Via Crooked Timber, I see that philosopher Simon Blackburn would like to dispel some myths. (He does this in the inaugural article of a Times Higher Education series “in which academics range beyond their area of expertise”.) Of the ten myths Blackburn identifies for busting, the one that caught my attention was “the myth of the scientist”:
Category Archives: Philosophy
Getting students to ask good questions.
Neil Sinhababu (aka the Ethical Werewolf) lays out one approach to making an impression in a job interview teaching demo:
Before giving my job talk, N[ational] U[niversity of] S[ingapore] had me give an hour-long presentation to the graduate students and advanced undergraduates to prepare them for the talk and also evaluate my teaching abilities. Since my talk was on the Humean theory of motivation, I taught them about the puzzle involving cognitivism, internalism, and the Humean theory — if you accept all three, you end up having to say that humans can’t make moral judgments, so you’d better deny at least one of the three. I’d planned the talk to include about 20 minutes of student questions, but a third of the way through, the students hadn’t asked me anything.
So I looked at them and tried a trick that I had spontaneously come up with in the previous session of the lecture I’ve been teaching at Texas. I said, “If someone asks a question, and it’s a good question, I’m going to dance.” Amid lots of giggling, a brave young man raised his hand and asked a question — I’ve forgotten what it was now, but it was good, and the students laughed again when they saw me dancing. After that, good questions flowed freely. When students see that their teacher is willing to do comical and mildly embarrassing things to reward student participation, they get the idea that class really is a place where they’re suppose to participate.
I wondered at the time what the NUS faculty evaluating me thought of that stunt. They didn’t express emotion in any obvious way, and it seemed kind of high-risk, high-reward — would I look like a dynamic, exciting teacher, or a maniac?
Neil totally got the job — so you might want to congratulate him. Then you can ask for advice on your own dance moves.
Silly hypothesis, meet snarky retort.
In case those readers trained in analytic philosophy managed to miss it, this comment at A Philosophy Job Market Blog gave me the giggles while striking me as an entirely appropriate response (given the audience) to a lazy reliance on speculative evolutionary psychology to justify the status quo (in this case, the lopsided gender split of folks pursuing philosophy in their studies and as a career). The italicized portion is quoted from the earlier (ev-psych-loving) commenter:
Maybe, just maybe, philosophy is something “inherently more valuable” to men qua hunters
Because chasing down those non-existent unicorns painted to look like zebras in fake barn country required the ability to discern whether one was a brain in the vat before throwing a spear?
Anonymous commenter, I think I love you.
Facts and their interpretation.
Over at DrugMonkey, PhysioProf has written a post on the relative merits of “correct” and “interesting”, at least as far as science is concerned. Quoth PhysioProf:
It is essential that one’s experiments be “correct” in the sense that performing the same experiment in the same way leads to the same result no matter when the experiment is performed or who performs it. In other words, the data need to be valid.
But it is not at all important that one’s interpretation of the data–from the standpoint of posing a hypothesis that is consistent with the data–turns out to be correct or not. All that matters is that the hypothesis that is posed be “interesting”, in the sense of pointing the way to further illuminating experiments.
I spend a lot of time with my trainees on this distinction, because some of them tend to be so afraid of being “wrong” in their interpretations that they effectively refuse to interpret their data at all, and their hypotheses are nothing more than restatements of the data themselves. This makes it easy to be “correct”, but impossible to think creatively about where to go next.
Some tend in the opposite direction, going on flights of fancy that are so unmoored from the data as to result in hypotheses that are also useless in leading to further experiments with a reasonable likelihood of yielding interpretable results.
I think this is a really good description of a central feature of scientific activity.
Science and belief.
Given that in my last post I identified myself as playing for Team Science, this seems to be as good a time as any to note that not everyone on the team agrees about every little thing. Indeed, there are some big disagreements — but I don’t think these undermine our shared commitment to scientific methodology as a really good way of understanding our world.
I’m jumping into the fray of one of the big disagreements with this repost of an essay I wrote for the dear departed WAAGNFNP blog.
There’s a rumor afoot that serious scientists must abandon what, in the common parlance, is referred to as “faith”, that “rational” habits of mind and “magical thinking” cannot coexist in the same skull without leading to a violent collision.
We are not talking about worries that one cannot sensibly reconcile one’s activities in a science which relies on isotopic dating of fossils with one’s belief, based on a literal reading of one’s sacred texts, that the world and everything on it is orders of magnitude younger than isotopic dating would lead us to conclude. We are talking about the view that any intellectually honest scientist who is not an atheist is living a lie.
I have no interest in convincing anyone to abandon his or her atheism. However, I would like to make the case that there is not a forced choice between being an intellectually honest scientist and being a person of faith.
The future of philosophical discourse.
Seen in a comment on A Philosophy Job Market Blog:
… instead of writing “QED” at the end of proofs, I think we should all start writing “pwned.” I want this change to be my legacy to philosophy.
What’s a disease?
“What is a disease?”
It would be nice to think that this is the kind of question where there are clear-cut, fact-based answers to be had. “Disease” is a term that seems to pick out a category of biological conditions, and biologists are pretty good with categorization.
On the slings and arrows of the philosophical job market.
Over at Bioethics Forum, Carl Elliott has an essay questioning the wisdom of the “convention interview” in the academic hiring process. As he notes, it is a fairly standard practice for philosophy departments to schedule a round of preliminary interviews for job candidates — those who make the “long list” of applicants still in the running for the position — at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division meeting. Among other things, scheduling interviews at the APA means that the job candidates are getting themselves to the conference on their own dime, and that there’s some likelihood that the candidates will be interviewing for other positions there as well. I suppose the thought is that with everyone coming to the same place at the same time, there’s an increase in the efficiency of the interviews both for the job candidates and the hiring departments.
Of course, there’s a catch: the Eastern APA always falls around December 26 through December 30.
This holiday scheduling is part of what strikes Elliott as inhumane about APA interviewing. He writes:
Advice for academic job seekers: do some homework on your prospective students.
A friend of mine in a philosophy department at an Ivy League school asked for my advice in helping students on the market for academic jobs prepare for their interviews:
One of the things our students asked us about was preparing for interviews at schools quite different than this one (e.g., state schools, liberal arts schools, satellite campus, etc.). In particular, they want to know what kinds of questions to be prepared for. The first question one student was asked last year, for example, was “Can you tell us what you think about the ideal teacher/student relationship?” This is not what he was expecting to hear!
As someone who had a whole passel of interviews with departments at schools very different from the university where I completed my graduate degree — and as someone who has interviewed job candidates for my current department — I have a few words of advice to the job candidate.
Not letting your high morals turn you into a cheater-pants.
As promised, I want to take a look at this article (discussed also at Corpus Callosum). I’m not a psychologist, so I won’t have much to say about what causes might underlie the phenomenon of do-gooders doing bad. However, I will have some words (from the point of view of someone concerned with practical ethics) about how this pitfall might be avoided.