doesn't connect up with what the Republican party is now known for: lower taxes, pro-business, anti-abortion, etc. In fact, some of those commitments are arguably in conflict with republicanism. (Being pro-business may take power from the people and give it to business interests.) Since that's the case, it's easy to see why some Republicans would be anxious to undermine and mock the name of the opposing party.

Two final points.

First, a good case can be made that Democrats are committed to protecting democracy. That's in part what all the fuss in Florida (in 2000) and Ohio (in 2004) was all about.

Second, what would be a better name for the Republican Party? The obvious choice would be the "Conservative Party" (unfortunately there's already a pretty powerful Conservative Party in New York and it's hard to see them giving up their name). But that's problematic, too, since many conservatives, especially small government, libertarian conservatives, would argue that the current Republican party has betrayed the conservative cause as well.

2006-07-26T18:01:00.000-04:00

Philosophers and Fellowships III

Oh, dear. More from the Leiter Report that philosophers aren't getting the fellowships they deserve:

The 2006 winners of American Council of Learned Society Fellowships have been named. Only one philosopher was a winner this year (out of sixty awards): Steven Crowell from Rice University for a project on "Heidegger and the Claims of Reason." A rather large number of historians (I haven't counted them all up) were winners. Two or three philosophers have usually won ACLS Fellowships in recent years.
I'd be interested in hearing from philosophers ... who applied during the 2005-06 cycle and weren't chosen. I'll keep this information confidential, but I may post in a general way about some of the issues that Jason Stanley and I have raised in prior posts ... if it turns out that there is an area bias at work here too.

OK, I've already commented on this topic here and here.

Three points:

1) "If it turns out that there is an area bias at work here too." Too? That's highly debatable. In fact, most of those who commented on earlier postings at the Leiter Report thought that the philosophical profession was at least partly complicit in its own marginalization. See here.

2) What can this sort of informal survey possibly accomplish? First, it depends on rejected applicants reading Brian Leiter's post (maybe they will, maybe not, but that's hardly a reliable way to gather data). Second, to find signs of bias it would be necessary to know the acceptance rate of other disciplines. Without that information, I don't see how it is possible to determine whether the ACLS is being biased or not.

3) What is it with the History bashing? Why single out the number of historians receiving awards? Is that supposed to be self evidently suspicious? (And if so, why? Is it because philosophers are entitled to a certain number of fellowships?) That aside really confuses me (to be charitable).

2006-07-26T15:33:00.000-04:00

Joe Lieberman and the Basis of Morality

A lot has been written recently about Joe Lieberman and his primary opponent, Ned Lamont. Lieberman has been under fire for his support of the Iraq war and for being "Bush's favorite democrat." So he's facing a strong primary challenge and it's not clear that he will win the Democratic nomination for Senate.

Reading all this has reminded me of the 2000 election, when Lieberman was already beginning to annoy me. (Since then Gore's done a lot to redeem himself; Lieberman, not so much.)

In particular, what set me off was Lieberman's linkage of morality with religion. In August 2000, Lieberman quoted George Washington who, he said, warned us "never to indulge the supposition ‘that morality can be maintained without religion.’"

(You can see what Jacob Sullum and Bruce Gottlieb wrote at the time.)

That's poppycock on two levels. First, it's laughably false, since it ignores millennia of work in philosophical ethics. So I take exception to Lieberman pretending as if a non-religious basis for ethics is impossible.

Second, as Sullum pointed out, Lieberman was also distorting Washington's words:

Washington’s actual words were not quite that strong. "Let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion," he said in his 1796 Farewell Address. "Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."

Washington's point was that, with a "refined education" individuals could be both ethical and areligious, but that this was not realistic for an entire nation.

So, two strikes against Lieberman.

What annoyed me in 2000, and still does, is Lieberman's sanctimony. When you get right down to it, what he said was the same as what evangelical Christians say all the time. I can't support an evangelical Christian running for Senate, and for the same reasons I won't support Lieberman.

2006-07-25T11:31:00.000-04:00

Epistemology Course Readings

I've finished the reading list for my fall course on Theories of Knowledge. This is a survey course so it contains the following:

1) A little history
2) A taste of truth theories
3) A glance at Gettier problems
4) A jot of justification theories
5) A soupçon of skepticism
6) A healthy dose of naturalism

This is for a 10 week quarter, so we're riding the express train here.

I like these readings (and I guess I should, having chosen them) because they combine some of the usual suspects with work that deserves to be more widely anthologized but isn't: that is, work that I think is profoundly, importantly right yet falls outside the mainstream for one reason or another.

There's one book on the list: Michael Bishop and J.D. Trout's Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment. I try to assign a recent book every time I teach this course, and this one fits in nicely with the other themes - besides being a great read, packed with interesting observations, and, even better, a book I'm largely in agreement with. I was also thinking about using Miriam Solomon's Social Empiricism, but it doesn't seem to be in paperback and MIT Press seemed to be remaindering the hardback edition - so I wasn't sure if it would be available.

One final gripe. I tried to find an epistemology textbook to use since that would have saved me a lot of time photocopying and uploading articles, and that turned out to be an exercise in frustration. And here's my complaint: there are entire anthologies, 500 pages long, without a single article by a woman. My reading list isn't exactly a model of diversity, either (though there are five women on it, which I think is pretty good in this area), but I can't bring myself to assign a textbook that's just a boy's club.

Well, without further ado, here's the reading list as it currently stands:

9/4 Introductory remarks
9/6 Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy (on line)

9/11 Hume: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (on line)
Goodman: “The New Riddle of Induction” (on line)
9/13 Tarski: “Truth and Proof” (on line)

9/18 Misak: “Deflating Truth: Pragmatism vs. Disquotationalism” (on line)
9/20 Gettier: “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” (on line)
Fogelin: “Pyrrhonian Reflections on Knowledge and Justification” (on line)

9/25 Code: “Taking Subjectivity Into Account” (on line)
9/27 Goldman: “Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge” (on line)

10/2 Price: “The Given” (on line)
Sellars: “Does Empirical Knowledge Have a Foundation?” (on line)
10/4 DeRose: “Contextualism: An Explanation and Defense” (on line)

10/9 Putnam: “Brains in a Vat” (on line)
10/11 Haslanger: “What Knowledge Is and What It Ought to Be” (on line)

10/16 Quine: “Epistemology Naturalized” (on line)
10/18 Rooney: “Putting Naturalized Epistemology to Work” (on line)

10/23 Weinberg et al.: “Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions” (on line)
10/25 Boyd & Trout: Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment, chs. 1-2

10/30 Boyd & Trout: Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment, chs. 3-5
11/1 Elgin: “The Epistemic Efficacy of Stupidity” (online)

11/6 Boyd & Trout: Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment, chs. 6-8
11/8 Boyd & Trout: Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment, chs. 9-10 + Appendix, §1, §3, §11

2006-07-24T15:25:00.000-04:00

Ramin Jahanbegloo and Rorty

3 Quarks Daily has a link to an interview with Ramin Jahanbegloo. Jahanbegloo is an Iranian philosopher (trained at the Sorbonne) who since April has been imprisoned in Tehran for political reasons. The interview, with Danny Postel, is from January and February of this year.

