Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Blast from the past: Alan Dershowitz, serial enemy of academic freedom

Since the "blowhard and buffoon" Alan Dershowitz (I here quote one of my liberal, Jewish, very pro-Israel law colleagues!) is back in the news because of his shilling for Trump--the explanation is transparent, since Dershowitz has only one criterion for any position he takes (namely, is it good for Likud)--it's worth recalling that Dershowitz has been a resolute opponent of academic freedom and freedom of expression, most notoriously in the tenure case of Norman Finkelstein at DePaul.

Reed College capitulates to mindless 18-year-olds...

...and of course they aren't satisfied, which should be a warning to any school that thinks of capitulating and substituting juvenile consumerism for academic judgment.  This remark by a faculty member is apt:

Meanwhile, defenders of Hum 110 -- which currently begins with the Epic of Gilgamesh and ends with the Bible and Apuleius’ The Golden Ass -- have argued that critics err in transposing modern notions of race into the course, or even misunderstand it altogether.

“The idea that Hum 110 is a ‘white’ course is very strange to me,” Jay Dickson, a professor of English, recently told Reed Magazine. “It presupposes that our contemporary racial categories are timeless.”

Perhaps Reed should make all incoming students read Adolf Reed instead?

Comey compares Trump to a "mob boss"...

...which, of course, is exactly right, as we noted long ago.   I imagine Mr. Comey has dealt with many traditional mob bosses during his career in law enforcement, so he knows of what he speaks.

Economist Tyler Cowen (George Mason) talks to philosopher Agnes Callard (Chicago)

Podcast and transcript both here.  An excerpt:

COWEN: Let’s turn now to your new book, Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming. There’s a sentence from the book. Let me read it, and maybe you can explain it. “Proleptic reasons allow you to be rational even when you know that your reasons aren’t exactly the right ones.” What’s a proleptic reason?

CALLARD: What I’m trying to explain is, how do people get themselves to care about things that they don’t yet care about? Suppose that you want to come to appreciate a certain kind of music — that’s the example I use in the book — more than you do.

Then there’s the question, why should you do that? Why should you take the music appreciation class? You might say, well, the value of music. Classical music is this great thing, but you don’t see it as valuable, presumably. That’s why you have to take a class.

So there’s a kind of paradox that would suggest we should never try to get ourselves interested or into new things because, in order to have a reason to do that, we’d already have to have the interest. 

Annual AAUP report on faculty salaries (and, this year, the problem of salary compression between ranks)

IHE has a summary account.  Salary compression is nearly ubiquitous, since the market for new assistant professors sets their salaries, meaning they quickly catch up or surpass associate or full professors who were hired long ago and who have not had competing outside offers.  (The University of California system has less of this problem, due to their intelligent "step" system of promotions with associated salary increases based on regular internal assessments of faculty work.)

Fordham Philosophy professor suspended from teaching after multiple Title IX complaints

Details here.

On the attorney-client privilege, and when it can be breached by law enforcement

This is a sensible and clear explanation of the topic du jour concerning the gangster/toddler who is President.

This old (1994) interview with Bernard Williams...

...has been making the rounds on social media, and is a moderately interesting read.  It is nice to see how important he considers Nietzsche to be, though I never had the sense he really understood Nietzsche very well.

Ideological delusion watch: the case of rural America

An excerpt:

Q:  In the book, you argue that the anger we’re seeing in rural America is less about economic concerns and more about the perception that Washington is threatening the way of life in small towns. How, specifically, is Washington doing this?

A:  I’m not sure that Washington is doing anything to harm these communities. To be honest, a lot of it is just scapegoating. And that’s why you see more xenophobia and racism in these communities. There’s a sense that things are going badly, and the impulse is to blame “others.”

 

Adolph Reed, Jr. on "Marx, Race and Neoliberalism"

We've noted Reed's work previously, and I've been reading more lately, since he is far and away the most penetrating writer on issues related to race currently in America.  This piece is particularly interesting.  An excerpt:

Race is a taxonomy of ascriptive difference, that is, an ideology that constructs populations as groups and sorts them into hierarchies of capacity, civic worth, and desert based on “natural” or essential characteristics attributed to them. Ideologies of ascriptive difference help to stabilize a social order by legitimizing its hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege, including its social division of labor, as the natural order of things...Ascriptive ideologies are just-so stories with the potential to become self-fulfilling prophecies. They emerge from self-interested common sense as folk knowledge: they are “known” to be true unreflectively because they seem to comport with the evidence of quotidian experience. They are likely to become generally assumed as self-evident truth, and imposed as such by law and custom, when they converge with and reinforce the interests of powerful strata in the society....

