Category Archives: Philosophy

Desperately seeking session chairs for Pacific APA.

Posted on by

Hey you professional philosophers (including graduate students):

I’m on the program committee for the Pacific division of the American Philosophical Association, and we are working hard to finalize our program for the upcoming meeting in Seattle (April 4-7, 2012).

For some reason, there was a larger-than-usual pool of submissions this year, and apparently we were not sufficiently draconian in our refereeing (lesson learned!), because there are still a bunch of sessions where we’re trying to find session chairs.

The primary duty of the chair is to introduce the session’s speakers (briefly) and enforce time limits.

A caveat: you can’t chair if you are already on the program in some other capacity (since there’s a rule that one may only appear on the program once).

I am looking for a chair for a metaphysics/philosophy of science session, one for a philosophy of biology session, and one for a biomedical ethics session. If you are interested and able to chair one of these sessions, please email me ASAP! (dr – dot – freeride – at – gmail – dot – com)

If you are a philosophical type who is already planning to attend the Pacific APA this coming April, is not on the program already, and would be willing to chair some other session, email me your information (name, email address, institutional affiliation) and I’ll pass it on to our program committee chair so we can call on your services as needed.

Thanks!

Helpful hint for ethics students.

Posted on by

Let’s say you have been given a case study and asked to suggest an ethical course of action for the protagonist in the case.

If, in the course of explaining the course of action you are recommending, you find yourself writing, “Even though it would be unethical, the protagonist should …,” you may be doing it wrong.

Astounding claims made on the internet.

Posted on by

On this post, from a commenter named Zac*:

I’m a philosophy student. When we disagree we reason, we argue, we discuss. We do not, ever, ever call for a boycott of those with opposing views.

My thoughts on this:

  1. What would make you think that reasoning, arguing, and discussing necessarily rule out boycotting? Where’s the logical contradiction you’re assuming?
  2. Also, would you like to offer a positive argument that people with whom we disagree are entitled to our money? I means, if we take their goods and services they have a claim to our money, but do they have a right to demand that we not take our business elsewhere?
  3. And look, for this particular X, the claim that “Philosophers do not do X” turns out to be clearly false. Perhaps you meant to make a normative claim rather than a descriptive one. If this is the case, you’ll probably also want to offer a defense of the particular “oughts” you are asserting.

This edition of “Astounding claims made on the internet” brought to you by my current inability to settle down and grade case study responses.
_____
*The permalink may be wonky. The comments appears at July 13, 2011 at 01:51 AM.

How can you have a university without a philosophy department?

Posted on by

It’s no secret to readers of this blog (or residents of these United States who have been paying attention to the world that exists more than six inches from their faces) that the last few years have been rough for state budgets, and that the budget woes are especially noticeable for state university systems.

A recent case in point: owing to budget shortfalls in Nevada, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas is poised to eliminate its Philosophy Department entirely. The current chair of that department, Todd Edwin Jones, has an eloquent piece in the Boston Review that explains some of the reasons that this budgetary strategy is likely to impoverish the UNLV educational experience. He writes:

Philosophy has prompted confusion and anger ever since Socrates, one of the first practitioners of the discipline, was sentenced to death in 399 B.C.E. for “corrupting the youth.” Puzzlement over why people study philosophy has only grown since Socrates’ era. It is not surprising that in hard economic times, when young people are figuring out how best to prepare themselves for the world, many state college administrators and the taxpayers they serve believe that offering classes in philosophy is a luxury they can’t afford.

Yet people think of philosophy as a luxury only if they don’t really understand what philosophy departments do. I teach one of the core areas of philosophy, epistemology: what knowledge is and how we obtain it. People from all walks of life—physicists, physicians, detectives, politicians—can only come to good conclusions on the basis of thoroughly examining the appropriate evidence. And the whole idea of what constitutes good evidence and how certain kinds of evidence can and can’t justify certain conclusions is a central part of what philosophers study. Philosophers look at what can and can’t be inferred from prior claims. They examine what makes analogies strong or weak, the conditions under which we should and shouldn’t defer to experts, and what kinds of things (e.g., inflammatory rhetoric, wishful thinking, inadequate sample size) lead us to reason poorly.