Jahanbegloo brought many American and European philosophers to Tehran and it is interesting to get his take on the kind of philosophy that resonates with young Iranians.

Jahanbegloo describes Richard Rorty's visit to Tehran in June 2004. Rorty argued that human rights don't require any sort of universal, philosophical foundation. This is part-and-parcel of Rorty's general anti-foundationalism and anti-universalism.

Jahanbegloo reponds to Rorty with a distinction between "soft" and "hard" universalism. As he says:

“Soft” universalism applies the universal right to reciprocity in a world of plural values in order to allow people with different values to accept one another.

I see “soft” universalism as the only hope for promoting democracy in non-democratic cultures.

If I understand him correctly (and this sounds vaguely Habermasian to me), Jahanbegloo posits a general, universal framework committed to "reciprocity", which is then the means for debating particular values. Here he doesn't say how this universal framework can be justified. But he does say this:

I think it would be extremely dangerous to have a dialogical exchange among cultures without a structure of shared universal values. In other words, I do not believe in international relations without an international ethics, especially in situations of power, violence and crisis. But going back to Rorty, I believe that his take on the desirability of human rights free of claims to their naturalness is an open-ended debate. But it certainly requires a long process of political and cultural argumentation and persuasion, one which many non-democratic societies, like ours, cannot afford for the time being. (emphasis added)

In short, Jahanbegloo concludes that universal foundations are necessary in situations of "power, violence and crisis" and in many "non-democratic societies."

I'm intrigued by that claim because it is, on its face, so pragmatic: an "international ethics" is justified by its success in dealing with dangerous situations.

This philosophical point is all the more poignant given Jahanbegloo's current imprisonment. How does one protest his imprisonment (which seems entirely trumped up): does one appeal to universal standards of justice, or does one appeal to the sort of pragmatic considerations Rorty (e.g.) favors?

2006-07-22T14:13:00.000-04:00

Complexity, good; inconsistency, bad.

I had one more thought about complexity. I consider myself a contextualist in philosophy, which means taking issues in context, which means trying to do some justice to their complexity rather than artificially simplifying matters. But the danger is that by recognizing complexity one is given a free pass to wallow in uncertainty, and that doesn't get us anywhere, not at all.

[There's also complexity for complexity's sake, of which in my opinion we see all too much. But that's different from recognizing a kind of real-world complexity, which is what I'm talking about here.]

But, again, there's an important difference between complexity and inconsistency. In my earlier post, I suggested that the architect of the Guantanamo force feedings is confusing the two: using the complexity of the situation to justify an inconsistent policy. Of course, he could argue that the policy isn't inconsistent - but I can't imagine anyone defending inconsistency as a good thing.

The reason inconsistency is bad is because it is constitutive of both rationality and justice: being rational means drawing similar conclusions from similar cases, just as being just means treating people fairly. That's an over-simplification, but I think the general idea is right. Inconsistency is just bad, bad, bad.

I can't make such a strong positive case for complexity - there are plenty of circumstances, after all, when simplicity is better - but I do believe that a certain receptiveness to real-world complexity is a sign of maturity, both philosophically and intellectually.

2006-07-22T13:38:00.000-04:00

Moral Complexity

Luke Mitchell has a thought provoking essay in the current (August 2006) issue of Harper's (though I don't believe the essay is posted on the website).

The essay is entitled "God Mode" and refers to a feature in shoot-'em-up video games that allows the player to play on endlessly. Mitchell uses this as a metaphor for current U.S. foreign policy:

We, as a nation, seem to be seeking a technological circumstance that allows the United States not just to dominate but to dominate so absolutely and effortlessly that we need not even think about our enemies, much less fear them.

Mitchell's example is the force-feeding of prisoners in Guantanamo. The force-feedings raise ethical questions: on the one hand, there is a medical responsibility to preserve life; on the other hand, there is a moral imperative to respect the prisoners' autonomy and right to protest their incarceration, in perhaps the only way still left open to them.

Mitchell describes his conversation with Dr. William Winkenwerder, an assistant secretary of defense and "chief architect" of the force-feeding policy. Like other aspects of U.S. foreign policy, the force feedings are pre-emptive: fasting prisoners are force fed in advance of any specific medical problems.

Winkenwerder tells Mitchell that the policy isn't to prevent hunger strikes, but rather to prevent deaths as a result of hunger striking. Mitchell, rightly, I think, sees this as inconsistent, since preventing the deaths means preventing the hunger strikes. But Mitchell also concedes that Winkenwerder is completely sincere, despite the inconsistency, and that his sincerity depends on the inconsistency. It's because the situation is complex that Winkenwerder can sincerely endorse a policy that, on the face of it, is inconsistent.

Winkenwerder never did make clear to me what was so complex about the decision to force a man to eat. Maybe he couldn't. Or maybe he conceived of that complexity as a final form of defense.

I feel for Winkenwerder because he's not pretending that there's a simple black-and-white answer to this problem. (I disagree with Mitchell that force-feeding isn't a complex decision.)

Historically, philosophers have pretended that these issues are black-and-white, so I'm all in favor of recognizing the complexity and ambiguity of real-life moral dilemmas. But Mitchell is right that recognizing the complexity can also be a dodge, a way of shrugging one's shoulders and doing whatever one would have done anyway. And, of course, a kind of ethical relativism is the next logical step (which puts us all in "God mode").

So, while it is important to recognize complexity, to look at the specifics of the case, etc., it's just as important to make sure that this doesn't lead to moral paralysis. Complexity isn't the same as inconsistency, so recognizing the former doesn't entail embracing the latter.

2006-07-19T20:40:00.000-04:00

Learning and Doing

From 3QuarksDaily, this article from Seed Magazine: "How We Know" by Jonah Lehrer. It begins by describing the Algebra Project and its founder, Bob Moses:

Instead of confronting students with abstract equations, Moses took them out into the real world, traveling around Boston in search of experiences that could demonstrate the practical uses of math. A ride on the T became a lesson in coordinate graphing and negative numbers. Neighborhood landmarks stood in for integers. When Moses taught students about displacement, he had them measure the dimensions of their own bodies. The first rule of Moses' math class was that students always had to "participate in a physical event."