 

Regarding race in particular, classificatory schemes have varied substantially, as have the narratives elaborating them. That is, which populations count as races, the criteria determining them, and the stakes attached to counting as one, or as one or another at any given time, have been much more fluid matters than our discussions of the notion would suggest. And that is as it must be because race, like all ideologies of ascriptive hierarchy, is fundamentally pragmatic. After all, these belief systems emerge as legitimations of concrete patterns of social relations in particular contexts. 

This, of course, explains why, for example, at various points in U.S. history, Jews were not "white," nor immigrants from Italy, and so on.  Reed's historical details on "races" and the work for which they were suited is fascinating. 

 

Given that ours is the age of mindless "diversity blather," these observations of Reed's are particularly striking for those on the actual left:

 

Where tenure-stream faculty at the U.S. top 20 (2017-18) got their PhDs

This is where all tenure-stream faculty (junior and senior) at the PGR top 20 programs for 2017-18 earned their PhDs.  Remember that Harvard and Princeton were the top departments in the country from the mid-1950s through the 1980s (Harvard for much longer than that before, though Harvard declined more than Princeton in the 1990s); in the 1990s, first Rutgers, then NYU emerged as dominant programs.  MIT's PhD program began in the early 1960s, and was a top ten program from the start (early faculty included Hilary Putnam and John Rawls); Pittsburgh emerged as a philosophy powerhouse in the early 1960s as well.  Michigan had a top ten, often top five, PhD program from the 1950s onwards.  UCLA emerged in the 1950s (first with Hans Reichenbach, then Rudolf Carnap, Richard Montague and others) as a major PhD program, while Berkeley became a more prominent player in the field in the 1960s.  Yale went from top ten status in the 1950s, through many years of conflict and decline, before reemerging in the 1990s as a major PhD program.   Cornell was one of the top ten programs from the 1950s until the early 1990s.  Columbia, like Yale, had ups and downs, sometimes in the top ten, sometimes not even in the top twenty.  Chicago was a solidly top ten program during the time Donald Davidson was on the faculty (1976-1981), and a top 15-20 program most of the rest of the time.  Stanford has been a top ten program since the 1960s, with Patrick Suppes and a young Donald Davidson, among others.

Programs are ranked by the total number of graduates in tenure-stream positions in the current U.S. top twenty, though I also note the number of those faculty who are untenured but on tenure-track; in ten years time, Rutgers and NYU will be giving Harvard and Oxford a run for the money (probably Berkeley too).

1.  Princeton University (55 total, 7 currently junior)

2.  Harvard University (43 total, 4 currently junior)

3.  Massachussetts Institute of Technology (31 total, 5 currently junior)

4.  Oxford University (24 total, 3 currently junior)

4.  University of California, Berkeley (24 total, 7 currently junior)

Syracuse's Kris McDaniel interviewed...

...at 3AM.

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Bloodrock, "Lucky in the Morning," 1970

Another great find from reader Richard Elliott in London, Bloodrock was a hard/progressive rock band out of Fort Worth, Texas that enjoyed some modest success, and one top forty hit, in the early 1970s.  This tune is the lead number from their second album, their most successful:

 

Canadian readers: what do you make of the suggestion that Jordan Peterson, our idiot du jour, is really a "typical" Canadian?

The suggestion is in this NYT op-ed.  Thoughts?

Sean Hermanson: 'Rethinking implicit bias: I want my money back'

MOVING TO FRONT, ORIGINALLY POSETD APRIL 2--MORE COMMENTS WELCOME; SEE REPLY BY DORIS ET AL. IN COMMENTS

(There's been lots of chatter on social media about the recent attempt to salvage "implicit bias" by philosopher John Doris and psychologists Laura Niemi and Keith Payne in Scientific American.  At the suggestion of Edouard Machery [Pitt], I invited philosopher of cognitive science Sean Hermanson (FIU) to comment on these issues.  His esssay follows and comments are open [they will be moderated for substance and relevance]--BL.)

Have you missed all the wrangling in philosophy journals and books over the (alleged) inexistence of implicit biases?  In actuality, philosophers have mostly avoided scrutinizing findings about implicit biases and associated concepts, such stereotype threat and micro-aggressions.  Debates among philosophers--even lukewarm ones--about the existence of implicit bias are hard to find.

