Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Muslims don't hate U.S. freedoms, they hate U.S. policies

So says a new report from the Pentagon (have they been reading Noam Chomsky?); an excerpt:

'Muslims do not hate our freedom, but rather they hate our policies [the report says]. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the long-standing, even increasing, support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan and the Gulf states. Thus, when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy....'

China's Xinhuanet reported that the board's report criticized the US for failing in its efforts to communicate its military and diplomatic actions to the world, and the Muslim world in particular, "but no public relations campaign can save America from flawed policies." The report also takes the administration to task for talking about Islamic extremism in a way that offends many Muslims....

MSNBC notes that the report, in a comment that directly goes against statements made by President Bush and senior cabinet members, says the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have united otherwise-divided Muslim extremists and given terrorists organizations like Al Qaeda a boost by "raising their stature."

No kidding, who would've guessed?

Rumsfeld Sued for War Crimes

One down.  I suppose Rummy will have to cancel future vacations to Berlin.

Chomsky on the 2004 Election

There is quite a lot of interesting material in Chomsky's analysis of the 2004 election in historical perspective; an excerpt:

The post-1960s era has been marked by substantial growth of popular movements dedicated to greater justice and freedom, and unwillingness to tolerate the brutal aggression and violence that had previously been granted free rein. The Vietnam war is a dramatic illustration, naturally suppressed because of the lessons it teaches about the civilizing impact of popular mobilization. The war against South Vietnam launched by JFK in 1962, after years of US-backed state terror that had killed tens of thousands of people, was brutal and barbaric from the outset: bombing, chemical warfare to destroy food crops so as to starve out the civilian support for the indigenous resistance, programs to drive millions of people to virtual concentration camps or urban slums to eliminate its popular base. By the time protests reached a substantial scale, the highly respected and quite hawkish Vietnam specialist and military historian Bernard Fall wondered whether "Viet-Nam as a cultural and historic entity" would escape "extinction" as "the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size" – particularly South Vietnam, always the main target of the US assault. And when protest did finally develop, many years too late, it was mostly directed against the peripheral crimes: the extension of the war against the South to the rest ofIndochina – terrible crimes, but secondary ones.

State managers are well aware that they no longer have that freedom. Wars against "much weaker enemies" – the only acceptable targets -- must be won "decisively and rapidly," Bush I's intelligence services advised. Delay might "undercut political support," recognized to be thin, a great change since the Kennedy-Johnson period when the attack on Indochina, while never popular, aroused little reaction for many years. Those conclusions hold despite the hideous war crimes in Falluja, replicating the Russian destruction of Grozny ten years earlier, including crimes displayed on the front pages for which the civilian leadership is subject to the death penalty under the War Crimes Act passed by the Republican Congress in 1996 – and also one of the more disgraceful episodes in the annals of American journalism.

The world is pretty awful today, but it is far better than yesterday, not only with regard to unwillingness to tolerate aggression, but also in many other ways, which we now tend to take for granted.....

As usual, the electoral campaigns were run by the PR industry, which in its regular vocation sells toothpaste, life-style drugs, automobiles, and other commodities. Its guiding principle is deceit. Its task is to undermine the "free markets" we are taught to revere: mythical entities in which informed consumers make rational choices. In such scarcely imaginable systems, businesses would provide information about their products: cheap, easy, simple. But it is hardly a secret that they do nothing of the sort. Rather, they seek to delude consumers to choose their product over some virtually identical one. GM does not simply make public the characteristics of next year's models. Rather, it devotes huge sums to creating images to deceive consumers, featuring sports stars, sexy models, cars climbing sheer cliffs to a heavenly future, and so on. The business world does not spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year to provide information. The famed "entrepreneurial initiative" and "free trade" are about as realistic as informed consumer choice. The last thing those who dominate the society want is the fanciful market of doctrine and economic theory. All of this should be too familiar to merit much discussion.

Sometimes the commitment to deceit is quite overt. The recent US-Australia negotiations on a "free trade agreement" were held up by Washington's concern over Australia's health care system, perhaps the most efficient in the world. In particular, drug prices are a fraction of those in the US: the same drugs, produced by the same companies, earning substantial profits in Australia though nothing like those they are granted in the US – often on the pretext that they are needed for R&D, another exercise in deceit. Part of the reason for the efficiency of the Australian system is that, like other countries, Australia relies on the practices that the Pentagon employs when it buys paper clips: government purchasing power is used to negotiate prices, illegal in the US. Another reason is that Australia has kept to "evidence-based" procedures for marketing pharmaceuticals. US negotiators denounced these as market interference: pharmaceutical corporations are deprived of their legitimate rights if they are required to produce evidence when they claim that their latest product is better than some cheaper alternative, or run TV ads in which some sports hero or model tells the audience to ask their doctor whether this drug is "right for you (it's right for me)," sometimes not even revealing what it is supposed to be for. The right of deceit must be guaranteed to the immensely powerful and pathological immortal persons created by radical judicial activism to run the society. When assigned the task of selling candidates, the PR industry naturally resorts to the same fundamental techniques, so as to ensure that politics remains "the shadow cast by big business over society," as America's leading social philosopher, John Dewey, described the results of "industrial feudalism" long ago. Deceit is employed to undermine democracy, just as it is the natural device to undermine markets. And voters appear to be aware of it.

On the eve of the 2000 elections, about 75% of the electorate regarded it as a game played by rich contributors, party managers, and the PR industry, which trains candidates to project images and produce meaningless phrases that might win some votes. Very likely, that is why the population paid little attention to the "stolen election" that greatly exercised educated sectors....

In 2000, "issue awareness" – knowledge of the stands of the candidate-producing organizations on issues – reached an all-time low. Currently available evidence suggests it may have been even lower in 2004. About 10% of voters said their choice would be based on the candidate's "agendas/ideas/platforms/goals"; 6% for Bush voters, 13% for Kerry voters (Gallup). The rest would vote for what the industry calls "qualities" or "values," which are the political counterpart to toothpaste ads. The most careful studies (PIPA) found that voters had little idea of the stand of the candidates on matters that concerned them. Bush voters tended to believe that he shared their beliefs, even though the Republican Party rejected them, often explicitly. Investigating the sources used in the studies, we find that the same was largely true of Kerry voters, unless we give highly sympathetic interpretations to vague statements that most voters had probably never heard....

It is easy to demonstrate that for Bush planners, the threat of terror is a low priority. The invasion of Iraq is only one of many illustrations. Even their own intelligence agencies agreed with the consensus among other agencies, and independent specialists, that the invasion was likely to increase the threat of terror, as it did; probably nuclear proliferation as well, as also predicted. Such threats are simply not high priorities as compared with the opportunity to establish the first secure military bases in a dependent client state at the heart of the world's major energy reserves, a region understood since World War II to be the "most strategically important area of the world," "a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history." Apart from what one historian of the industry calls "profits beyond the dreams of avarice," which must flow in the right direction, control over two-thirds of the world's estimated hydrocarbon reserves – uniquely cheap and easy to exploit – provides what Zbigniew Brzezinski recently called "critical leverage" over European and Asian rivals, what George Kennan many years earlier had called "veto power" over them. These have been crucial policy concerns throughout the post-World War II period, even more so in today's evolving tripolar world, with its threat that Europe and Asia might move towards greater independence, and worse, might be united: China and the EU became each other's major trading partners in 2004, joined by the world's second largest economy (Japan), and those tendencies are likely to increase. A firm hand on the spigot reduces these dangers....

There are many other illustrations of the same lack of concern of planners about terror. Bush voters, whether they knew it or not, were voting for a likely increase in the threat of terror, which could be awesome: it was understood well before 9-11 that sooner or later the Jihadists organized by the CIA and its associates in the 1980s are likely to gain access to WMDs, with horrendous consequences. And even these frightening prospects are being consciously extended by the transformation of the military, which, apart from increasing the threat of "ultimate doom" by accidental nuclear war, is compelling Russia to move nuclear missiles over its huge and mostly unprotected territory to counter US military threats – including the threat of instant annihilation that is a core part of the "ownership of space" for offensive military purposes announced by the Bush administration along with its National Security Strategy in late 2002, significantly extending Clinton programs that were more than hazardous enough, and had already immobilized the UN Disarmament Committee.

As for "moral values," we learn what we need to know about them from the business press the day after the election, reporting the "euphoria" in board rooms – not because CEOs oppose gay marriage....

[I]t means little to say that people vote on the basis of "moral values." The question is what they mean by the phrase. The limited indications are of some interest. In some polls, "when the voters were asked to choose the most urgent moral crisis facing the country, 33 percent cited `greed and materialism,' 31 percent selected `poverty and economic justice,' 16 percent named abortion, and 12 percent selected gay marriage" (Pax Christi). In others, "when surveyed voters were asked to list the moral issue that most affected their vote, the Iraq war placed first at 42 percent, while 13 percent named abortion and 9 percent named gay marriage" (Zogby). Whatever voters meant, it could hardly have been the operative moral values of the administration, celebrated by the business press.

I won't go through the details here, but a careful look indicates that much the same appears to be true for Kerry voters who thought they were calling for serious attention to the economy, health, and their other concerns. As in the fake markets constructed by the PR industry, so also in the fake democracy they run, the public is hardly more than an irrelevant onlooker, apart from the appeal of carefully constructed images that have only the vaguest resemblance to reality.