In short, students were learning math by doing things. Math wasn't an abstract topic but rather a way of solving real life problems:

By taking his students outside the classroom, Moses made math a part of everyday life: He realized that the brain wasn't designed to deal with abstractions it doesn't know how to use, or to solve variables while sitting at a desk. Our knowledge, Moses intuited, is a by-product of activity. What we end up knowing is what we can learn how to use. We learn by doing.

Moreover, this is supported by brain science:

The human mind understands the world by interacting with it. When we see an inanimate object that we are familiar with, our mirror neurons instinctively imagine what they could do with that object. A tennis racquet causes our cells to imagine swinging it; a violin causes our cells to imagine playing it. If you happen to be taught algebra by Bob Moses, a math equation might trigger thoughts of taking the subway.

What does this have to do with American philosophy? Well, a lot. The connection between learning and doing was championed by John Dewey over a century ago.

[Dewey's] mission was to "reinstate experience into education"; as a result, Laboratory students spent most of their day outside the classroom, engaging in activities such as sewing, carpentry and cooking. But these activities weren't simply exercises in manual labor. Rather, they were demonstrations of "active learning."

But sadly a scientifically supported, Deweyan educational philosophy runs afoul of standardized testing:

Dewey's insights are needed now more than ever. His curriculum, by collapsing what he called "the invidious distinction between learning and doing," took full advantage of our mirror neuron circuit. Unfortunately, in the age of standardized testing, US schools have given up on Dewey's experiential approach—and the difficulties faced by the Algebra Project exemplify this trend. Even in districts where the curriculum has been an unambiguous success, it has fallen victim to standardized testing. Not long after the Cambridge public schools reported two-fold increases in advanced math enrollment among Algebra Project graduates, the project was quietly shut down. "It's really a tragedy," says Lynne Godfrey, who is still a math teacher in Cambridge."

The rest of the article is well worth reading. One of Lehrer's examples is Toyota, which appears to have incorporated Dewey's insights into its manufacturing plants. This, Lehrer suggests, goes a long way to explaining why Toyota is making record profits while companies like Ford and GM are closing plants.

2006-07-18T22:15:00.000-04:00

Rorty on The Moral Purposes of Universities

Richard Rorty has written a number of thought-provoking essays about American universities. One of my favorites is "Education as Socialization and as Individualization," published in Philosophy and Social Hope.

I've recently come across another essay - and was it ever hard to get! I ordered it through Inter-Library Loan, and they're normally super fast, but this took 3 months to receive. Anyway, it's an article entitled "The Moral Purposes of the University" published in The Hedgehog Review (Fall 2000, pp, 106-119).

Rorty begins by arguing that very few religious communities qualify as "constructive subtraditions" in American society (apologies that these selections begin and end in mid-sentence):

Instead, it is universities that function as "the conscience of the nation":

So what's a professor to do?

That sound like a pretty modest proposal - but in Rorty's defense it may well be more than what many academics presently do. There are lots of important points in this essay.

2006-07-17T12:13:00.000-04:00

APA Representation

One final thought while it's on my mind: the matter of representation on APA nominating committees. Now, normally, the candidates for the nominating committee teach at Ph.D granting institutions (or at top-flight Northeastern liberal arts colleges). And I'd guess that it is one's stature as a member of a Ph.D granting institution that gets one elected to the nominating committee (at least in part).

But here's the problem. Without begrudging the service that the nominating committee provides, it's obvious that its membership doesn't accurately reflect the profession as a whole: e.g., those of us who teach primarily undergraduates, who teach at less than flag-ship institutions, whose responsibilities are primarily teaching, not research, who don't have TAs, etc.

When I look at the thumbnail CVs of the candidates for APA posts (helpfully provided with the ballots), it's clear that few, if any, have any experience teaching at the sort of institutions where most of the rest of us teach. And then I wonder how well their concerns match those of the rank and file.

And that's one reason I have serious doubts about the APA's ability to represent academic philosophers.

My solution? I'd like to see at least one slot reserved for philosophers teaching at non-Ph.D granting institutions, or at an institution that, say, falls within the appropriate Carnegie Foundation classification.

2006-07-17T11:53:00.000-04:00

Misidentification

Several year ago I remember reading about how Americans tend to identify with higher socio-economic classes. A recent example of this is the brouhaha over the estate tax (aka the "death tax"). Lots of people oppose the estate tax even though it only affects a really small number of people. So one explanation is that people oppose the estate tax because they subconsciously identify with the wealthy, maybe thinking "yeah, someday that could be me."

I think something similar happens in academia. People get riled up about issues that really only affect a small number of academics teaching at high-profile institutions. That's part of what is going on with the whole question of "are philosophers winning their share of MacArthur prizes?" Again, that's not the real question: the real question is why anyone (other than a potential candidate) should care.

2006-07-16T14:05:00.000-04:00

Philosophers Outside Philosophy Departments

Continuing on the topic of MacArthur "Genius" awards: this list shows winners by category. There are a few philosophers who've won in related areas - as Sharon Crasnow points out, Nancy Cartwright under "History and Philosophy of Science" (also Evelyn Fox Keller, in the same category).

Lisa Shapiro made a similar point: that if we look at a range of categories, philosophers do quite well. Here's how Jason Stanley responded:

It is also the case that a substantial minority of those listed under philosophy are not people who philosophers would classify as fellow philosophers. I assume a similar situation is true of other disciplines. So a few philosophers occur under other categories, and a few of the people who appear under 'philosophy' aren't philosophers. (Link here, then scroll down.)

Here's the list of MacArthur winners for "Philosophy": Cavell, Patricia Churchland, Kolakowski, Rorty, Scanlon, Shklar. Now I'm wondering which of these don't count as "philosophers." It's one thing to be blasé about their work, but who in their right mind could deny that each of these is a philosopher?

Likewise, who are these "philosophers" who are entitled to pass judgment on who is and is not a "fellow philosopher"? Are we talking about the rank-and-file here? (I don't think so.) Or are we talking about some smug, entitled subset of the profession? (More likely.)

To sum up: 1) I don't see the point in complaining about philosophers not winning MacArthurs when the philosophers who do are dismissed as not being real philosophers. 2) I'm still not sure why anyone should care.

But here's a related topic. Consider the number of philosophers who aren't associated with philosophy departments (or who aren't primarily associated with philosophy departments): Rorty, of course, but also Martha Nussbaum, Peter Singer, Judith Butler. I think I'm right about those four, and there are others I've no doubt missed. (Again, the only reason for denying that they are philosophers is if being a philosopher means being associated primarily with a philosophy department - which would be absurd.)

So this raises the question: why are some of the most prominent contemporary philosophers not in philosophy departments? And how much of this is due to attitudes like the one above?