Psychology is, arguably, undergoing a replication crisis although at least the problems are being discussed and reforms are underway.  Meanwhile philosophy's own crisis of replication continues in the form of a slow motion crash powered by ideology and steered by confirmation bias.  The crucial difference is that whereas in social psychology (and elsewhere) results are often not replicated, philosophy's problem runs in reverse: too often philosophers recycle poorly informed opinions about the efficacy of implicit biases.  This curious homogeneity is somewhat concealed under the seat cushions which, nonetheless, often sport attractive designs referencing intricate mappings--of behavior to responsibility, to propositional states, and various other cognitive structures.

Now it is time to vigorously apply the brakes.

Or: not so, according to a recent article aiming to reassure audiences that despite the speed bumps (and speed mounds and even speed mountains) implicit bias will overcome its obstacles.  Having once enjoyed a starring role, it turns out that IAT doesn't produce stable results and fails to correlate with actual discriminatory behavior.  Nevertheless Payne et al. contend that implicit bias is real and important and IAT is useful.  How can this be so? 

Payne et al. argue that IAT was never meant to be individually predictive.  Just as although scoring high on conscientiousness won't tell you if somebody's work right now is sloppy, yet knowing a whole workforce scores high predicts their work will tend to be done right, IAT is a blunt instrument and only reveals bias at the level of groups, not individuals.  However, since groups are comprised of individuals, doesn't somebody's work (several really) have to be biased towards conscientiousness (setting aside the weird view that conscientiousness in me somehow affects your work but not my own)?  In other words for many individuals we should be able to predict that their work will be conscientious rather than sloppy if conscientiousness exerts real casual effects on outcomes.  Keep in mind that one's work "on a particular occasion" isn't at issue.  It is only the overall pattern in an individual's actions that matters.  Data points ought to exhibit group-level patterns whether they are drawn from the career of one conscientious individual or several.  This is much the same as how a long standing pattern of a particular employee abstaining from hand-washing raises expectations customers served by that person will develop food poisoning.

We are also told that IAT is like an unreliable water-divining rod (perhaps then it should be abandoned?) but it doesn't matter because there are other tools strongly evidencing implicit biases.  However, this further support is consistently unimpressive.  Here's just one example: do "studies show" college professors are biased against Lamar and favor Brad when it comes to replying to emails?  What the researchers showed was that although professors mostly in business schools and health sciences responded significantly less often, there was no effect for faculty in the humanities, basically no effect in the social sciences, a bit in the hard and life sciences (quite possibly marginal) and even "reverse bias" in the fine arts.  Payne et al. describe this highly localized effect as part of a "widespread" pattern, thus giving the impression that college professors as a group exhibit callback biases.  Except they don't (I wrote to Milkman a few years back about subfields and she reported that they did not have sufficient data for philosophy).  Let us further note that there was no effect anywhere if the request was urgent (also, shouldn't implicit bias impose itself most strongly when there is less time for reflection?).  And, curiously, there was no effect for Hispanic females under any condition. 

Still, what's up with the business schools?  I don't know.  Perhaps it's a one-off result that will not be replicated.  Or maybe business schools are full of Trump Jr.s ("TJs").  Supposing they are: why should callback data bear on the issue of whether biases are implicit or explicit?  Indeed, it does not if TJs are fully aware of their attitudes about women and minorities.  Meanwhile, even if TJs are scarce in health sciences, note that more than 70% of their students are women.  Might this help explain why inquiries from men are given slightly more attention?   Again, I don't know, but I am curious about why implicit bias magically turns itself off when we enter the College of A&S. 

Let us step back and take stock.

A plausible exoneration of Kristeva from the recent allegations of collaborating with the Bulgarian secret police

Here at the LRB.  I find this a convincing account of what really transpired.  It doesn't change the facts about her intellectual contribution, of course, but it does suggest that she was not complicit with fascists.

(Thanks to Richard Marshall for the pointer.)

Ismael from Arizona to Columbia

Jenann Ismael (philosophy of science and physics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University, starting this July.  That's a big catch for Columbia!

'Did Descartes have exploding head syndrome?'

Maybe.

(Thanks to Evan Goodwin for the pointer.)

Two philosophers win Guggenheim Fellowships in 2018 competition

They are:  Sally Haslanger (MIT) and John Heil (Washington University, St. Louis).

(Thanks to Randolph Clarke for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  Several readers point out that bioethicist Carl Elliott (Minnesota) also won a Guggenheim (he appears under the "Medicine & Health" category).