This is not to say that doctors, district attorneys, or drain manufactures cannot make decent assessments without ever taking a philosophy class. It’s also possible for someone to diagnose a case of measles without having gone to medical school. The point is that people will tend to do better if, as part of their education, they’ve studied some philosophy. (This is one of the reasons why undergraduate philosophy majors have the highest average scores on the standard tests used for admission to post-graduate study.) No matter what goals someone has, she can better achieve them through assessing evidence more effectively, which philosophy can teach her. Questions about whether this or that goal is one that is good to have or whether certain goals are consistent with other goals, in turn, concern ethics and values—other subjects that philosophers have long pursued.

Philosophy is sometimes described as revolving around “the big questions” — what can we know, how sure can we be, what do we value, how can we get along in a world where others have very different values than our own. etc. They aren’t big because they are insurmountable (although some of them are wicked-hard). Rather, they are big because they keep coming up in all sorts of contexts, and because getting them right (or more right than not) is important.

Philosophy classes make students grapple with these questions. In the process, they help students develop strategies for dealing with other questions in other context. In the process, philosophy students learn to think carefully, to argue clearly, to evaluate evidence, and to think through sensible objections to their own views. Philosophy students have to become proficient with language, both oral and written. They have to think analytically — and often, abstractly. Philosophy is a discipline that pushes book nerds to be more math-y (what with the formal logic most philosophy degrees require) and math geeks to be more verbal (with all those essays and class discussions).

Philosophy classes leave students with skills more broadly applicable than dissecting individual axons out of a fruit fly embryo.

Not, of course, that I want to argue that the value of a college education or its component parts lies solely in the delivery of practical jobs skills. (Indeed, I’ve argued against this view.) But if we want to rank the value of academic departments in terms of the valuable and/or widely transferable job skills they impart to their students, I reckon philosophy will hold its own against the more “practical” disciplines one might name.

These are skills we try just as hard to impart in “service” courses (i.e., those taken largely by students in other majors to fulfill general education or distribution requirements) as in courses aimed at our majors. Moreover, they are skills that our peers in other departments and college recognize that we have some skill in imparting, given that they call upon our expertise to do things like develop ethics curricula for their majors. (It is true that these ethics curricula are often spurred into existence by an outside accreditation agency for a discipline, or by funding agency strings attached to a training grant. This strikes me as more evidence that organizations beyond the ivory tower — including science and engineering organizations — identify a central strand of philosophy as important in the training of people entering these non-philosophy disciplines.)

Arguably, philosophy could also provide people with skills that are important to participating effectively — heck, to participating rationally in the governance of our nation, our states, our communities. As Jones writes:

It’s long been recognized that some tasks are best coordinated by governments, and that to succeed in these efforts, governments have to raise revenue from citizens. Since colonial times, Americans have recognized that education is one of the things that taxpayers need to support (and those were some lean times!). Sadly, over the last several decades, Americans seem to have grown accustomed to thinking that they can have roads, schools, fire departments, and Medicare without fully paying for them. Now that such thinking has proven a fantasy, taxpayers should have responded with a sensible, “We should have been paying for these things, and perhaps we should start.” Instead they have clamored to cut spending—usually on things that don’t directly concern them or whose immediate benefits aren’t apparent. Such thinking leads new Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval to propose a budget with enormous cuts to education (including elementary school). And it leads college administrators to insist that these cuts require eliminating the Philosophy Department.

(Bold emphasis added.)

An attentive philosophy student has a toolbox with which to analyze this magical taxpayer thinking, whether in terms of ethics or political theory, in terms of our ability to think down the links of a causal chain or our difficulties with empathy.

Surely, more facility with critical thinking, not less, is what it will take to bring us through a difficult economic climate.

Of course, when there’s not enough money in the budget (and when the populace and/or their elected representative have ruled out tax increases as a way to get enough money), stuff gets cut. Maybe some of that stuff really is of little value, but a lot of the things left to cut are going to hurt someone when they’re gone.

Eliminating a philosophy department may not cause the same degree of immediate harm as would, say, cutting off medical aid to the indigent or eliminating free school lunches for poor elementary school kids. But it will cause harm. Maybe that harm will take longer to smack the people of Nevada in the face, but this doesn’t mean that the impact won’t be devastating.

Dispatch from PSA 2010: Symposium session on ClimateGate.