2006-07-15T14:31:00.000-04:00

Fellowships for Philosophers

There's been a discussion lately on the Leiter Report blog about the small number of philosophers receiving prestigious awards (MacArthur, Guggenheim, etc.). I commented on this post. My argument is that it has as much (or more) to do with dysfunction within the philosophical profession as it has to do with animus directed toward philosophers by others.

Now, some seem to believe that those philosophers who do win MacArthurs, etc., aren't really philosophers or aren't working in the core areas of philosophy. That is, they're either Rorty or Patricia Churchland, or they do applied or cross-disciplinary work, which isn't as valuable as the real stuff namely metaphysics, epistemology, and logic. I think that line of thinking is rubbish and further indicates the dysfunction in our discipline.

There's a lot more to say about this, but one quick question: why should I care whether philosophers are winning MacArthurs? I'm not going to win a MacArthur, and I've learned to live with that, and so I'm sure philosophers at Harvard, Princeton, NYU, etc., can learn to live with it too. I mean, I'm sorry if you don't win the MacArthur, but if you teach at Harvard (or wherever) it's difficult to feel too sorry.

I suppose the response is that it's good for the profession (and for me) if philosophers are winning awards, and so I should care for that reason. But philosophers are winning the awards - they just happen to be philosophers like Rorty and Churchland and people who do applied or cross-disciplinary work. So, really, the gripe is that the winners aren't the right kind of philosophers: i.e., they're not analytic epistemologists, metaphysicians, and logicians. But then I really fail to see how having more analytic epistemologists winning awards would help the profession (and I speak as an analytic epistemologist). Rather, it's precisely people like Rorty, and Churchland, and Peter Singer who've done a great job of raising the profession's profile - and good for them: if they win awards, I have no problem with that.

So I still don't see why I should care if (certain kinds of) philosophers aren't winning the big prizes.

2006-07-14T14:51:00.000-04:00

Lachs on Philosophers Committing Disciplinary Suicide

I'd heard this story before, but it took a mention by Jason (on the Leiter blog) for me to track it down. It comes from a longer letter by John Lachs, printed in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association.

The contempt philosophers feel for colleagues who do not share their values and techniques is nothing short of bizarre and has served to undermine the honor and integrity of the discipline. In serving on National Endowment for the Humanities committees, I noted that members of the panel from English and history and anthropology tended to support applicants from their fields. Philosophers, by contrast, couldn’t wait to light into their colleagues; they tore research proposals apart, presenting their authors as fools or as championing out-of-date, inferior ideas and methods. As a result, scholars from other fields garnered much of the money that would, under normal circumstances, have gone to philosophy. These gatekeepers to our profession thought their actions were justified by the imperative to maintain high standards; in fact, they often undertook to judge work they did not understand, and condemned styles of thought and topics of investigation simply because they had no sympathy with them.

The rest of the letter is worth reading (here).

I was glad, too, to see that it was a distinguished scholar of American Philosophy who made this point.

2006-07-14T11:39:00.000-04:00

Rooney on Naturalized Epistemology

Phyllis Rooney in "Putting Naturalized Epistemology to Work" (in Epistemology: The Big Questions, ed. Alcoff):

Naturalist epistemologists are committed to a particular way of doing epistemology without in many cases actually doing it. An examination of most papers on naturalized epistemology reveals bibliographies with references mainly or exclusively to other philosophers published in philosophy journals and anthologies. In effect, these epistemologists are agreed that one ought to do epistemology in a certain way even if they are not actually doing it. (285)

That seems right to me - though there some hopeful signs. Maybe experimental philosophy is one of these though I think the jury is still out.

2006-07-12T13:41:00.000-04:00

Vision's Veritas

Still on the topic of truth - whether jokes can be truly funny, for example - I've been looking at Gerald Vision's Veritas.

It's a defense of the correspondence theory: roughly, that the truth of a proposition is the result of the world being the way the proposition says it is. (Vision is cagey at the beginning about avoiding problematic, difficult to define, concepts like "facts.")

I don't know what it is about the correspondence theory, but I have a hard time accepting it. Maybe it's just not sexy enough: deflationary theories certainly win on that score. Or maybe it's because I'm too much of a pragmatist to be able to accept the correspondence theory, which carries a lot of metaphysical baggage. Or maybe it's that something so obvious (on the face of it) just can't be right.

Vision mentions two platitudes that get his account of truth going: one is that the truth of propositions must vary with the world (if the world changes so does the truth); the second is that truth is "cognition independent" - i.e., that there may be truths that transcend recognition.

Back on the theme of pragmatism, Vision has a handy taxonomy that shows how the different theories of truth are related to each other (11). I have some quibbles with how he places pragmatism, but I was mostly peeved that it shows "Pierce" (not "Peirce") as a pragmatist. I get really tired of seeing that mistake. I don't think it is Vision's mistake (MIT Press is notorious for poor typesetting) but it still galls me. Of course, "Hempel" is also misspelled, even more egregiously: with an epsilon in place of the first "e".

2006-07-11T10:51:00.000-04:00

Jokes and Truth

Lately I've been thinking about the relation between jokes and "critical thinking." There's a natural connection since jokes often depend on the same failures of rationality that we try to teach in critical thinking classes. Plus, I think this would be a fun way of discussing the material. I'd like to see a short book come out of this - maybe a companion that could be assigned in critical thinking classes.

As I think about this there are so many connections and interesting issues that come up once one starts thinking about jokes. For example, when is a joke really funny? And is it right to even talk about a joke being truly funny? This gets into issues having to do with truth-conditions, and whether there are conditions that allow us to say "That joke was truly funny."

I'm willing to bet, based on experience, that 95-100% of my students would say that whether a joke is funny is merely "subjective", a matter of "opinion", etc. That's what a lot of people think, anyway. But I'm not so sure. Of course a lot depends on how you understand truth, but I don't see much of a difference between humor and other areas where we have no hesitation saying that something is "truly" one way or another.

Let's face it: some jokes just aren't funny. And other jokes are really, really funny. Moreover, if someone doesn't get a joke, doesn't find it funny, that doesn't mean there's no truth there: it's just as likely, I think (at least in some situations) that they just don't have a sense of humor. Just like if I met someone who didn't think that lying was wrong. That doesn't mean that there's no truth here; rather it means that they have some lack, some deficiency.

Jokes, I'd like to think, shed some good light here. Today, it doesn't matter much to me if someone doesn't share my general aesthetic taste. I don't care, much, if someone doesn't have my taste in music or art or architecture. But jokes are different. While I can brush off someone's different taste in music, if I tell a joke and someone doesn't get it, then that bothers me. That this bothers me is a piece of raw data that needs to be explained, and this can be the entering wedge in considering whether the language of truth extends farther than many people think.