The Library of Congress Kluge Prize in "the Human Sciences"

Last year's prize, the first one, to Leszek Kolakowski, was clearly politically motivated and a weak choice:  whatever prestige the prize might have had was squandered. (For my comments on last year's prize and some of the controversy they generated, see here and here).  This year's prize has been awarded to the historian Jaroslva Pelikan and the philosopher Paul Ricoeur.  I know nothing of Pelikan's work, or whether he is a meritorious choice, but at least in the case of Ricoeur, there is no reason to think political pandering to the right was a factor in the selection.  Of philosophers in the hermeneutic tradition, Ricoeur's shelf life, to be sure, is unlikely to approach that of Dilthey's or Gadamer's, though I must confess that apart from the 1970 Freud and Philosophy--a book which gets Freud rather wrong, but interestingly so--I have read very little of his corpus (among those interested in 20th-century European philosophy, I expect this is not atypical--indeed, as Michael Rosen and I work with the contributors to The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy we find that Ricoeur's work has come up not at all).  So at least from this small corner of the academic universe, this year's choices provoke nothing more than a large yawn.

It is still worth remarking, perhaps, that if the stated criteria were to be taken at all seriously, namely,

the Kluge prize rewards lifetime achievement in the wide range of disciplines not covered by the Nobel prizes. Such disciplines include history, philosophy, politics, anthropology, sociology, religion, criticism in the arts and humanities, and linguistics. The award is at the financial level of the Nobel awards.

The prize is international; the recipient may be of any nationality, writing in any language. The main criterion for a recipient of the Kluge Prize is deep intellectual accomplishment in the human sciences. The recipient's body of work should evidence growth in maturity and range over the years. The recipient will have demonstrated unusual distinction within a given area of inquiry and across disciplines in the human sciences. Significantly, the recipient's writings should be, in large part, understandable and important for those involved in public affairs,

then the only explanation for why Noam Chomsky was not the first recipient (or, now, the second) is pure political bias, since he so plainly towers over Kolakowski and Ricoeur (and just about everybody else) on the stated dimensions of merit.  But don't expect this kind of political bias infecting academic decision-making to attract any attention in the American media.

Right-Wing Identity Politics

A good analysis by Carlos Villareal, Executive Director of the San Francisco chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (and a graduate of the University of Texas School of Law with whom I had the privilege of working).

Saramago on Bush: "the biggest liar on the planet"

Article here; an excerpt:

U.S. politics over the next four years will be rooted in patriotism and religion, an 'explosive combination' that will require Latin Americans to 'arm themselves with strength, courage and bravery,' according to Portuguese writer José Saramago, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Saramago spoke to writers and journalists this week in Caracas....

'Things will undoubtedly be very bad for Latin America,' the writer predicted. 'You only have to consider the ambitions and the doctrines of the empire, which regards this region as its backyard,' he said.

At an earlier speaking engagement in Bogotá, Colombia, Saramago called Bush 'the biggest liar on the planet.' He added that if the U.S. president ever decides to focus on the region, Latin America should tremble with fear. 'I could say the same about Africa, but I don't want to create an international panic,' he joked.

Turning his attention to the rest of the world, Saramago told his audience in Caracas that the United States will never leave Iraq, 'because it needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan....'

[W]henever he addresses the subject of international politics 'I always ask two questions, and only two: How many countries have military bases in the United States? And in how many countries does the United States not have military bases?'

Advice to philosophy graduate students about publishing

A philosophy PhD student writes:

I read with interest your post and the comments on which philosophy journals are and are not responsible about dealing with submissions.

I am still rather early in my Ph.D. program, and the question of submission for publication is a new and daunting thought for me. I wonder if you or some of your readers might be interested in giving some rather basic advice on publication to me and others in situations similar to mine. I really don't even know where to begin thinking about submitting a paper for publication. How does one know when a paper is good enough to be worth a shot? What journal should it be submitted to? What rules govern submission? I gather from the comments to your thread that it is only permissible to send a paper to a single journal at a time.

Really, I think that I -- and likely other people similar to me -- could just benefit from some general advice about the publication process. I'm not even sure which questions I need to be asking.

Good questions, that deserve an answer.  I've opened comments, and invite the many, many readers qualified to offer guidance on these topics to do so.  I'm a bit under the gun at the moment, but I may weigh in too in due course.

Becker-Posner Blog

The economist Gary Becker and the legal scholar and jurist Richard Posner will have their own blog here.  Dick has assured me, however, that despite his official entrance in to the blogosphere, he will still be guest-blogging here the week beginning Monday, December 27.  (He and Becker won't be tackling jurisprudential topics, which will be the primary focus of the postings here.)

Philosophy Journals: Which Ones are Responsible, Which Ones Not?

A young philosopher in Australia writes:

For relatively junior people, the really useful and hard-to-get information is...which journals are well-run. For instance, it's useful to know things like:

1. Will they get back to you in a timely manner (within 3-4 months)? If not, how long will it take? (anecdotal evidence: 7 months at PhilRev, 12 months at Mind.)

2. Will they answer your emails or just ignore them?

3. Do they give reviews?

4. Will the review process be blind?

5. What's the quality of the reviewers?

6. Will revise and resubmit policies be arbitrary? (e.g. sending the paper to new reviewers who raise completely different objections)

7. Are you likely to run into arbitrary editorial decisions after the initial reviews? (Ethics looks like a culprit)

8. How long will it be before an accepted article appears in print ? (PPR: 3 years)

From what I can gather from my own experience and from word of mouth, most top journals perform shockingly on one or more of these questions.

In some cases, it seems to be systematic. It'd be useful to know how widespread these problems are at particular journals. Time to review can be a real problem for junior people, and it would be nice to have a more accurate understanding of the risks of delay and other vagaries you're letting yourself in for with different journals. And some journals are genuinely well run (e.g.. from what I can tell, Nous, PhilStudies, Phil Imprint, AJP, PhilQ seem on the ball).

I will note that my anecdotal evidence is the opposite of what is reported above with respect to Ethics, which I would have put in the "genuinely well run" category (and this prior to John Deigh, the editor, becoming my colleague).  In any case, I've opened comments; no anonymous postings, of course.

The Epistemology Page

I was talking to a prospective student interested in epistemology recently who had not yet seen Keith DeRose's excellent resource, The Epistemology Page.  In addition to commentary on graduate programs, it contains a reasonably current bibliography of writings by epistemologists, and lots of useful links.  Students, current and prospective, as well as faculty in epistemology and cognate fields, will find it of considerable value.

Black is White

George Will is joining the chorus of attack on the universities:

Academics, such as the next secretary of state, still decorate Washington, but academia is less listened to than it was. It has marginalized itself, partly by political shrillness and silliness that have something to do with the parochialism produced by what George Orwell called "smelly little orthodoxies." Many campuses are intellectual versions of one-party nations — except such nations usually have the merit, such as it is, of candor about their ideological monopolies. In contrast, American campuses have more insistently proclaimed their commitment to diversity as they have become more intellectually monochrome. They do indeed cultivate diversity — in race, skin color, ethnicity, sexual preference. In everything but thought. So here's what things look like once you've fallen through the looking glass:  a representative of the monochrome mass media--where diversity means a political spectrum so narrow that no social democrat, socialist, or genuine libertarian finds a regular home--has the audacity to suggest that the only institution where genuine intellectual diversity in the United States still exists (where it is possible to teach, as I do [and my situation is not atypical], with Burkean conservatives, free market utopians, socialists, social democrats, Clintonite democrats, and regular 'ole boring liberals) lacks diversity of "thought"!  Perhaps never having had one, he doesn't recognize where it still exists. But let us translate:  what Mr. Will really means is that universities are places where the banalities and misinformation which are the lifeblood of the mass media are not taken seriously; where people who think Iraq attacked the World Trade Center have a tough time holding their own in grown-up conversation; where apologists for state terror have to confront the arguments of those who know an apology for state terror when they see it; where lies about economic and social policy are perceived as lies, and made to answer to facts and evidence; where, in short, the parochial smugness of an effete little simpleton like George Will (and his many clones who constitute the "diversity" of the mass media) is perceived as exactly that.

Bush and Prayer

We've heard recently from the nasty reactionaries who go to Columbia Law School, now let's hear from the more cosmopolitan students at that distinguished institution; this from Erik Encarnacion, a philosophy major from Princeton now studying at CLS; he writes:

I've been thinking more about this whole liberal hand-wringing about Bush.

On every substantive issue Bush has been a resounding failure. Polls indicate as much: people are dissatisfied with his performance on every level. Liberals (like me) thus conclude that it must be Bush's position on substantive cultural conservative issues, like gays, guns, and god. Surely this has some truth to it.

But I think to many fundamentalist Christians George W. Bush represents something deeper than these discrete issues: he is the first ostensibly fundamentalist Christian to be president, and to reject him would be to reject fundamentalist decision-making methodology: prayer is better than thought. The idea is that for any given problem, praying will provide superior answers to actual thought. This theme is well represented in Bush's decision to go to Iraq. I remember his talking about how he prayed really hard about the decision to invade. I also remembered not being comforted at all by this fact. But for fundamentalist, culturally conservative Christians, the fact that Bush prays before making a decision is sufficient to legitimize the outcome. To reject Bush's 1st term would entail acknowledging that prayer is not a good decision-making method, which, being brainwashed, they are not willing to acknowledge.

[T]hank you for your inspirational blog: it is better than a cup of coffee in the morning before my "Corporations" class.

Why does the Dean of Stanford Law School Have Such a Low Opinion of Lawyers?

Ciceronian Review has a rather good point here.  (And I suspect Dean Kramer will be grateful for Professor Tribe's review once he sees that by my colleague Professor Powe!)

Guernica Redux

Cutting piece by Saul Landau; an excerpt:

On November 12, as US jets bombed Fallujah for the ninth straight day, a Redwood City California jury found Scott Peterson guilty of murdering his wife and unborn child. That macabre theme captured the headlines and dominated conversation throughout workplaces and homes.

Indeed, Peterson "news" all but drowned out the US military's claim that successful bombing and shelling of a city of 300 thousand residents had struck only sites where "insurgents," had holed up. On November 15, the BBC embedded newsman with a marine detachment claimed that the unofficial death toll estimate had risen to well over 2000, many of them civilians.