Posted on by

The Philosophy of Science Association Biennial Meeting included a symposium session on the release of hacked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Given that we’ve had occasion to discuss ClimateGate here before, i thought I’d share my notes from this session.

Symposium: The CRU E-mails: Perspectives from Philosophy of Science.

Naomi Oreskes (UC San Diego), gave a talk called “Why We Resist the Results of Climate Science.”

She mentioned the attention brought to the discovery of errors in the IPCC report, noting that while mistakes are obviously to be avoided, it would be amazing for there to be a report that ran thousands of pages that did not have some mistakes. (Try to find a bound dissertation — generally only in the low hundreds of pages — without at least one typo.) The public’s assumption, though, was that these mistakes, once revealed, were smoking guns — a sign that something improper must have occurred.

Oreskes noted the boundary scientists of all sorts (including climate scientists) have tried to maintain between the policy-relevant and the policy-prescriptive. This is a difficult boundary to police, though, as climate science has an inescapable moral dimension. To the extent that climate change is driven by consumption (especially but not exclusively the burning of fossil fuels), we have a situation where the people reaping the benefits are not the ones who will be paying for that benefit (since people in the developed world will have the means to respond to the effects of climate change and those in the developing world will not). The situation seems to violate our expectations of intergenerational equity (since future generations will have to cope with the consequences of the consumption of past and current generations), as well as of inter-specific equity (since the species likely to go extinct in response to climate change are not the ones contributing the most to climate change).

The moral dimension of climate change, though, doesn’t make this a scientific issue about which the public feels a sense of clarity. Rather, the moral issues are such that Americans feel like their way of life is on trial. Those creating the harmful effects have done something wrong, even if it was accidental.

And this is where the collision occurs: Americans believe they are good; climate science seems to be telling them that they are bad. (To the extent that people strongly equate capitalism with democracy and the American way of life, that’s an issue too, given that consumption and growth are part of the problem.)

The big question Oreskes left us with, then, is how else to frame the need for changes in behavior, so that such a need would not make Americans so defensive that they would reflexively reject the science. I’m not sure the session ended with a clear answer to that question.

* * * * *

Wendy S. Parker (Ohio University) gave a talk titled “The Context of Climate Science: Norms, Pressures, and Progress.” A particular issue she took up was the ideal of transparency and how it came up in the context of climate scientists interactions with each other and with the public.

Parker noted that there had been numerous requests for access to raw data by people climate scientists did not recognize as part of the climate science community. The CRU denied many such requests, and the ClimateGate emails made it clear that the scientists generally didn’t want to cooperate with these requests.

Here, Parker observed that while we tend to look favorably on transparency, we probably need to say more about what transparency should amount to. Are we talking about making something available and open to scrutiny (i.e., making “transparency” roughly the opposite of “secrecy”)? Are we talking about making something understandable or usable, perhaps by providing fully explained nontechnical accounts of scientific methods and findings for the media (i.e., making “transparency” roughly the opposite of “opacity”)?

What exactly do we imagine ought to be made available? Research methods? Raw and/or processed data? Computer code? Lab notebooks? E-mail correspondence?

To whom ought the materials to be made available? Other members of one’s scientific community seems like a good bet, but how about members of the public at large? (Or, for that matter, members of industry or of political lobbying groups?)

And, for that matter, why do we value transparency? What makes it important? Is it primarily a matter of ensuring the quality of the shared body of scientific knowledge, and of improving the rate of scientific progress? Or, do we care about transparency as a matter of democratic accountability? As Parker noted, these values might be in conflict. (As well, she mentioned, transparency might conflict with other social values, like the privacy of human subjects.)

Here, if the public imputed nefarious motives to the climate researchers, the scientists themselves viewed some of the requests for access to their raw data as attempts by people with political motivations to obstruct the progress (or acceptance) of their research. It was not that the scientists feared that bad science would be revealed if the data were shared, but rather that they worried that yahoos from outside the scientific community were going to waste their time, or worse to cherry pick the shared data to make allegations that the scientists to which would then have to respond, wasting even more time.

In the numerous investigations that followed on the heels of the leak of stolen CRU e-mails, about the strongest charge against the involved climate scientists that stood was that they failed to display “the proper degree of openness”, and that they seemed to have a ethos of minimal compliance (or occasionally non-compliance) with regard to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. They were chided that the requirements of FOIA must not be seen as impositions, but as part of their social contract with the public (and something likely to make their scientific knowledge better).