What's the connection with critical thinking? This: critical thinking is about examining the reasons one has for believing that something is true. If we expand the range of what can be true - to include whether a joke is funny, say, but also issues in ethics, politics, aesthetics, etc. - then we can see how it is possible and worthwhile to hold a lot of things up for scrutiny. And this means that we are entitled to argue, debate, and discuss a wider range of topics than we normally do.

As Socrates said, "the unexamined life is not worth living" so by expanding the circle of true statements we are able to examine more of our life. Ironically, since Plato seemed to have a low opinion of laughter (Cohen refers to some passages in The Republic), jokes seem one way of encouraging this examination.

2006-07-09T22:58:00.000-04:00

More on Ted Cohen: Jokes

Cohen argues that a major function of some jokes is the acceptance of absurdity. In fact, he says this is a major part of Jewish jokes and hence a large part of American jokes.

For example (the actual joke is much too long): a NY cabbie who is finally convinced to drive a fare to Chicago, through PA, OH, IN, IL, Lake Shore Drive, etc., two days and one night. So he drops the fare off at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago and two women get in his cab and ask to be taken to Flatbush Ave. "Sorry, I don't drive to Brooklyn," he says.
(48)

Cohen writes:

Those of us who laugh at these jokes are all laughing at the same kind of thing. It is something not fully comprehensible, and our laughter is an acceptance of the thing in its incomprehensibility. It is the acceptance of the world, of a world that is endlessly incomprehensible, always baffling, a world that is beyond us and yet our world. (60)

That seems to much to me. Perhaps some jokes are like this (and Cohen has many other examples). But just as often, and I think this is the really important point, we tell jokes not because we accept absurdity but because we criticize it. That's the case with the cabbie joke, above. We tell a joke to point out that something is absurd and hence wrong.

Two further points. First, this aspect of joke telling butts up against another, less appealing type of joke: ethnic jokes, e.g. Ethnic jokes often make fun of a person because of their ethnicity (not always, but often). Likewise, the type of joke I'm interested in makes fun of a person for not thinking straight.

Second, it isn't always failures of rationality that are the butt of jokes. Sometimes it is hyper-rationality that comes in for criticism. And how better to criticize hyper-rationality than with a joke? (After all, can you argue with the hyper-rational?)

2006-07-07T12:57:00.000-04:00

Philosophy of Science Association - Is this any way to run an organization?

The Philosophy of Science Association meets every two years and is the main professional organization for philosophers of science. I'm not a member but I know people who are, and the more I hear about the Association the angrier I get.

The biennial meeting is taking place this fall and the submission and review process for papers has been a complete travesty:

1) People who submitted workshop and symposium proposals (which were due eleven months before the conference) were not given a decision by the promised date. But even when the promised date had passed, there was no communication with people who'd submitted proposals.

2) As a result, the program committee had to extend the deadline for contributed papers. They had to do this to give people time to revise rejected workshop and symposium proposals into contributed paper format.

3) The program committee promised to make a decision on contributed papers by "mid June". They blew that deadline, too, again without informing anyone what was up. You'd think that common courtesy would dictate an e-mail saying "we're going to miss our deadline, please bear with us."

4) After all, how hard is it to send an e-mail? (Well, harder than you might imagine: see below.)

5) Part of what galls me is that the requirements for submission are pretty strict. If you're late sending in your paper, tough luck. So if the organizers are holding people to a high standard, then they should hold themselves to a similar standard.

6) So, finally, as we enter the second week of July, an e-mail goes out informing people that their papers haven't been accepted. The e-mail goes out to about 160 people, and the list isn't suppressed! You can look at this list and see exactly whose paper got rejected.

7) That's bad because it is a breach of confidentiality: no one agreed to have their rejection letter made public. But it's also bad because a lot of people need acceptances for the job-market and for tenure and promotion, and the public nature of this rejection amounts to a kind of "bad press." There are lots of people in this profession who don't have secure positions, and the last thing they need is bad press and the possible shame that goes with it. Thanks, PSA.

8) 30 minutes after the mass rejection e-mail there's a follow-up from the "assistant" (a TA? an undergrad? the neighbor's kid?) who forgot to suppress the list of recipients. But why should the assistant apologize? Was it really her fault? Why was she put in the position of handling these communications? Why didn't the co-chair of the program committee (whose e-mail account was used) apologize for foisting this off on someone else? After all, that's where the real responsibility lies. The co-chair should apologize for not caring enough to send the e-mail herself.

9) Again, how difficult is it to use e-mail? Was the co-chair so busy that she couldn't press "send" and had her assistant do it instead?

10) All of this just stinks of laziness and disorganization. If there's an alternate explanation I'd love to hear it.

11) Finally, looking over the list of rejected people, I immediately thought: "you know, they would make a great conference." The PSA only meets every other year. I think it's time for an alternative that could meet during the PSA's off years. There's obviously a lot of good work out there, and I'd have no confidence that PSA is able to function as a fair judge of quality.

12) And last of all, this is just one more example of professional philosophers being their own worst enemies. What possible good does it do the profession when a major organization is so incompetent? And, again, it isn't just the organization that suffers, but everyone whose career depends on the organization and its meetings.

2006-07-06T21:42:00.001-04:00

Ted Cohen: Jokes

After reading Critchley's On Humour, I've turned to Ted Cohen's Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters. My interest here is in the relationship between jokes and "critical thinking" - or how jokes shed light on rationality and common sense.

First of all, Cohen's jokes are better than Critchley's, and there are lots of them. Even the groaners ("What's big and gray and wrote gloomy poetry? T.S. Elephant.") are there for a reason. And Cohen doesn't shy away from telling jokes that can be admittedly offensive - again, if there is a good reason for doing so.

Second, Cohen's approach is refreshingly non-theoretical. He writes:

Only a fool, or one of those who believe in "theories," would presume to say, in general, what the purpose of joking is....I will attempt nothing global or universal; there will be no comprehensive theory of jokes or their purpose, not only because I have no such theory but also because I believe there could be no such theory. (9, 10)

This seems broadly Wittgensteinian to me - and also exactly right. It's a fine expression of philosophical modesty, and honesty.

Third, Cohen's avoidance of big "theory" doesn't prevent him from making many important observations. In his second chapter he observes how jokes are "conditional" on a shared background of knowledge. If someone doesn't get a joke, then it's probably because they don't have the same background knowledge that people who do get the joke have.

This, according to Cohen, explains why we're bothered when someone doesn't get our jokes. The reason is that jokes provide reassurance that we are like each other, and that we have similar values and interests and find the same things funny. Cohen points out that we worry more about whether someone finds our jokes funny than whether we are the victims of an evil demon - a problem with a long and respectable philosophical tradition (32).