As Iraqi eye witnesses told BBC reporters he had seen bombs hitting residential targets, Americans exchanged viewpoints and kinky jokes about Peterson. One photographer captured a Fallujah man holding his dead son, one of two kids he lost to US bombers. He could not get medical help to stop the bleeding.

A November 14 Reuters reporter wrote that residents told him that "US bombardments hit a clinic inside the Sunni Muslim city, killing doctors, nurses and patients." The US military denied the reports. Such stories did not make headlines. Civilian casualties in aggressive US wars don't sell media space....

Retired Marine Corps general Bernard Trainor declared that: militarily "Fallujah is not going to be much of a plus at all." He admitted that "we've knocked the hell out of this city, and the only insurgents we really got were the nut-cases and zealots, the smart ones left behind- the guys who really want to die for Allah." While Pentagon spin doctors boasted of a US "victory, Trainor pointed out that the "terrorists remain at large."

The media accepts axiomatically that US troops wear the "white hats" in this conflict. They do not address the obvious: Washington illegally invaded and occupied Iraq and "re-conquered" Fallujah -- for no serious military purpose. Logically, the media should call Iraqi "militants" patriots who resisted illegal occupation. Instead, the press implied that the "insurgents" even fought dirty, using improvised explosive devices and booby traps to kill our innocent soldiers, who use clean weapons like F16s, helicopter gun ships, tanks and artillery....

Banality and corruption arise from the epic evil of this war, one that has involved massive civilian death and the destruction of ancient cities....

That [Nazi] doctrine [of "Total War"] became practice in late April 1937. Nazi pilots dropped their deadly bombs on Guernica, the ancient Basque capital ­ like what US pilots recently did to Falluja. A year earlier, in 1936, the Spanish Civil War erupted. General Francisco Franco, supported by fascist governments in Italy and Germany, led an armed uprising against the Republic. The residents of Guernica resisted. Franco asked his Nazi partners to punish these stubborn people who had withstood his army's assault....

Almost 1700 people died that day and some 900 lay wounded. Franco denied that the raid ever took place and blamed the destruction of Guernica on those who defended it, much as the US military intimates that the "insurgents' forced the savage attack by daring to defend their city and then hide inside their mosques. Did the public in 1937 face the equivalent of the Peterson case that commanded their attention?...

In Germany and Italy in 1937, the media focused on the vicissitudes suffered by those pilots who were sacrificing for the ideals of their country by combating a "threat." The US media prattles about the difficulties encountered by the US marines. It never calls them bullies who occupy another people's country, subduing patriots with superior technology to kill civilians and destroy their homes and mosques. On November 15, an embedded NBC cameraman filmed a US soldier murdering a wounded Iraqi prisoner in cold blood. As CNN showed the tape, its reporter offered "extenuating circumstances" for the assassination we had witnessed....

The reporting smacks of older imperial wars, Andrew Greely reminded us in the November 12, Chicago Sun Times. "The United States has fought unjust wars before -- Mexican American, the Indian Wars, Spanish American, the Filipino Insurrection, Vietnam. Our hands are not clean. They are covered with blood, and there'll be more blood this time." Falluja should serve as the symbol of this war of atrocity against the Iraqi people, our Guernica. But, as comedian Chris Rock insightfully points out, George W. Bush has distracted us. That's why he killed Laci Peterson, why he snuck that young boy into Michael Jackson's bedroom and the young woman into Kobe Bryant's hotel room. He wants us not to think of the war in Iraq. We need a new Picasso mural, "Falluja," to help citizens focus on the themes of our time, not the travails of the Peterson case. The Bush Administration sensed the danger of such a painting. Shortly before Colin Powell's February 5, 2003 UN Security Council fraudulent, power point presentation, where he made the case for invading Iraq, UN officials, at US request, placed a curtain over a tapestry of Picasso's Guernica, located at the entrance to the Security Council chambers. As a TV backdrop, the anti-war mural would contradict the Secretary of State's case for war in Iraq. Did the dead painter somehow know that his mural would foreshadow another Guernica, called Fallujah?

And another nice item from the mailbag

This Australian student no doubt speaks for many observers of the U.S. election from abroad:

Dear Professor Leiter

Hi.  I am an Australian student (of philosophy, actually, and maths).  As an Australian I have had to undergo not one but two depressing elections recently.  There was the one in which I got to vote, though that vote ended up amounting to very little, as the election saw a return to power of our current conservative government with an incresed majority in the lower house and newly awarded control of the senate; and there was the one I cared about - the American election.

Not that I don't care about what happens over here.  It is only that I am aware of the obvious truth that a bad Australian government is relatively limited in the amount of damage it can do.  Also, domestic policy, while bitterly fought in the details, is not really going to move too far, by world standards.  Noone here, for instance, would dream of doing away with universal health care, or unemployment benefits (I'm not sure you even have such a thing in America). We are pretty well looked after, here.

A bad American government, on the other hand, could mean the end of civilization.  Perhaps that's a little hysterical, I know, but I really felt the fate of the world was to be decided in this last election.  I could not and still can not think of a single event that could make the world better than a change of administration in America.  Perhaps you can imagine my frustration and feelings of impotence knowing that there was nothing I could do to influence the outcome.  I desperately wanted some way to be able to engage in events.  My way of doing this was to watch The News Hour with Jim Lehrer religiously (we get it on a channel called 'SBS'; it screens news-services from all over the world, mostly for the benefit of immigrants and expatriates).  Man, I love that show.  It's the highest quality news show on Australian television, which is an indication of the unfortunate state of journalism in Australia, overall.

An aside: my frustration at being a bystander to decisions that determine the outcome of the world was bad, but it must be nothing compared to that of a citizen of a country that is on the arse-end of American foreign policy. In Australia, if the wrong government gets elected in America, your Prime Minister looks smug.  In Iraq, if the wrong government gets elected in America, your family gets blown up.  And you have no say in the processes that caused this, and no way to make those responsible accountable.

Anyway, on election night (day, here) I went to the country, to my parents' house (they have cable, and thus get CNN), and watched the slow death of hope.  I was gutted.  I'm still a little shell shocked.  Since then, I have been trying to find some solace in the internet.  This is where you come in.  I have been reading your blog regularly since then, and it has been of enormous comfort to get the impression, as I have, that there are a community of people over there that resist all this madness.  Thank you.

I knew that already, of course.  I have a number of American friends, many of whom seem to share my political opinions, generally, and I am aware that the U.S. is a big and complicated place, with room enough for many voices.  But it is one to know in the abstract that there must be resistance, and another to see it happening.

I am a fan of sanity; it is rare and precious commodity.  You seem also to be fan.  There is a brotherhood in that.

Ignorance, Scientific Illiteracy and the Presidential Election

This recent poll data is striking, offering scant comfort to Democrats (whose ranks are also swelled by the hordes of the ignorant) and sheer horror to friends of the Enlightenment:

55% of Americans believe, falsely, that God created humans in their present form.  While 67% of Bush voters believe that, so do 47% of Kerry voters.

Only 13% of Americans believe that human beings evolved without a guiding hand from God.  A mere 21% of Kerry voters subscribe to that belief, while a piddling 6% of Bush voters share that belief.

65% of Americans want creationism taught along with evolution in the public schools (and so do 56% of Kerry voters!).  But cheer up, only 37% of Americans want evolution replaced outright with creationism.  Now that's a real tribute to the American spirit of even-handedness.

There are plainly many more ignorant and intellectually backwards countries in the world than the United States; but the list of those that outpace America on this score (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Pakistan) is hardly reassuring.  What seems clear is that there is nowhere in the world that combines the same level of excellence at the highest levels of the sciences and humanities with such astonishing backwardness in the popular culture at large.

From the Mail Bag

Since I occasionally print the stray abusive e-mail I still sometimes get (I think I've largely purged the readership of the juvenile and ressentiment-filled right-wingers who send such missives), I suppose I am entitled to print an especially nice one, this from a graduate student in Florida:

I applaud your efforts to defy all things simple-minded, dogmatic, pernicious, and ignorant.  Unfortunately, given today's cultural and political climate, you have far too much to rant about.  Just know that both my fiancé and I--as well as several of the other lawyers at the firm she works at--read your blog daily.  It is one of the few things that help us maintain a sense of sanity and balance in this time of impending darkness. 

That is, indeed, a gratifying note to receive, and a good motivation to keep on slogging through the dark times ahead.

Citations to Political Science Profs in Law Reviews

Keith Whittington, a well-known public law scholar in the Politics Department at Princeton, has prepared an interesting study of the frequency of citation to political science professors who study law and courts.   The study confirms that law professors pay relatively scant attention to the quite interesting work on law that goes on in Political Science Departments.  Indeed, the top three faculty on the list--Chicago's Cass Sunstein, Yale's Bruce Ackerman, and Texas's Sanford Levinson--are all scholars whose primary appointment is in the law school at their university.  Indeed, half the top ten are faculty who spent most of their academic careers in law schools.  The five in the top ten who have spent their academic careers outside law schools are Austin Sarat at Amherst College, Michael Sandel at Harvard University, Jon Elster at Columbia University, Robert George at Princeton University, and Gerald Rosenberg at the University of Chicago.  None of these latter five, strikingly, would have made it on to a list of the 75 most cited legal scholars, and only one might have made it (just barely!) on to a list of the 100 most cited scholars in law reviews.

It Could Happen Here

The final installment of David Neiwert's well-crafted and chilling account of fascist tendencies in modern America. 

Thus Spoke Nietzsche

"The vanity of others offends our taste only when it offends our vanity."

--Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 176.

"What is noble?  What does the word 'noble' still mean to us today?  What betrays, what allows one to recognize the noble human being, under this heavy, overcast sky of the beginning rule of the plebs that makes everything opaque and leaden?...

"It is not the works, it is the faith that is decisive here, that determines the order of rank--to take up again an ancient religious formula in a new and more profound sense:  some fundamental certainty that a noble soul has about itself, something that cannot be sought, nor found, nor perhaps lost.