Compliance, of course, takes resources (one of the most important of these being time), so it’s not free. Indeed, it’s hard not to imagine that at least some FOIA requests to climate scientists had “unintended consequences” (in terms of the expenditure of tim and other resources) on climate scientists that were precisely what the requesters intended.

However, as Parker noted, FOIA originated with the intent of giving citizens access to the workings of their government — imposing it on science and scientists is a relatively new move. It is true that many scientists (although not all) conduct publicly funded research, and thereby incur some obligations to the public. But there’s a question of how far this should go — ought every bit of data generated with the aid of any government grant to be FOIA-able?

Parker discussed the ways that FOIA seems to demand an openness that doesn’t quite fit with the career reward structures currently operating within science. Yet ClimateGate and its aftermath, and the heightened public scrutiny of, and demands for openness from, climate scientists in particular, seem to be driving (or at least putting significant pressure upon) the standards for data and code sharing in climate science.

I got to ask one of the questions right after Parker’s talk. I wondered whether the level of public scrutiny on climate scientists might be enough to drive them into the arms of the “open science” camp — which would, of course, require some serious rethinking of the scientific reward structures and the valorization of competition over cooperation. As we’ve discussed on this blog on many occasions, institutional and cultural change is hard. If openness from climate scientists is important enough to the public, though, could the public decide that it’s worthwhile to put up the resources necessary to support this kind of change in climate science?

I guess it would require a public willing to pay for the goodies it demands.

* * * * *

The next talk, by Kristin Shrader-Frechette (University of Notre Dame), was titled “Scientifically Legitimate Ways to Cook and Trim Data: The Hacked and Leaked Climate Emails.”

Shrader-Frechette discussed what statisticians (among others) have to say about conditions in which it is acceptable to leave out some of your data (and indeed, arguably misleading to leave it in rather than omitting it). There was maybe not as much unanimity here as one might like.

There’s general agreement that data trimming in order to make your results fit some predetermined theory is unacceptable. There’s less agreement about how to deal with outliers. Some say that deleting them is probably OK (although you’d want to be open that you have done so). On the other hand, many of the low probability/high consequence events that science would like to get a handle on are themselves outliers.

So when and how to trim data is one of those topics where it looks like scientists are well advised to keep talking to their scientific peers, the better not to mess it up.

Of the details in the leaked CRU e-mails, one that was frequently identified as a smoking gun indicating scientific shenanigans was the discussion of the “trick” to “hide the decline” in the reconstruction of climatic temperatures using proxy data from tree-rings. Shrader-Frechette noted that what was being “hidden” was not a decline in temperatures (as measured instrumentally) but rather in the temperatures reconstructed from one particular proxy — and that other proxies the climate scientists were using didn’t show this decline.

The particular incident raises a more general methodological question: scientifically speaking, is it better to include the data from proxies (once you have reason to believe it’s bad data) in your graphs? Is including it (or leaving it out) best seen as scrupulous honesty or as dishonesty?

And, does the answer differ if the graph is intended for use in an academic, bench-science presentation or a policy presentation (where it would be a very bad thing to confuse your non-expert audience)?

As she closed her talk, Shrader-Frechette noted that welfare-affecting science cannot be treated merely as pure science. She also mentioned that while FOIA applies to government-funded science, it does not apply to industry-funded science — which means that the “transparency” available to the public is pretty asymmetrical (and that industry scientists are unlikely to have to devote their time to responding to requests from yahoos for their raw data).

* * * * *

Finally, James McAllister (University of Leiden) gave a talk titled “Errors, Blunders, and the Construction of Climate Change Facts.” He spoke of four epistemic gaps climate scientists have to bridge: between distinct proxy data sources, between proxy and instrumental data, between historical time series (constructed of instrumental and proxy data) and predictive scenarios, and between predictive scenarios and reality. These epistemic gaps can be understood in the context of the two broad projects climate science undertakes: the reconstruction of past climate variation, and the forecast of the future.