Here's what I would add to this. So jokes are often a way of reinforcing social bonds, of strengthening community. Sometimes they do this by ridiculing outsiders - Poles, Jews, the Irish, etc. But sometimes they reinforce norms of rationality too: a joke that brings an absurdity to light strengthens a kind of cognitive (as opposed to ethnic) community.

Sometimes, when we tell a joke it's to make sure that what seems rational to us seems rational to others: e.g., "here's a story I think is crazy and I hope you will agree."

Here's an example, from Cohen:

A turtle was mugged and robbed by a gang of snails. When the police asked for a description of the villains, the turtle replied, "I'm sorry, but I just don't remember. It all happened so fast." (39)

What makes this funny? I think it's that the turtle uses a cliché ("It all happened so fast") even though, of course, being robbed by snails isn't fast at all. In fact, what the joke reveals is that this is a cliché, even though it might be the sort of thing we can easily imagine saying, in some circumstances. So, at the risk of absolutely killing this joke, I'd say that it is really akin to saying "Gosh, isn't it sometimes absurd when someone says 'it all happened so fast'? What does that mean? Isn't that sometimes just an excuse for failing to pay attention?"

In other words, this joke is actually making a point - and if someone laughs at the joke, then that signals agreement with the underlying point: that sometimes it's irrational or meaningless or clichéd to say "it all happened so fast."

Of course that's not all that makes the joke funny (part of it is just the absurdity of the premise) but I do think that the humor of this joke is at least partly a function of (what we hope) is a shared background of rationality.

2006-07-03T22:45:00.000-04:00

More on Critchley

Despite my earlier comments on Simon Critchley's On Humour - namely that it isn't very funny and that it over-theorizes its subject - he does make some very nice points. One is his highlighting of a particular type of humor:

...a more secular, democratic use of wit and humour as that which can encourage the use of reason and guide the sociability of sensus communis. (83)

That's an important point about humor and joking: that being able to tell a joke presupposes a shared social background, and that humor can actually foster a deeper sense of shared sociability.

But I'm still bothered that Critchley's conception of humor is so different from mine. A couple more examples:

1) Near the end of the book Critchley gives some anecdotes. One tells of Levinas turning down a second cup of tea because he is, he says, a "mono-thé-iste." The other ("the great Tommy Cooper gag") goes "So I got home, and the phone was ringing. I picked it up and said 'Who's speaking please?' And a voice said 'You are.'" (107)

Critchley then says "Such anecdotes, it is true, make us laugh out loud." Really ?! They are mildly amusing, sure, but laugh out loud? This convinces me that my sense of humor and Critchley's are wildly different.

2) The book ends on a real downer: "Melancholy creatures that we are, human beings are also the most cheerful. We smile and find ourselves ridiculous. Our wretchedness is our greatness." (111)

That's the last sentence of the book. (Which I might remind you, is called On Humour.) I don't deny Critchley his right to find the coal-black lining in humor, but again this seems to miss the joy, the fun, the hilarity of good humor. And so, once again, I'm struck by how different my sense of humor, or sense of what's funny, is from Critchley's. There's something odd going on here when intuitions about humor are so wildly divergent, and it makes me seriously doubt Critchley's conclusions.

2006-07-02T19:33:00.000-04:00

Simon Critchley on Humor

Lately I've been reading Simon Critchley's book On Humour. The reason is that I'm interested in the relation between jokes and rationality - and how jokes can shed light on what we call "critical thinking."

Critchley's book is pretty interesting - but it isn't very funny. Why is that? For one thing, I think there's a general tendency to treat humor itself very seriously. Second, there's a tendency among philosophers to over-theorize and that's what I think is going on here. So, while he makes some interesting points, they don't always correspond to what I think of as humor. In fact, many of his examples are only marginally humorous. Almost none are out-and-out funny; many are witty, or clever, or droll but, again, I don't think many of his examples (often drawn from Swift, or classical sources) are good examples of humor.

Plus, there are a couple of places where I think he is just mistaken. For example, he writes:

In my view, true humour does not wound a specific victim and always contains self-mockery. (14)

That's just not right. A few weeks ago a video made the rounds of Stephen Colbert interviewing Lynn Westmoreland, a congressman from Georgia. Westmoreland has sponsored a bill to post the Ten Commandments in court houses, and he was passionate about the cultural and moral importance of doing so. So Colbert asked him to name the Ten Commandments - and Westmoreland could only name three. Very funny! But this certainly had a specific victim - Westmoreland - since it made him look like a total fool. And I think it's very debatable whether there was any self-mockery in Colbert's interview. So, I disagree with Critchley's idea of "true" humor.

Here's another quote:

As the example from Beckett indicates, when the laughter dies away, we sense, with a sadness...that is always the dark heart of humour, what an oddity the human being is in the universe. (50)

Well, maybe, sometimes. There's nothing wrong with mentioning this "dark heart of humour" but I don't think it is right to say that this is always the case. Many jokes are just that: funny, but it over-intellectualizes matters to think that they say anything about our place in the universe. Of course, if you use Beckett to illustrate humor, that's exactly the sort of conclusion you'll reach - and that's why Beckett isn't the first person to come to mind when one thinks about humor.

The root problem, here, is that Critchley is treating certain examples as paradigms of humor when they really aren't. Becaue he uses these as paradigms he's able to suggest big philosophical conclusions. But that making too big a deal both of these examples (which aren't really all that funny) and of what philosophy can contribute to an understanding of humor.

To link up with an earlier post, Critchley seems to be approaching humor as a big problem that needs to be addressed by using heavy-duty philosophical machinery. But as Wittgenstein points out, often the best solution is to see how these apparent problems are actually caused by too much philosophizing.

2006-06-30T14:13:00.000-04:00

Horwich on Wittgenstein's Meta-philosophy

Here's an interesting quote from Horwich's "Wittgenstein's Meta-Philosophical Development":

The right reaction to our puzzlement is to expose and eliminate the mistakes that provoke it—that is, to recognize how the questions derive from the exaggeration of linguistic analogies, how the puzzlement they induce is uncalled-for, and how the theories designed to dispel that puzzlement are irrational. Once this has been doen we will be left with no new knowledge...but merely with a strengthened resistance to philosophical confusion. (166)

That's a really nice way of expressing the difference between solving a problem and dissolving a problem.

2006-06-29T21:54:00.000-04:00

Katherine Harris

Katherine Harris is telling people that Democratic members of congress from Florida are supporting her. Of course, that seems wildly absurd. Furthermore, according to the Orlando Sentinel, the 7 Democratic members of congress from Florida deny this. But Harris has said weird things before:

The incident is another in a list of curious episodes regarding Harris.

In the past, she has claimed the media doctored photos of her, described a nonexistent plot to blow up a power grid in Indiana and urged Florida scientists to treat citrus canker with a solution that turned out to be water.