"The noble soul has reverence for itself."

--Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 288

Disclaimer Stickers for Science Textbooks...

...are available here.  (By the way, the first one was really proposed in Georgia!)  These should come in handy as the United States sinks further in to the dark night of ignorance. 

(Thanks to Doug Barnes for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  Professor Daniel Ray from Eastern Michigan University notes some complications posed by the recommended stickers:

Prof. Leiter:  Enjoy your site tremendously, and I'm laughing (better to do that than cry, I suppose) at the linked disclaimers page.  However, I must take issue with a couple of the disclaimers.  First, the sticker on continental drift is blatantly inaccurate.  We are witnessing this continent drift backwards into pre-Enlightenment with each passing day.  As to the disclaimer on gravity, it's correct as far as it goes, but to make it completely accurate, the following needs to be added:

If you intend to experiment with your childrens' lives using the theory of gravity as you are willing to do with their education using the theory of evolution, you should first acquaint yourself with the principle of deceleration.  This principle posits that a relatively smaller mass accelerating toward a larger mass will, upon contacting that larger mass, rapidly decelerate.  The rapidly decelerating mass, if theretofore living, may thus end up in a theoretical state sometimes referred to as dead.  See the death theory disclaimer.

Of course, this would then necessitate a disclaimer that death is merely a theory that some people believe to be false by reason of the theory of eternal life (meaning, of course, another sticker), and that the theory of death should be approached with an open mind and cautiously.

Sorry to open up such a can of worms here; just trying to be helpful.

Demolishing Gertrude Himmelfarb

Gertrude Himmelfarb is a conservative historian who is reasonably prominent in the United States because of her politics, not the quality of her historical scholarship.  (Isn't it ironic that the champions of merit and high standards are overwhelmingly represented by intellectuals whose work fails to meet those standards?  Remember Allan Bloom?)  The political theorist Alan Ryan has a skillful and understated demolition of Himmelfarb in the December 2 New York Review of Books.  He is reviewing her latest book, The Roads to Modernity:  The British, French, and American Enlightenments.  Although readers will know my preferred modus operandi is to "philosophize with a hammer" (as Nietzsche says), I must say I very much admire what Ryan has done here.  Early on, he notes:

There is room for disagreement about the quality of Gertrude Himmelfarb's work as a historian and room for concern about the extent to which it has been damaged by her political preoccupations--some might say obsessions.  What leaves no room for disagreement is the quality of her writing, which has a verve and sharpness absent from most academic prose, and if there is always much to disagree with in what she says, she says it with wonderful clarity.  The Roads to Modernity is no exception.  It is a pleasure to read.  There is a great deal to be said against the line Ms. Himmelfarb takes, but much to be said in favor of the way she does it.

Notice how skillfully this is done:  several hints are dropped that, on substance, there are serious problems here, but high and generous marks are given for style.  Ryan then moves to an extended summary of the argument of Himmelfarb's book, with almost no editorial comments mixed in.  The crux of her position is to distinguish the British Enlightenment from the French one, and to argue that,

the "good" [British] Enlightenment was not a rationalist, secular, radical enterprise at all.  It was mildly progressive, socially conservative, culturally tolerant....[Its intellectual] heroes [Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke] were...sociologists of virtue.  "Virtue" in this context is a term of art:  it has nothing to do with the preservation of one's virginity, but everything to do with the qualities that make us useful members of society.

The bulk of the review essay is given over to an exposition of Ms. Himmelfarb's claims about these thinkers and the British Enlightenment.  Only in the final few paragraphs does Ryan finally unleash the critical reservations.  It begins with the following rather gentle reprimand:

Ms. Himmelfarb is a vivid writer, but oddly naive.  She writes as though it is an urgent matter to understand who thought what and to award them good and bad marks for their ideas; but she never stops to discuss how much impact intellectuals have on the politics of their day, or to wonder what conditions must obtain if they are to have an impact....

This line of criticism--Ms. Himmelfarb's "unconcern with questions of causation" as Ryan quietly puts it--is developed over the next few paragraphs, setting the stage for the final blow (and what a brilliant blow it is):

The Roads to Modernity is perhaps not to be read as history.  It is certainly very entertaining if read simply as a slight essay on some distinguished thinkers.  But Ms. Himmelfarb--as her epilogue makes clear--means it as more than that.  It is meant to defend the view that America, in its current Republican incarnation, represents what is best in "modernity."  And as we know from what she has recently written elsewhere, this includes President Bush's version of the war on terror, his unflinching support for Ariel Sharon's Israel, and his faith-based initiatives in welfare and education.  The defense of America also includes belittling the achievements of countries whose inhabitants lead longer and more healthy lives than those of the United States, and whose workers are, on an hourly basis, the most productive in the world.  One can only observe that the parochialism, narrowness, and insularity of her political outlook betray the cosmopolitan ethos that her book defends.  They are also, and in themselves, silly.

What a tour de force!  This could almost stand as an epitaph on what passes for conservative public intellectual thought in America today:  sometimes "entertaining," intellectually "slight," and ultimately "silly."

Only those on the Left are reasonable...

...according to this article about the growing number of new, overtly religious law schools (such as Regent, Ava Maria, St. Thomas in Minnesota, and Liberty):

"The prevailing orthodoxy at the elite law schools is an extreme rationalism that draws a strong distinction between faith and reason," said Bruce W. Green, Liberty's dean.

The claim that professors at the leading law schools tilt to the left is supported by statistics....

Interesting juxtaposition of points, isn't it? 

Web Stat Counter Finally Operational

My web stat counter is now on the new site (see the bottom left of the links list), though it hasn't of course counted the first 3 weeks here.  According to Typepad, here's what the first three weeks at the new site brought in terms of readership:

Total number of hits:	93707
Average per day:	3346.68
Today:	7497
In the last hour:	254
This week:	27581

As noted on an earlier thread, though, it appears that at least the daily hit count is really a page view count...well, we'll find out soon enough, once we get past the holidays, how the move has affected the readership.  The anecdotal evidence, based on e-mail correspondence, does suggest the readership is up.  Thanks to all for your interest!

UPDATE:  With Web Stat back in operation, it looks like daily hits to the site are, indeed, averaging well over 3,000 per day.  I better get to work on my holiday greetings cards...

Problems Accessing This Site?

I've heard from two readers who have had some difficulties accessing this site from certain browsers, but not others:  the site appears, but there is no text.  Sometimes hitting the reload button suffices to restore the text.  If you have encountered a problem, would you e-mail me and let me know what kind of browser you were using when you encountered the problem.  Thanks.

Summary of Specialty Rankings for All Canadian Departments

Richard Zach (Philosophy, Calgary) has compiled all the data here based on the new PGR.

The Right-Wing Attack on the Universities is Going Mainstream

The telltale sign that right-wing mischief is going mainstream is when The New York Times starts reporting on it as though it is something other than right-wing mischief.  The Orwellian "Academic Freedom Bill of Rights" (whose aim is to destroy academic freedom, by substituting political criteria for academic hiring)--about which we've taken note previously--is now featured, with the proverbial fake pose of journalist neutrality, in this Times article:

One of the studies, a national survey of more than 1,000 academics, shows that Democratic professors outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. That ratio is more than twice as lopsided as it was three decades ago, and it seems quite likely to keep increasing, because the younger faculty members are more consistently Democratic than the ones nearing retirement, said Daniel Klein, an associate professor of economics at Santa Clara University and a co-author of the study.

In a separate study of voter registration records, Professor Klein found a nine-to-one ratio of Democrats to Republicans on the faculties of Berkeley and Stanford. That study, which included professors from the hard sciences, engineering and professional schools as well as the humanities and social sciences, also found the ratio especially lopsided among the younger professors of assistant or associate rank: 183 Democrats versus 6 Republicans.

The political imbalance on faculties has inspired a campaign to have state legislatures and Congress approve an "academic bill of rights" protecting students and faculty members from discrimination for their political beliefs. The campaign is being led by Students for Academic Freedom, a group with chapters at Berkeley and more than 135 other campuses. It was founded last year by the leftist-turned-conservative David Horowitz, who helped start the 1960's antiwar movement while a graduate student at Berkeley.

"Our goal is not to have the government dictate who's hired but to take politics out of the hiring process and the classroom," said Mr. Horowitz, who called the new studies the most compelling evidence yet of hiring bias. "Right now, conservative students are discouraged from pursuing scholarly careers, because they see very clearly that their professors consider Republicans to be the enemy."

Perhaps, though, the ratio of Democratic voters to Republican voters in the academy has increased over time because the Republican party has gone increasingly bonkers, such that educated and informed people by and large can't stomach it any more?  Anyone in academia can think of many conservative and libertarian colleagues who won't vote Republican anymore for exactly these reasons; we've seen, before, libertarian commentators taking the same position.

Nothing in these studies, of course, shows hiring bias, unless one assumes that (1) the supply of Republican candidates is more or less equal to the supply of Democratic candidates for faculty positions, and (2) the candidates are of equal merit otherwise.  Why think either is true?  Some evidence, I'm afraid, is needed, at least in the reality-based community.

Here's a pertinent fact, based on 8 years on the Appointments Committee of the Law School here:  of the three dozen candidates I actively supported and recruited during this time, I had no idea what the political views were of about half of them; in some cases, I still don't know!  There are some fields, and law is often one of them, where candidates wear their politics on their sleeve; but in most fields, including many parts of law, they don't.  I've certainly seen politically motivated voting for and against candidates for law teaching positions from the right and the left--both here and at my former institution, San Diego--but I've never seen it, for example, in Philosophy.  And Philosophy is plainly more typical of most academic fields:  you either have the requisite technical skills or you don't, and one's party registration is basically invisible.   Given that the hard sciences, as well as fields like philosophy, have similar ratios of Democrats to Republicans, bias seems an increasingly unlikely explanation for the overall proportions (though it may be more pertinent in some particular areas than others).