As you might expect, various climate scientists have had different views about which kinds of proxy data are most reliable, and about how the different sorts of proxies ought to be used in reconstructions of past climate variation. The leaked CRU e-mails include discussions where climate scientists dedicate themselves to finding the “common denominator” in this diversity of expert opinion — not just because such a common denominator might be expected to be closer to the objective reality of things, but also because finding common ground in the diversity of opinion could be expected to enhance the core group’s credibility. Another effect, of course, is that the common denominator is also denied to outsiders, undermining their credibility (and effectively excluding them as outliers).

McAllister noted that the emails simultaneously revealed signs of internal disagreement, and of a reaching for balance. Some of the scientists argued for “wise use” of proxies and voiced judgments about how to use various types of data.

The data, of course, cannot actually speak for themselves.

As the climate scientists worked to formulate scenario-based forecasts that public policy makers would be able to use, they needed to grapple with the problems of how to handle the link between their reconstructions of past climate trends and their forecasts. They also had to figure out how to handle the link between their forecasts and reality. The e-mails indicate that some of the scientists were pretty resistant to this latter linkage — one asserted that they were “NOT supposed to be working with the assumption that these scenarios are realistic,” rather using them as internally consistent “what if?” storylines.

One thing the e-mails don’t seem to contain is any explicit discussion of what would count as an ad hoc hypothesis and why avoiding ad hoc hypotheses would be a good thing. This doesn’t mean that the climate scientists didn’t avoid them, just that it was not a methodological issue they felt they needed to be discussing with each other.

This was a really interesting set of talks, and I’m still mulling over some of the issues they raised for me. When those ideas are more than half-baked, I’ll probably write something about them here.

Blogrolling: Reaction Crate.

Posted on by

Longtime readers of this blog will know that one of my professional interests (which I even talk about occasionally here) is the philosophy of chemistry, a subset of the philosophy of science with a fairly small number of practitioners.

Well, I’ve recently found a new blog, Reaction Crate, whose tagline promises “Philosophy, Chemistry, and Other Reactive Things.”

So far, there’s a cool post on chemical classification by microstructure. And, there’s an extremely helpful post about how to get into grad school in philosophy or history and philosophy of science. The blog’s author, Julia Bursten, is a third year grad student in the HPS department at the University of Pittsburgh, so she knows of what she speaks — and she’s writing about it very engagingly.

Check it out!.

Students who can rock a midterm and make me laugh.

Posted on by

I may have mentioned once or twice before that I really dig my student. Not only are they really committed to learning the stuff I’m trying to teach them (while working many hours, commuting long distances, taking care of families, etc.), but a bunch of them are also really funny.

That they can maintain a sense of humor while taking a midterm is already impressive. That they can produce really good answers that make me laugh is even better — especially since it makes my experience of grading 110 midterms in a sitting a bit more enjoyable.

Two examples from the most recent midterm that are too good not to share:

Continue reading→

Building a critical reasoning course: getting started with the external constraints.

Posted on by

My Fall semester is rapidly approaching and I am still in the throes of preparing to teach a course I have never taught before. The course is called “Logic and Critical Reasoning.” Here’s the catalog description of the course:

Basic concepts of logic; goals and standards of both deductive and inductive reasoning; techniques of argument analysis and assessment; evaluation of evidence; language and definition; fallacies.

The course involves some amount of symbolic logic (and truth-tables and that good stuff) but also a lot of attention to argumentation “in the wild”, in the written and spoken word. My department usually teaches multiple sections of the course each semester, but it’s not the case that we all march in lockstep with identical textbooks, syllabi, and assignments.

The downside of academic freedom, when applied to teaching a course like this, is that you have to figure out your own plan.

Nonetheless, since critical reasoning is the kind of thing I think we need more of in the world, I’m excited about having the opportunity to teach the course. And, at Tom Levenson‘s suggestion, I’m going to blog the process of planning the course. Perhaps you all will have some suggestions for me as I work through it.

Part of why my department offers multiple sections of “Logic and Critical Reasoning” is that it fulfills a lower-division general education (G.E.) requirement. In other words, there’s substantial student demand for courses that fulfill this requirement.

For this course to fulfill the G.E. requirement, of course, it has to meet certain pedagogical goals or “learning objectives”. So, where I need to start in planning this course is with the written-and-approved-by-committee learning objectives and content requirements:

Course Goals and Student Learning Objectives
“Logic and Critical Reasoning” is designed to meet the G.E. learning objectives for Area A3.