More recently she has endured an exodus of staff members and has been linked to a defense contractor who pleaded guilty to bribing a former California congressman.

The contractor, Mitchell Wade, also pleaded guilty to giving Harris $32,000 in illegal campaign contributions in 2004.

Harris has said she did not know the contributions violated the law, and she has not been charged with any crimes. She has since donated the money to charity.

What's amazing (or maybe not) is how Harris seems to have no hesitation bending the truth whenever she wants. But it isn't just that: she doesn't just lie, she tells whoppers. Most of us would be embarrassed to tell such stories, or to be caught (as she has been, repeatedly). But that doesn't stop her.

Of course, on second thought, that's not so surprising. Harris' entire political career is based on a lie: namely, that Bush beat Gore in Florida in 2000. She, better than anyone, knows that a lie repeated often enough has the force of truth, and it doesn't really matter how outlandish the lie is. So she's just following in the footsteps of those who went before.

2006-06-28T20:44:00.000-04:00

Davidson on Truth (again)

In Truth and Predication Davidson has many interesting things to say about the concept of truth. But I can't help but think that he's missed the forest for the trees.

Davidson writes:

A T-sentence says of a particular speaker that, every time he utters a given sentence, the utterance will be true if and only if certain conditions are satisfied. T-sentences thus have the form and function of natural laws; they are universally quantified bi-conditionals, and as such are understood to apply counterfactually and to be confirmed by their instances. Thus, a theory of truth is a theory for describing, explaining, understanding, and predicting a basic aspect of verbal behavior. (54)

I like that passage quite a lot: particularly the (daring, I think) idea that T-sentences are like natural laws.

But the rest of the chapter doesn't quite live up to this passage. For the rest of the chapter, for some 20 pages, Davidson shows how the concept of truth is useful in situations of radical interpretation. But much of that discussion has the feeling of a just-so story. For example:

The interpreter, on noticing that the agent regularly accepts or rejects the sentence 'The coffee is ready' when the coffee is or is not ready, will (however tentatively pending related results) try for a theory of truth that says that an utterance by an agent of the sentence 'The coffee is ready' is true if and only if the coffee can be observed by the agent to be ready at the time of the utterance. (63)

Well, yes, I guess so. But that scenario is so contrived, so wildly different from how languages are actually learned, from how truth really comes in useful, that it distorts what is really most important about the concept of truth: namely, that true beliefs are beliefs that work. Now, one way they work is, undoubtedly, that they allow for communication and understanding - and I think this is what Davidson is getting at. But I don't think that is the most important aspect of truth's working, and I think it distracts from the broader usefulness of true beliefs.

Telling these sorts of genetic stories about the origin of the usefulness of truth seems to commit something like a philosopher's fallacy. Philosophers might be most interested in how truth and truth theories are connected with broader issues of inter-translatability, etc. But that's just a conceit, and it misses how truth is grounded in much more mundane and realistic sorts of interactions with the world, and with each other.

In short, we don't need the concept of truth for the narrow reason that it (somehow) assists us in imputing the belief "the coffee is ready" to someone whose language we are trying to learn. Rather, the concept of truth has much more obvious value in assisting us when we are communicating with someone whose language we already share. For example, when someone we think we know well does something surprising or apparently bizarre: "Why did Jones do X? Because he thought Y was true." That's when the concept of truth comes in useful, not in the scenarios Davidson describes.

2006-06-27T22:19:00.000-04:00

More Rush Rhees

A few more anecdotes and quotes from Rush Rhees' Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse.

Rhees on Wittgenstein:

...the difficulties of philosophy were difficulties of will, not of intellect;—and what is closely connected with that—that philosophy is difficult not because it deals with abstruse and unfamiliar subjects, but because it deals with things that are so familiar that we hardly notice them. (260)

Rhees applying for a lectureship in 1945:

I have published nothing and I have not written anything that might be published. It is not likely that I ever shall. I have had opportunity enough. (272)

Phillips on Rhees' refusal to accept promotions (after receiving his first permanent position at Swansea):

When J.R. Jones was to come as professor in 1953, Heath [basically the chair of the department] persuaded Rhees to accept a senior lectureship to assist the new man. During his first year as professor, Rhees asked Jones, casually, whether he had settled in well. On being told that he had, Rhees promptly relinquished the senior lectureship before the date of its commencement. (272)

Phillips on editing Rhees' work:

Having edited Without Answers, I found, to my amazement, that Rhees had instructed Routledge to pay all the royalties to me. Naturally, I refused to go along with this arrangement. The publishers were confronted by refusals from an author and an editor
to accept money. I then suggested to Rhees that he might want to establish prizes for students with the royalties. He was delighted with the suggestion, saying it would never have occurred to him. (274)

Finally, I can't help but wonder what it was like being an American who went to school, worked, and taught in Great Britain. I can't think of many others who've made that move.

2006-06-27T15:29:00.000-04:00

Rush Rhees

Blackwell has recently published the second edition of Rush Rhees' Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse. Glancing at it today I was struck by the biographical chapters: one, Rhees' on Wittgenstein; the second, D.Z. Phillips' biographical sketch of Rhees himself.

Rhees had a Rochester connection: his father (also Rush Rhees) was President of the University of Rochester. In his biographical sketch, Phillips describes the young Rush Rhees' decision to leave the University of Rochester after two years to study in Edinburgh. (Rhees had gotten himself banned from a philosophy professor's class for being too argumentative. The spat made the front page of the New York Times.)

The main library at the University of Rochester is named after the elder Rush Rhees. It dominates the campus and is one of the most recognizable features of the Rochester skyline.

It's interesting, finally, to read about Rhees' difficulty finding a permanent position. His situation is not unlike Alfred Tarski, who was also in his early 40s before having a permanent appointment. But while Tarski was the victim of anti-semitism, Rhees seemed to have been overly modest, and perhaps pathologically insecure, about his abilities. Or maybe he was more interested in teaching than in publication. In any case, it wasn't until 1946 (age 41) that he landed at Swansea, and he never took a promotion during the 20 years he subsequently taught there. Strikingly, Rhees seems to have worked in factories and as a welder in between some of his temporary appointments. I'm sure this endeared him to Wittgenstein.

2006-06-23T20:00:00.000-04:00

Gutman on Science and Religion

From The Chronicle:

Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania, warned today of the perils of extremist rhetoric, a topic on which she is writing a book. In a speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington, Ms. Gutmann said extremist rhetoric now saturates public discourse and is undermining democracy.

Ms. Gutmann cited the debate over intelligent design as an example of how such rhetoric spawns equally inept counter-rhetoric. She dubbed the view that all human understanding derives from scientific inquiry as “scientism,” which she said “treats religion with contempt just as creationism treats evolution as beyond the pale of reasonable understanding.”