Meanwhile, the confessed right-wing villains at The Wall Street Journal editorial page have also joined in the chorus for the destruction of the universities:

One way to combat groupthink would be if donors to universities and regents began pressuring faculties to adopt an Academic Bill of Rights that would forbid university faculties from hiring, firing, and granting or denying promotion or tenure on the basis of political beliefs. When Mr. Horowitz suggested the idea be adopted at Colorado's public universities, he was accused of advocating "quotas" and "McCarthyism." He calmly explained that his plan eschews quotas and only requires universities to judge professors on their merits, not ideology. After several legislative hearings, Colorado university officials voluntarily adopted a variation of his Academic Bill of Rights to ward off a more muscular one the Legislature was considering.

Colorado has also gone further and adopted a reform that could serve as a model for how to make higher education more accountable to students and the taxpayers which pay its bills. Starting next year, the state will start shifting its higher-ed dollars from direct payments to universities to vouchers that will go directly to students. The idea is hardly radical. It is taken from the GI Bill of Rights, which is widely credited with giving returning veterans a chance at college through a program that won universal acclaim.

Debating such reforms is perfectly legitimate given that about half of the budget of public university systems come from taxpayers. Private universities derive about 35% of their budgets from public money, largely research grants. In addition, much of the student loan and grant money used to pay college tuition flows from taxpayer sources.

Somone worried that conservatives are, in fact, stupid might take much solace from this editorial and its "reasoning" that paying for a portion of a service makes it "legitimate" to determine how the service is provided (so much for academic freedom).  Of course, by this logic, the "consumers" are entitled to determine only one-third to one-half of the service; I propose giving them all of English, as long as they leave Philosophy alone!    

The real difficulty, of course, is that if you create rights, you also have to have remedies.  And at some point even the genuinely dumb conservatives will notice that the Horowitz proposal will create causes of action for Marxist economists who can't be hired by economics departments, for postmodernists who can't get hired by philosophy departments,  and on and on.  And what is to stop Intelligent Design creationists from suing biology departments that won't hire them?  Or alchemists from suing Chemistry departments?  You get the idea.

The problem with which no one wants to come to terms is this:  not all ideologies have merit.   That there are relatively few Republicans in the universities may simply be co-extensional with the fact that there are relatively few educated people who believe that Iraq attacked the World Trade Center, a belief, as we know, that is widely shared among Bush supporters.  Surely this possibility has to be entertained, if one were really serious about the question of bias. 

There remains, of course, the astonishing irony that conservatives generally resist inferring bias against blacks from their relatively small numbers in academia:  insufficient supply of qualified candidates and merit are the preferred explanations.  Why not think the same is true with respect to card-carrying Republicans?  Surely an argument is needed.

UPDATE:  Related thoughts here, with a pleasingly direct conclusion.  (Thanks to Bob Seltzer for the pointer.)

Canadian Involvement in the Iraq War

Details here; an excerpt:

Canada has long denied any role in the US war. However, General Dynamics, the US "defense" contractor, recently announced a deal with Canada's SNC Technologies Inc. as part of a multinational consortium of small-caliber ammunition producers. Their purpose is to supply between 300 million-500 million more bullets to occupation forces per year, and potentially for at least five years.

The high demand in bullets is in response to a recent U.S. Army market survey for a "Small-Caliber Ammunition Systems Integrator". The Financial Times reports that the US occupation forces will need 300m to 500m more bullets a year for at least five years. And because the single army-owned, small-calibre ammunition factory in Lake City, Missouri, can produce only 1.2m bullets annually, the army is suddenly scrambling to get private defense contractors to help fill the gap....

But sadly, this ammunitions contract is only the tip of the iceberg. Canada has quietly supported the US led war on Iraq even before Canada had taken an official position.

As early as February, 2003 Canada had provided strategic support for the war on Iraq by transferring 25 military planners from US Central Command in Tampa, Florida to the US command post in Qatar.

Other evidence that Canada supported the war includes the use of Canadian military personnel aboard the US Air Force's E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning And Control System air craft. The E-3 Sentry provides all-weather surveillance, command, control and communications for the military. According to the US Air Force, one such aircraft, "carried approximately 180 members from the 552nd Air Control Wing -- the wing's Canadian component -- and 513th Air Control Group reservists. The units were deployed supporting operations Enduring and Iraqi Freedom."

More, also in February, 2003, Commander Roger Girouard assumed command of the navy Task Force 151, located in the Persian Gulf, under an agreement by Ottawa and Washington. The Task Force was responsible for escorting ships, intercepting and boarding suspect ships and guarding against attacks on shipping. Girouard was in charge of up to 20 allied ships from several different countries, including the United States, France, Italy, Greece and Canada. The Canadian Government even allowed US planes on route to Iraq to fly through Canadian air space and to refuel, this ended after the first 3 weeks in March, 2003.

It is, no doubt, rather difficult for the Northern neighbor of a mad imperialist power to completely disentangle itself.  And when there is money to be made....

Four Major (Part-Time) Appointments for USD Law

The University of San Diego School of Law has made four quarter-time appointments of leading scholars from the University of California at San Diego (which does not have a law school):  Richard Arneson (political philosophy), David Brink (moral, political, & legal philosophy), Matthew McCubbins (positive political theory), and Michelle White (law & economics).

Ohio Election Irregularities Still Put Election in Doubt

Details here; an excerpt:

[T]estimony has revealed a widespread and concerted effort on the part of Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell to deny primarily African-American and young voters the right to cast their ballots within a reasonable time. By depriving precincts of adequate numbers of functioning voting machines, Blackwell created waits of three to eleven hours, driving tens of thousands of likely Democratic voters away from the polls and very likely affecting the outcome of the Ohio vote count, which in turn decided the national election.

Let us suppose this all turns out to be true; it would still be the case that Bush won the popular vote nationally, and that fact stands as an eternal indictment of the moral sanity of the United States.

A call to ban Bush from Canada

Michael Mandel (a well-known authority on international criminal law at Osgoode Hall/York University, perhaps Canada's leading law faculty) and Gail Davidson, an attorney, have written to the Prime Minister of Canada as follows:

It was with absolute dismay that we learned of the planned visit of President Bush to Canada on November 30th 2004.

Surely you are aware of the many grave crimes against humanity and war crimes for which President Bush stands properly accused by the world, starting with the Nuremberg Tribunal's 'supreme international crime' of waging an aggressive war against Iraq in defiance of international law and the Charter of the United Nations, and including systematic and massive violations of the Geneva Conventions Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War and Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, as well as the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. As recently as November 16, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and former war crimes prosecutor Louise Arbour called for an investigation into crimes against the Geneva Conventions in the assault by US forces on the densely populated city of Fallujah....

The President's responsibility for these offences derives not only from his 'command responsibility' as Commander in Chief of US forces, for crimes that he knew were being committed, or ignored through willful blindness, but did nothing to prevent; it also comes from his direct involvement in the formulation of policy. This includes his personal involvement not only in the devising and waging of an aggressive, illegal war, but also of the unlawful refusal to grant prisoner of war status to prisoners of war, contrary to specific provisions of the Geneva Conventions, an act repudiated in the US Courts. It also includes the approval of techniques of interrogation by his direct subordinate, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, that legally and morally constitute torture and that led directly to the disgraceful violence against Iraqi prisoners, for example at the prison at Abu Ghraib.

As you know, not only are these acts criminal under international law, but many of them are also criminal under Canadian law, under laws enacted in pursuance of our international obligations, most importantly the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act, put in place just four years ago under a Liberal government. They also violate the provisions on torture in the Canadian Criminal Code.

By these laws, Canadians and non-Canadians alike are liable to prosecution in Canada, no matter where in the world they have committed their crimes. Furthermore, as the Attorney General can advise, the fact that these crimes have been committed by Mr. Bush while President of the United States is absolutely irrelevant to his personal liability to prosecution in Canada, according to principles established at Nuremberg and universally recognized since then, including by the British House of Lords in the Pinochet case in 1999. And if President Bush were to visit Canada after leaving office, we would be seeking the Attorney General's permission under section 9 of the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act and section 7 of the Criminal Code to commence proceedings against him.

However, as you also know, should President Bush come to Canada now, while still President, he would be clothed with both diplomatic and head of state immunity from our laws and we would be powerless to bring him to justice.

Your invitation in these circumstances, therefore, shows contempt for both Canadian and international law and is a grievous insult to the literally hundreds of thousands of victims of President Bush's international crimes. It is also our belief that the invitation endangers Canadians' security at home and abroad, because it is a departure from our steadfast refusal to this point to participate in this criminal war of the Bush administration. In fact, it is our belief that this invitation can only act as an encouragement to President Bush in his continuing criminal activity, providing him with an important platform in this, his first post re-election foreign visit, to defend illegal US actions in Iraq and to improve his international standing despite them, all this against the wishes of the majority of Canadians....

It's nice to see that moral sanity and respect for the rule of law still exist somewhere in North America.

More friends of academic freedom...

...will no doubt be making themselves heard over the next few years, since universities remain one of the few elite institutions in American society not taken over by the forces of reaction; here's what's in store (this is subscriber access only):

Oneida J. Meranto did something this semester that she had never done in her career. She tape-recorded her lecture.

The reason: self-protection. Last winter two students filed grievances accusing the associate professor of political science at Metropolitan State College of Denver of having a liberal bias and intimidating conservative students.

Although college officials found as recently as October that she had done nothing wrong, she received death threats and dozens of hateful e-mail messages. She was too frightened to walk to her car alone, so students escorted her.

Should she be accused of bias again, she wanted a record of what she had said.

Sure enough, two days after she taped her lecture, another student filed a grievance against the tenured professor.

Plainly faculty in the inherently political disciplines, like political science, will be more vulnerable to these smear campaigns and intimidation tactics.  But it is good to know that the remedy for allegations of bias are death threats and hateful e-mails.