A.
Critical thinking courses help students learn to recognize, analyze, evaluate, and engage in effective reasoning.

B.
Students will demonstrate, orally and in writing, proficiency in the course goals. Development of the following competencies will result in dispositions or habits of intellectual autonomy, appreciation of different worldviews, courage and perseverance in inquiry, and commitment to employ analytical reasoning. Students should be able to:

  1. distinguish between reasoning (e.g., explanation, argument) and other types of discourse (e.g., description, assertion);
  2. identify, analyze, and evaluate different types of reasoning;
  3. find and state crucial unstated assumptions in reasoning;
  4. evaluate factual claims or statements used in reasoning, and evaluate the sources of evidence for such claims;
  5. demonstrate an understanding of what constitutes plagiarism;
  6. evaluate information and its sources critically and incorporate selected information into his or her knowledge base and value system;
  7. locate, retrieve, organize, analyze, synthesize, and communicate information of relevance to the subject matter of the course in an effective and efficient manner; and
  8. reflect on past successes, failures, and alternative strategies.

C.

  • Students will analyze, evaluate, and construct their own arguments or position papers about issues of diversity such as gender, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.
  • Reasoning about other issues appropriate to the subject matter of the course shall also be presented, analyzed, evaluated, and constructed.
  • All critical thinking classes should teach formal and informal methods for determining the validity of deductive reasoning and the strength of inductive reasoning, including a consideration of common fallacies in inductive and deductive reasoning. … “Formal methods for determining the validity of deductive arguments” refers to techniques that focus on patterns of reasoning rather than content. While all deductive arguments claim to be valid, not all of them are valid. Students should know what formal methods are available for determining which are which. Such methods include, but are not limited to, the use of Venn’s diagrams for determining validity of categorical reasoning, the methods of truth tables, truth trees, and formal deduction for reasoning which depends on truth functional structure, and analogous methods for evaluating reasoning which may be valid due to quantificational form. These methods are explained in standard logic texts. We would also like to make clear that the request for evidence that formal methods are being taught is not a request that any particular technique be taught, but that some method of assessing formal validity be included in course content.
  • Courses shall require the use of qualitative reasoning skills in oral and written assignments. Substantial writing assignments are to be integrated with critical thinking instruction. Writing will lead to the production of argumentative essays, with a minimum of 3000 words required. Students shall receive frequent evaluations from the instructor. Evaluative comments must be substantive, addressing the quality and form of writing.

This way of describing the course, I reckon, is not the best way to convince my students that it’s a course they’re going to want to be taking. My big task, therefore, is to plan course material and assignments that accomplish these goals while also striking the students as interesting, relevant, and plausibly do-able. In addition, I want to plan assignments that give the students enough practice and feedback but that don’t overwhelm me with grading. (The budget is still in very bad shape, so I have no expectation that there will be money to hire a grader.)

I have some ideas percolating here, which I will blog about soon. One of them is to use the blogosphere as a source of arguments (and things-that-look-like-arguments-but-aren’t) for analysis. I’m thinking, though, that I’ll need to set some good ground rules in advance.

Do these learning objectives and content requirements seem to you to call out for particular types of homework assignments or mini-lecture? If you had to skin this particular pedagogical cat, where would you start?

Book review: The Evolution of Everything.

Posted on by

In The Evolution of Everything: How Selection Shapes Culture, Commerce, and Nature, Mark Sumner prefaces his exploration of Darwin’s theory of evolution – and of the power of selection to explain phenomena as diverse as the economic downturn, the “success” of patent medicines that don’t do much to cure what ails you, and the shape of the new TV season – with the reminder that what you think you know could well be wrong. Sumner argues that the set of erroneous beliefs to which most of us cling includes our sense of what Darwin’s own Darwinism actually asserts.

Continue reading→

Save us from the armchair philosopher with a blog.

Posted on by

In what is surely a contender for the photo next to the “business as usual in the blogosphere” entry in the Wiktionary, a (male) blogger has posted a list of the sexiest (all-but-one female) scientists (using photos of those scientists obtained from the web without any indication that he had also obtained proper permission to use those photos in his post), and now the blogger says he wants to know what could possibly be wrong about making such a post.

Continue reading→