It's that last comment that I disagree with. Now I'm not exactly sure what Gutmann means by "scientism" but if it's anything like what Dewey had in mind (and Dewey would argue that knowledge does derive from scientific inquiry, broadly construed) then she's just wrong.

Her saying this is too "balanced" and minimizes the real differences between intelligent design creationism (IDC) and science. IDC is intellectually bankrupt and dishonest and it isn't contempt to say so. That's not anti-religion, though it is anti-a-certain-kind-of-religiosity.

Gutmann's comment isn't constructive. It conflates defenders of science with hard core creationists. That undermines the merits of the former and the weaknesses of the latter. Furthermore, it sends a message (and for god's sake, she's a university president) that all these positions are the same. And that just isn't true.

Perhaps Gutmann is being misquoted, or there's more to her position than described in the Chronicle article. But as it stands her remarks don't help.

2006-06-22T15:28:00.000-04:00

Davidson on Tarski

From Truth and Predication:

"My own view is that Tarski has told us much of what we want to know about the concept of truth, and that there must be more." (27)

"What is missing is the connection with users of language. Nothing would count as a sentence, and the concept of truth would have no application, if there were not creatures who used sentences by uttering or inscribing tokens of them." (36)

That seems right to me. I'm interested in this because it can point in the direction of a pragmatic theory of truth. Pragmatic theories have received a bad rap so it's always nice to see someone make pragmatic sounding noises when it comes to truth.

2006-06-20T16:06:00.000-04:00

Davidson on Dewey on Truth

I've started reading Davidson's Truth and Predication. It's a new book but old material: the first several chapters are Davidson's Dewey lectures from 1989.

The book starts out very promising, with a quick discussion of Dewey on truth. Dewey's theory of truth is rarely discussed (perhaps because he avoided the term in his 1938 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry). So it's good to see Davidson discussing Dewey on truth.

Davidson writes:

John Dewey drew two conclusions [re: truth]: that access to truth could not be a special prerogative of philosophy, and that truth must have essential connections with human interests. (7)

The second point is important: it's often overlooked, I think, that the concept of truth must have some use. That's a pragmatic point. But often the usefulness of the concept of truth is so refined that it isn't very useful at all: consider redundancy theories or Quine's notion of "semantic ascent." Sure, truth has a use: but not much of one.

It's to the pragmatists' credit that they always kept the general usefulness of the concept of truth front and center. And that makes a lot of sense: rather than focus on the usefulness of truth in a logical or semantic sense, they asked how our everyday lives would be different without this concept. Of course there's no reason why one can't be interested in both the logical usefulness of truth and its everyday usefulness - the problem is when the former is emphasized at the expense of the the latter. That gets things exactly backwards.

One other quibble with Davidson: while it's great that he quotes Dewey, he could have found better quotes. "Propositions, Warranted Assertibility, and Truth", for example, is an important part of Dewey's work on truth and deserves greater attention.

2006-06-18T23:09:00.000-04:00

An Inconvenient Truth

This movie is an absolute must see for all the obvious reasons. No need to go into those.

But one thing about the movie does stand out: it's a PowerPoint presentation. Now, normally, I deplore such things. As Edward Tufte has pointed out, PowerPoint (PP) encourages sloppy thinking and lazy presentation. And 99.99% of the time that's true. But not here. For once, here's an example of a PP presentation that works.

Part of the reason Gore's pressentaion works, of course, is that we don't just see the PP presentation. This is a movie, after all. And Gore has given this presentation 1,000+ times - so he's a pro. But I realized watching this movie that the slides really did help make the case. How's that?

One reason is that Gore (and the filmmakers) undermine several of PP's purported "strengths." They avoid bullet lists and there's little fluff (or what fluff there is, like some of the animation, is actually pretty effective). Gore uses PP to show pictures and data - line charts, in particular. And PP is an effective means of doing this. (It is noticeable that Gore never refers to this as a "PowerPoint" presentation - always instead as a "slide show." In fact, I'm not sure if he was actually using PP for his presentation.)

The lesson is this: PP can be an effective tool for conveying certain kinds of information when the presenter is already super well-prepared. PP complements Gore's presentation because he barely needs it. But all too often people rely on PP as a crutch because they themselves are unprepared. We should be telling people to only use PP when they already have a command of their presentation. Otherwise PP takes control of the presenter, rather than the other way around.

2006-06-18T12:14:00.000-04:00

Feferman Biography of Tarski

Just finished the Fefermans' biography of Tarski. A good read with some surprising information and gossip - but also frustrating.

The surprises: Tarski, it would seem, was high on speed and stimulants most of his adult life. He was also - and here the Fefermans are not as blunt as they could be - a sexual predator. That's not what the Fefermans call him, but it seems to be an accurate description: women seemed more surprised when he didn't proposition them than when he did. I'm not sure there's a single female in the biography that he didn't try to lure into bed.

But that's also one of the frustrating parts. The Fefermans largely, though not entirely, excuse his behavior. They suggest that it was due to his being a European intellectual. They also suggest that his wife (largely) excused his philandering because he was such a genius. But that's bunk. If she did, she deserves pity. And, in any case, there's something wrong about suggesting a connection between his great intellect and his great libido: as if limiting the latter would limit the former.

Combined with the fact that he worked his graduate students like slaves, it's no surprise that Tarski had few female graduate students, especially in the last decades of his career.

I don't think the Fefermans do justice to Tarski's sexual harassment (and I don't think they even use the word) - but that is certainly what it is. And that's odd, to say the least.

In other respects this must have been a very difficult biography to write. The main problem is how to make very abstract, complicated work accessible to the well educated reader. The Fefermans' solution is to intersperse several "interludes" that deal with the logical material, and then focus on names and places in the longer and more numerous biographical chapters. At first I thought this worked quite well. I could move quickly through the biographical material and then go more slowly through the short, discrete chapters on logic. By the end of the book, though, I wasn't so convinced. One problem is that the logical interludes are an order of magnitude more difficult than the biographical chapters - and as a result don't do quite as good a job of explaining Tarski's significance as a logician. We're left to trust that Tarski was a really, really important guy, but we don't have as clear a picture of how he fit into the intellectual/academic community. We hear a little about his work, but this is mostly in the context of where he was traveling, who he was advising, and who he was trying to seduce.

This book made me appreciate Rebecca Goldstein's recent biography of Godel even more. There are places where Goldstein could be accused of dumbing Godel down, or even of engaging in unwarranted psychological speculation, but she does a tremendouse job of weaving together Godel's life and his logic. That's missing from the Tarski book, so it is difficult to see why he attacked the problems he did, and why his work was so significant. The Feferman's biography is good, but not great.