UPDATE:  Thanks to a right-wing NYC tabloid, these Columbia professors can now expect similar harassment for their political views.  Sadly, we have noted before the political campaign against Middle Eastern Studies that has been under way for some time.  (Let me add that I know close to nothing about what goes on in Middle Eastern Studies--it could be the field is as intellectually feeble as, say, Straussianism in political theory, or postmodernism in philosophy.  But it is very clear that the attack on the field has nothing to do with the intellectual merits, and everything to do with persecution of individuals for their political views, occasionally disguised with unconfirmed hearsay about teacher misconduct.)

Being a Good Lawyer Doesn't Mean You Can Make a Good Argument

This lawyer/philosopher takes apart some really bad arguments Eugene Volokh (Law, UCLA) has been making about the role of religious beliefs in public policy.  It pays to study philosophy.

UPDATE:  Ted Warfield (Philosophy, Notre Dame) reminds me that a good philosophical treatment of this whole subject is the debate between Robert Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff in their book Religion and the Public Square:  The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).

Notre Dame's Memorial Site for Philip Quinn...

...is now available here.

New Philosophers' Carnival (#5) is...

here.

Deja Vu All Over Again...The Priming Begins for the Next War

Details here, wherein that force for "moderation" in the Bush Administration, who helped lie us in to the last criminal and immoral war, starts all over again:

Powell partially confirmed claims by an Iranian opposition group that Tehran is deceiving the United Nations and is attempting to secretly continue activities meant to give it atomic arms by next year.

"I have seen intelligence which would corroborate what this dissident group is saying," Powell told reporters Wednesday as he traveled to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Santiago, Chile. "And it should be of concern to all parties."

Especially those between the ages of 18 and 26.

Many thanks to the Stanley brothers...

...for an extremely interesting week of postings on matters philosophical, economic, and political.  You can view their full week of contributions here, some of which I'll probably be returning to myself over the next couple of weeks.

Assuming their significant others agree, I hope to have Jason and Marcus Stanley back again before too long.

The end of the line for local news?

I presume that you, like me, rarely see the farce that local "news" programs have become.  But here in Cleveland I recently saw a local news show that set a new low.  This is Cleveland Action 19, a devoted practitioner of the "Stripper's Costume Too Revealing -- Film At 11!" school of journalism.  I occasionally catch them, and it's always funny to see the anchor try to project the proper Cronkite-esque sobriety while reading the latest manufactured sex scandal.  But imagine my surprise this past week when I saw they had actually gotten one of their anchors to strip for a performance art project, and broadcast her nude pictures on the air!  It seems they have eliminated the middleperson and are no longer dependent on the public to produce titillating "news".  Perhaps they could have the weatherman kill his wife and then give exclusive interviews to them during his trial?  The possibilities are endless.

Leaving journalism to the market alone tends to result in a race to the bottom, since actual news is rarely as interesting as the tabloid stuff one can cook up.  There is an externalities problem, since while each of us individually would rather watch the attractive naked newscaster (or perhaps I'm projecting here), we would also prefer to live in a community where the majority of citizens actually knew what was going on in their public life.

Marcus Stanley

Some final points on economic methodology and "humanism"

In the social sciences people frequently counterpose methodological purity to indulging "softer" concerns.  But I would argue that in economics at least the reluctance to face squarely up to the complexities of culture and a truly rich vision of psychology has led to its own methodological problems.  The desire to keep culture outside the theoretical system -- to stuff it in the ceteris paribus clauses if possible -- have led to what one might call the "parameterization" of culture.  Some economists' response to the "culture of poverty" debate was to essentially load the whole thing on to discount rates.  People were poor because they had high discount rates for the future.  Why they did was some other disciplines' business.   That is legitimate in one sense, but also a rather embarassing evasion of the central question.  If most of the variance in poverty (after all an economic question) is due to a factor that economists can't theorize but can only rename, how far have we really gotten methodologically?

The problem is even greater in the more recent "social capital" debates.  Here we sometimes seem to see an attempt to reduce all of sociology and social interaction into a single parameter to be stuffed into a regression equation.  Presumably the parameter represents "all the other cultural stuff" that affects economic interaction.  (See Ben Fine's book "Social Capital Versus Social Theory" for some discussion of what I am getting at).  This is in its own way just as "ad hoc" methodologically as any hand-waving ascription of economic differences to cultural character would be, perhaps worse because of the veneer of scientific rhetoric.   

Again, in fairness there is much interesting work in this area starting to happen within economics that I do not have time to discuss here.    Frankly that is true across the areas I have discussed in my last few posts -- economics is starting to make exciting moves toward the other social sciences in ways that go beyond boring extensions of stripped down rational actor models.  At times I think that some of this work is still too individualistic and continues to "evade culture" (in the sense that it does not try to look at the the structure of shared interpretive meanings that communities develop), but it is worthwhile and innovative stuff.

Well, there is much more to be said but not the time to really develop it.  For example, some economists have for a while been trying to develop evolutionary psychology as a way to give some kind of behavioral backbone to "homo economicus" while still appearing sufficiently scientific.  (This goes back to Gary Becker in the 1970s).  This is also an attempt that I think is doomed to fail.  Mainly because I think that evolutionary psychology done correctly will itself turn out to be a social and cultural discipline rather than the key to a comprehensive set of universal biological human desires and drives.   But perhaps more on that elsewhere...thanks for listening!

Marcus Stanley

More on "humanistic" concerns in economics

Our time here is ending, but I did want to add a follow-up to my previous post on economics and humanism.  Since these kinds of discussions are often carried out on an almost maddeningly abstract plane, I wanted to give more specific examples of how a certain kind of "scientism" has harmed economics.

One example that comes immediately to mind is that economists have tended to confuse "markets" with "capitalism".  The neoclassical school did seem to feel at some level that it had created a science of markets, one that it was quite proud of.  In so doing, it turned its back on an earlier, more sociological tradition rooted in Marx and Weber that saw capitalism as a much broader phenomenon than just markets.  Capitalism in this tradition requires a particular culture to support it, a particular kind of government and politics (not so much a democracy as a strong but non-arbitrary government), the emergence of particular sorts of class identities, a particular sort of relationship with applied technology, a new orientation toward investment among the business class, etc.  In short a whole bunch of supporting cultural institutions that make markets function in a recognizably "capitalist" way.   Now, it is easy to criticize that tradition for being overly deterministic in its theory of how culture was related to economic change (Weber was not an optimist about China's ability to develop capitalism).  But in ignoring cultural factors economics also developed its own sort of institutional determinism -- "build free markets and the capitalists will come".  Not always...sometimes a gang of thieves come instead.

I think this failure of imagination is related to the poor record Western economists have had in guiding countries across the developmental divide between pre-capitalism and modern capitalism.  There have been a number of disasters in that area (led by Russia in the 90s).  Just as the earlier tradition would have predicted, successful development often seems to have more to do with the maintenance of pre-existing cultural traditions and the transformation of pre-existing forms of social solidarity into more "capitalist" versions than with institutional change alone.  The success of Asian countries (Japan, Korea, China) in following some very non-neoclassical routes to development success seems relevant here.

But economic development is notoriously difficult.  I think that the impoverishment of the "culture of capitalism" side of economics is also related to some of the things we saw in the "New Economy" frenzy of the 1990s.  Economists pushed stock options hard as a means of linking managerial pay to performance.  Yet they greatly underestimated the ways in which stock options themselves could become a means of rent extraction.  To put it more plainly, they got taken for a ride and ended up making a significant behind-the-scenes contribution to the quick-buck culture that actually destroyed a lot of value during the stock market bubble.  There are value-creating ways of maximizing profits and other ways that do not create value.  A lot of what healthy capitalism is about is developing a business culture that accepts only a limited subset of the possible ways to maximize profits.  (This has a good deal to do with future orientation, but I think future orientation is too vague a concept to do justice to it). 

Thinkers like Daniel Bell have argued that modern capitalism is actually dependent on its pre-capitalist cultural heritage to remain healthy, a heritage which some critics argue is being depleted.  I find the work in this tradition to be too casual methodologically and more provocative than convincing.  But the ideas in it deserve greater development.  Honestly, that kind of development is already starting to happen in economics. 

More on the divide...

The philosopher Alva Noe, in a comment below, says the following about the so-called 'technical-humanist' divide:

"Here's an attempt to get at what people may have in mind when they talk about such a divide. We all recognize the stereotype of the philosopher, or the humanist, at work in his attic, thinking deep thoughts, making ready, after long and isolated effort, to spring his (rarely her) efforts, perfect and whole, on the world without. That humanistic stereotype may be contrasted with a different sort of paradigm: research as collaboration. On this model, dominant in the sciences, research is a genuinely collective undertaking, produced by teams, in laboratories or research groups, centers and institutes. Well, I think that in the last several years we have seen the emergence, within philosophy, of something more like the scientific, collaborative model. Many philosophers now work collaboratively, and view publication less as the offering of Finished Products, than as a contribution to an ongoing discussion. Philosophers of this sort are more likely to publish more, for they set a 'lower' standard on when work is ready for publication, and they are more likely to team up with others, and perhaps even more likely to blog. Certain departments have a reputation for the more rough-and-tumble, outgoing, collaborative kind of philosophy. Others have a reputation for the more traditional, work-alone style. (This may just be related to the age of the faculty.) And there is likely to be an opposition between these groups. From the standpoint of the more gregarious team-workers, the humanists may seem rather old-fashioned. And from the standpoint of the more traditional humanistic philosophers, the new folks may seem to lack depth."

Alva also says he does not think this is a "deep divide", and that it doesn't map onto a deep difference in philosophical orientation. In other words, Alva is arguing that the divide is much more over changing philosophical style than over substance. Back in May, David Velleman made some interesting comments on this blog, which are an entertaining juxtapositon to Alva's remarks:

"Many oldsters...tend to regard the philosophical blogosphere as symptomatic of troubling intellectual trends, of which I'll list just a few: an indiscriminate fascination with puzzle cases, and a correlative loss of interest in foundational issues; a fascination with snippets of empirical information drawn from linguistics, neuro-science, evolutionary biology, and so on, with no serious thought about whether their apparent relevance to philosophy is real; a blurring of the distinction between recreational philosophical banter and polished works of philosophy, with the result that speed and cleverness of response is valued over intellectual substance; and, finally, an expectation of recognition and reward simply for being at the center of the puzzling-solving, factoid-citing, one-upping action, irrespective of any prospects for lasting intellectual impact."

David's comments are, as he emphasizes, much exaggerated for the sake of argument (knowing David, there is no strong reading of what he says that he believes). But David's comments do suggest that some see the difference in style that Alva points to as in fact tracking a difference in substance, and that this perception divides somewhat along generational lines.

My interest has been in a slightly different distinction in philosophical styles than the ones Alva discusses. In the 'style-clash' I'm thinking of, people also are too quick to infer from stylistic differences to substantive ones (this would also be my critique of David's comment above). Again, resorting to caricature: On one side of the divide I'm thinking about, people are too quick to infer from the fact that someone's arguments are dense and hard to penetrate, and they exploit perhaps needlessly large vocabularly words and references, that the person is just projecting the illusion of depth. On the other side, just because a person's arguments are perfectly clear, or they appeal to something in logic or science, it doesn't follow that the person isn't after something very deep.

I'm not sure how this difference in style relates to the ones Alva and David are discussing. But it's just as real, and results in just as real divisions.

-Jason

Philosophy, Economics, and Society

I agree with Marcus's points about the difficulty of insulating economics from facts about psychology and society. This is presumably because economics is supposed to make predictions about the economic behavior of societies. In contrast, most philosophers think very differently about their subject matter. Generally, we take ourselves to be developing theories about certain properties or relations (metaphysical necessity, knowledge, truth, personhood, explanation), with the use of intuitions that we take to be cross-cultural. On the other hand, some of my colleagues think that the assumption that the intuitions we draw on are cross-cultural is false.

I'm not exactly sure how to proceed in philosophy if the intuitions we draw on are culturally relative. I am pretty certain we won't turn to Foucault. One strategy to exploit if, e.g., intuitions about metaphysical necessity turn out to be culturally relative is to appeal to context-dependence. We could say that "is metaphysically necessary" picks out different properties relative to different contexts of use, and what we philosophers are doing is investigating what they all have in common (this is actually somewhat similar to a move made by David Lewis to accommodate the apparent context-sensitivity of essentialist claims). Anything to avoid Foucault.

UPDATE: Any late-night generalization about what philosophers do turns out to be problematic. My colleague Barry Loewer remarks that I have "overstated the importance of intuitions...at least in some quarters of analytic(?) philosophy." According to Barry, "In philosophy of science intutions - and particularly whether they are cross-cultural- have very little to do with whether e.g. absolute or relational accounts of space are better interpretations of GTR, or  with whether statistical mechanics can ground temporal asymmetries etc. I don't mean that the beliefs we have about the world, e.g. that there are temporal asymmetries  and their nature are irrelevant. They aren't but I wouldn't call these beliefs 'intuitions.' Even some places where philosophers appeal to intutions, e.g. in disputes between Humean and Governing conceptions of laws (or views about objective chance), they are overrated. Same for counterfactuals and causation. The alternative is to get clear about the role of a certain concept e.g. law, in scientific theorizing. Our intuitions may conflict with an account  may tell us something about our psychology, or the cultural history, or bad philosophy that helped shape a concept. But they generally won't tell us much about the world."

The topic of the role of intuitions in philosophy is a very important one, and it bears on some of the issues about the nature of philosophical inquiry we've been discussing (especially in the comments about technical vs. humanist philosophy). There is an issue here about when one is appealing to intuitions that tell us about the nature of a concept (and so doing conceptual analysis, which is supposedly bad) and appealing to facts about the property we're investigating, facts that are simply hard to deny (either for scientific or commonsensical reasons). I grant Barry's point that we're sometimes doing the latter when we think we're doing the former. I didn't mean to suggest otherwise.

The central point of my original post was to discuss why it is implausible to expect that culturally shaped facts will enter into philosophical inquiry in certain areas (roughly metaphysics and epistemology, broadly conceived) in such a way that would lead philosophers to incorporate even very good social theory into their explanations. I linked to Stich et. al.'s work on these topics, because if the plausibility of skepticism (or Gettier cases) turns out to be culturally dependent, then social theory would be as good a place as any to look for an explanation.

My suspicion is that, were philosophers to be convinced about the dependence of a certain class of intuitions on social or cultural facts, then we would use that as a reason to abandon in-depth inquiry into the source of those intuitions. An explanation of why American college students find skepticism plausible but South-East Asian college students don't would no longer be philosophical. As my sociologist father used to tell me, as soon as a question becomes interesting it ceases being philosophical.

It's a standard move in philosophy to argue that a certain bit of discourse is context-sensitive, pragmatically shaped, or what have you. This is used to explain apparently conflicting intuitions or beliefs. Where there is an essentially cultural or social explanation, philosophers are less interested in delving further. I'm not saying that this is healthy or correct, but it's generally first our instinct.

-Jason

Economics, science, and the technical-humanist divide

Looking over my previous windbag posts on economics, I think I was struggling to make some very simple points.  I really do see economics as an interpretive discipline, though a heavily quantitative one.  Quantification and measurement instead of verbal description.  Formal, mathematical theories are used to express the "stories" that make sense of social interaction. Formalisms discipline the process of narrative description, forcing clarity about both assumptions and processes.  They also make it easier to maintain a common disciplinary core of "acceptable" assumptions, preventing the kind of theoretical fragmentation one sees in sociology.  (Although they also greatly limit the generality of descriptions).  But they are still in their own way narratives.  I have very rarely heard references to "laws" in economics seminars, but the term "story" is thrown around a lot (e.g. "is the story you're telling in your model really plausible"?). 

But economics has not (in the past) always seen itself as an interpretive discipline in this way, has if anything been afraid of seeming too similar to the more ad hoc and humanistic polical economy from which it emerged.  One of the most damaging aspects of this fear has been a flight from questions of culture and psychology, a flight that has been harmful for a social science.  Economic theory has tried hard to abstract from culture and psychology by making them purely exogenous inputs into the theory.  (Either in the form of constraints on market behavior or parameters in utility functions).   This has been changing over the last decade in some promising ways, especially with regard to psychology.  Economists are starting to do really interesting work about how to incorporate a better understanding of cultural interaction and psychology directly into formal models.   But economics still starts from a much too impoverished vision of human behavior. 

I wonder if there are some commonalities between the desire to be "technical" or "scientific" that one sees in economics and some of the things Jason is posting about in philosophy.  It seems to me that the internal academic war between "continental" humanism and "Anglo-American" empiricism has impacted a lot of different disciplines, even those that have not suffered any internal split.  From the empiricist side, this above all appears as a flight from questions about the relationship between culture and truth.  I am not talking about the absurdly sophomoric position that culture determines truth.  What I am trying to get at is the way in which certain truths cannot be understood outside of the meanings assigned to those truths within a particular human culture. 

There are numerous examples in economics.  For a simple one, one could think about wages and equilibrium in a labor market.  For a long time, economists tried to understand labor market equilibrium purely with reference to externally measurable quantities like money wages, excess labor demand, and excess supply.  But efficiency wage models show that equilibrium is critically dependent on how work effort responds to wages, on how workers *interpret* their wage.  Worker perceptions of wage fairness that impact the relationship between productivity and wages can completely change labor market models and make Walrasian equilibriums (once posited as an economic "law") almost irrelevant. 

Perceptions about wage fairness are of course a cultural phenomenon.  This does not at all mean they cannot be measured or modeled, but it does mean that they are embedded in a larger, perhaps "humanist" understanding of cultural context.  I don't know philosophy well enough to know what an analogous case of cultural embedding might be, but I suspect they are out there.

Frankly, I have not seen anything that makes me think that more Derrida or Foucault is particularly necessary in either the social sciences or philosophy.  But what is important in the continental tradition is not its current practicitioners but the habit of taking thinkers like Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber seriously.  Again, none of these thinkers can be directly incorporated for methodological reasons if nothing else.  They are out of date.  But their concerns are still deeply relevant and have been ignored in many ways.  (Weber is the most congenial to modern economics; to take just one example he clearly understood efficiency wages long before modern neoclassical economists did).

Marcus Stanley

Megalexandros!

For those of you who didn't waste precious years studying a dead language, that means "Alexander the Great".  A legendary conquerer, and also an Oliver Stone movie opening next week.  I can't wait.  Patricide (well, maybe) by 20, world conquerer by 25, dead by 33.  Is there any more dramatic story in human history? 

The movie almost can't help but be better than the overrated Ring trilogy, which I found a dreary alternation between cutesy hobbit homoeroticism and endless, repetitive battle scenes.  Not to mention that the movie's overriding theme of virtuous light-skinned blond races vs. twisted evil dark-skinned races was simplistic and lacking in originality -- played out back in the 30s.  (Nice New Zealand scenery, though). 

Call me old fashioned, but I like my epic heroes to have some complexity, internal conflict, tragic flaws, a nice helping of moral ambivalence.  It worked for Homer, right?  Alexander fits the bill nicely -- bold, charismatic Hellenistic culture hero on the one hand, murderous pederastic megalomaniac drunkard on the other. 

Some rather modern themes of propaganda mixed in there as well.  Alexander justified his imperialism as spreading freedom and high (Hellenistic) culture to the benighted victims of Eastern despotism, but wound up a tyrant himself.  Remakes of historical epics often reflect contemporary tensions, and I'd be surprised if a director as sharp as Stone doesn't take advantage of those themes. 

Hopefully he'll have a more complex vision than the current American action formula, where the hero wins audience sympathy by being victimized for the first fifteen minutes of the film and then soaks the screen in blood for the next hour and a half.  Righteous killing, there's nothing like it -- combines the entitlement of being a victim and the fun of being a sadistic bully.  No one who followed American action movies should have been surprised that we would use 9/11 as an excuse to leave a trail of blood and wreckage. 

Marcus Stanley

Technical-Humanist Divide

In this post, Brian raises what I think is an extremely important topic for philosophers, namely the worrisome divide between what Brian calls the "technical" and the "humanist" sides of the field of philosophy. Since this issue is so explosive, I'm hesitant to explore it. But I think it is important that it is discussed openly. I don't think Brian's vocabulary is helpful, though. The term "humanist" has no coherent use in which it excludes (say) questions about the nature of intentionality, or mind-body dualism, and "technical" has the pejorative connotation of 'merely technical'.

More interestingly, I also don't think that Brian's description of the divide as being between Metaphysics and Epistemology, broadly construed, on the one hand, and history and value theory, on the other is correct. My old department, Michigan, had great strengths in all of these areas. But I never saw any evidence that the ethicists and historians didn't support good metaphysics and epistemology hires, and vice-versa (quite the opposite in fact). More evidence that one can't make this elusive distinction by appeal to area comes from the fact that certain areas have representatives of both sides. For example, History of Analytic Philosophy, that intellectual Sunni Triangle of an area, includes some figures that are clearly on one side of the debate (Michael Dummett, Charles Parsons, Richard Heck, Jamie Tappenden), and others that are clearly on the other side (James Conant, Warran Goldfarb). 

Perhaps one way of describing the divide is by framing the caricatures we have of one another. One side thinks that the other side's work consists of dry, pedantic repetitions of numbered-premised arguments, which at its best (and only after years of work) succeeds at establishing definitively how the semi-colon works. The other side thinks the work of the first side consists of large vocabulary words, occasional references to Wittgenstein, Freud, or 19th Century German philosophy, stuck together without any discernable arguments to produce the illusion of depth. This work, at its best, manages to use the word "normativity" coherently.

I have lots of questions about this divide. First, what is its nature (mostly style? mostly substance?), and secondly, are the two 'sides' (if that is what they are) bound to be locked in interdisciplinary feud until the practitioners of one die out? Comments open (no invective please, and I'm most interested in hearing from professional philosophers).

-Jason

Blogging and the babes

Jason's wife has now threatened to leave him if he starts his own blog.

The woman I'm dating has informed me that blogging has brought me dangerously close to her acceptable threshhold of male geekiness.

Overall, blogging doesn't seem to impress the opposite sex nearly as much as it should.

The End of "Anglo-American Philosophy"?

Many of my friends are non-philosophy professors in the humanities (since a man can't live by logic puzzles alone). Some of them seem to labor under the misimpression that Anglo-American philosophy is over. On one point, I'm in full agreement. The phrase "Anglo-American philosophy" is so misleading that we should have set it out to pasture a long time ago. First, it denotes a style of philosophy many of the founding members of which were from the continent (e.g. Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Tarski). Secondly, a number of non-English speaking countries have had by this point rather distinguished national traditions in this style (the Scandinavian countries come to mind). Third, and most importantly, there are so many excellent philosophers in this tradition who work in non-English speaking countries that it seems absurd to retain the label. The European Analytic Philosophy meetings next year are taking place in Portugal, not in the United Kingdom. France, Germany, Italy, and Spain all have excellent philosophers in this style distributed all over who organize regular conferences. Holland has long been a hotbed of activity in logic and philosophy of language (the Amsterdam colloquium being one of the world's major conferences in these areas). Geneva and Lisbon are regular stopping points for talks, and Latin America has had a number of good departments in this tradition for decades (e.g. the institute of philosophy in Mexico City has been a regular locus of philosophical activity at least since the 1970s). Nowadays, a well-established senior philosopher in the "Anglo-American" tradition has a talk schedule in a year that includes departmental colloquia all over the world (e.g. one of my friends recently gave a departmental colloquium on the metaphysics of modality in Iran). "Anglo-American philosophy" was a confused failure, but Anglo-American philosophy is thriving. 

-Jason

Is Philosophy a Science?

Amid all this talk about whether economics is a science, I began to wonder about philosophy. Not only do have our own Nobel Prize, but most of us spend our days testing hypotheses, and even making (all too easily) falsifiable predictions (e.g. about what sort of intuitions rational beings will have under various counterfactual circumstances). There is furthermore a lot of circumstantial evidence that we're scientists. Many of us spend our time hanging around semi-reputable folks like linguists and psychologists, and even topics that have no prima facie connections to anything reputable, upon closer investigation, are in fact linked in fairly obvious ways to the most respected disciplines of all. Indeed, over the course of my career, I've been surprised to see how the most abstractly metaphysical topics originally discussed by philosophers have come to impact a variety of clearly empirical disciplines outside philosophy. Work by philosophers on the metaphysics of modality (or the semantics for modal languages) resulted in a model that has useful applicability in a wide variety of topics (e.g. the study of probability, the study of natural language meaning). Philosophers nursed the notion of causation while it was hiding from anti-metaphysical forces, and now it is a respectable topic again in the human sciences (e.g. no discussion of practical reasoning can ignore it). Psychologists interested in concept formation appeal to work in metaphysics as abstract as David Wiggins and Michael Ayers on sortal concepts (to the great chagrin of some of my colleagues). Some of us are even quite explicit about the fact that we do experiments. It is not just in my Quinean moments that I wonder how to make a distinction between philosophy and 'real' science.

-Jason Stanley

New PGR for 2004-06 is now on-line...

...here

--Brian Leiter

Strengths of economics, continued

The "general laws" that some claim economics has discovered are often either obvious, or wrong.  Sometimes both.  In Brian's economic science post there's the following example:

"The banality of economic "predictions" is especially vivid in Posner's claim that "an increase in the severity of punishment will (ceteris paribus) reduce the amount of crime." But surely we don't need economics--or any putative social science--to draw that conclusion!"

The conclusion is not only obvious but will sometimes be wrong -- punishments that are so severe as to violate someone's sense of justice may make them more likely to engage in the offending behavior.  (If you give a severe beating to your teenager for bringing home a "B" on his report card, he may respond by running away and dropping out of school altogether).

I think you go wrong when you look to economics for general laws, even when you sprinkle in a liberal helping of ceteris paribus clauses.  But I still find economic theory immensely valuable.  Mathematical economic models have a lot of strengths as a way to organize a causal story about social processes.  Econ is rigorous about modelling the interactions of large numbers of opportunistic individuals, and deriving predictions about the unintended emergent properties of those interactions.  These kinds of emergent properties are pretty non-intuitive (unless you are Adam Smith).  So econ is great training in interpreting and getting a feel for social systems, especially those involving markets (the collective system that economists understand by far the best). 

What people call the "general laws" of economics -- demand curves slope down, supply curves slope up, etc. -- are generally instead the modelling assumptions that are being made to impose mathematical form on social interaction, and thus to derive particular predictions.  Those predictions themselves are limited in usefulness -- they are general, qualitative and directional rather than specific and quantitative, and the level of abstraction economics is conducted at means they are wrong in specific cases on a fairly frequent basis.  They also tend to be extremely difficult to genuinely test empirically.  The fact that there is rarely a quantitative magnitude in the prediction means that a failed empirical test looks identical to a correctly predicted effect that just turned out to be small.

But I would argue that going through the modelling process still creates a fairly substantial improvement on untutored common sense.  Even when the predictions are wrong they usually have some validity, in that they alert you to genuine forces operating in the system, give you a feel for what to look for.  (Social systems rarely reach the "frictionless" equilibriums hypothesized by economists, but the pressures toward equilibrium still exist).

I do think that the standard market model in economics produces a wide variety of non-obvious predictions that have turned out to have at least some empirical force -- predictions about tax incidence (e.g. given reasonable labor supply assumptions taxes on employers are paid by workers), commodification and falling profit rates as industries mature, greater efficiency of market-organized production and distribution of goods (countries that have abandoned markets entirely have not had good economic outcomes).  They are don't always  come true (e.g. successful brands can prevent products from being commodified as firms age) but they point you toward pressures that are really operative.   

Of course modelling in economics has moved far beyond the familiar standard market model over the last few decades.  One could argue that this movement has almost gone in the opposite direction from "useful prediction".  As modellers took apart the standard model and varied its assumptions, they demonstrated that a wide range of predictions can be rationalized by varying theoretical assumptions in defensible ways.   Just by making some quite reasonable assumptions about information, transaction costs, market frictions, or returns to scale, you can get results that look very "unreasonable" according to standard market models.  Identically skilled workers can be paid different wages in a competitive market equilibrium.  Some workers might not be paid a compensatory benefit for taking a dirty or dangerous job.  Free trade might not be mutually beneficial.  That doesn't mean market logic doesn't continue to have validity -- market forces are still very operative in these models -- but it does mean that the range of possible real world outcomes compatible with theory is greatly expanded.  (Economists are perhaps overly quick to downplay these results "in public", or just jump to the conclusion they are not applicable, in order to maintain disciplinary clout behind the predictions they feel most comfortable with). 

In some sense these new models may have expanded the space of possible theoretical outcomes beyond our empirical capacity to test them.  But I don't think this is necessarily an unhealthy development, since I think social processes are too complex to allow for a simple model of definitive theory testing as we see in certain hard sciences.  These models can be valuable tools for describing and thinking about social processes if combined with close measurement and the proper types of auxiliary hypotheses.   But this might happen in a way that brings economics closer to being a highly mathematical, internally rigorous, measurement-oriented version of more "narrative" social sciences, rather than a hard science along the lines of a social physics. 

Marcus Stanley