Two senior hires for St Andrews: Dickie from Toronto, Berto from Amsterdam

The Department of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews has announced two senior hires:  Francesco Berto (logic, philosophy of logic, metaphysics) will join St Andrews in the summer of 2018 from the University of Amsterdam; while Imogen Dickie (philosophy of language, mind and action; epistemology) will join St Andrews in summer 2019 from the University of Toronto.  The St Andrews/Stirling joint program ranked 3rd in the U.K. in the most recent PGR surveys, before these hires with a score of 3.4, trailing Cambridge at 3.6.  It's possible these new senior appointments would push the program into a tie at 2nd with Cambridge.

Dennett v. Strawson on consciousness

Following up on our earlier thread, Dennett has now replied to Strawson's critique.

(Thanks to Larry Franz for the pointer.)

Colorado's Robert Pasnau interviewed...

...at 3AM.

MIT's ups and downs in the Philosophical Gourmet Report

I recently had a bizarre exchange on social media with an MIT PhD about the fluctuating fortunes of MIT in recent iterations of the PGR.  Much of the exchange was based in ignorance:  the young philosopher who was puzzled by MIT's drop from 7 to 13 between 2011 and 2014 (it jumped back to 7 in 2017 after several appointments) attributed the drop--bizarrely but consistently with the mystical views of cause and effect in certain segments of the 'profession'--to the "Leiter vs. Haslanger and feminist philosophers" dispute in 2014 (I guess meaning things like this and this).  How this was supposed to work was puzzling:  was it that voters scored MIT more lowly because Haslanger was on the wrong side of a dispute with me?  That seems unlikely, to put it mildly.  The simpler explanation, which I pointed out, was that between 2011 and 2014, MIT lost three senior faculty, Richard Holton, Rae Langton, and Robert Stalnaker (to retirement).  It was objected, reasonably but again reflecting ignorance, that Stalnaker didn't retire until 2016.  That's true, but Stalnaker was listed in the 2014 survey as on phased retirement ending in 2016--so evaluators unsurprisingly discounted Stalnaker, who simply wouldn't be availabale as an advisor for PhD students beginning their studies in fall 2015.  Since 2014, MIT made several new appointments as well as tenurings and promotions, bouncing them back into the top ten.

In general, when people puzzle about changes in the rankings, it often turns out that their puzzlement is due to not being aware of relevant facts.  Hopefully the new PGR will get on-line the faculty lists evaluators used, which may help dispel some of the mysteries.

Whittington on controversial speakers on campus

From an interview with Keith Whittington (Politics, Princeton) about his new book on free speech on campus:

Q: What do you make of “hate speech”? Should Richard Spencer be given the same rights to speak on campus as, for example, Peter Singer, a noted philosopher whose views offend many?

A: “Hate speech” is a broad and ill-defined category. There is general agreement that threats and personal harassment have no place on campus. We should be very reluctant, however, to declare that the consideration of some ideas have no place on campus. A college campus is precisely where we should be able to scrutinize controversial, outrageous and marginal ideas. Having said that, we should be spending our time on campus trying to engage with serious ideas and in the most intellectually productive way possible. We need to make choices of what to read and discuss in the classroom when we construct a syllabus.

But we also need to make choices outside the classroom about what ideas are worth debating and how, including those ideas that we do not think are academically serious. We should want to hear from the best, most serious advocates of ideas that matter to our public debates, even if those ideas are outside the political and social mainstream -- and even when we think they are misguided and wrong. We can disagree vociferously with Peter Singer and yet learn a lot from him. We would be fools to not want to hear from him and read his work. The same cannot be said for Richard Spencer. That doesn’t mean that Spencer should be specifically prohibited from speaking on campus, but I don’t see any reason why we should be inviting him to speak on a college campus.

Advertising update

Both top spots for May and for June are booked.  There are 2nd and 3rd spots still available in May (as well as thereafter).  I will be doing less blogging in the summer, so rates are reduced ($300 for a top spot, $250 for a 2nd, $200 for a 3rd from the top spot).  E-mail me for more information.

Why John Bolton is really dangerous

It's not simply because he's a war-mongering maniac, but because he's good at it.

Announcing this month's guest bloggers

I'm delighted to announce the guest bloggers for April; they are: 

Brian Bruya (Eastern Michigan) who will blog about introductory statistical analysis for philosophers.

Carrie Jenkins (British Columbia) who will blog about how to do philosophy research on the Internet.

Carolyn Dicey Jennings (UC-Merced) who will blog about how one can use APA-sponsored data collection on the philosophy job market as a way to take down elite PhD programs.

Steven Pinker (Harvard) who will blog about the Enlightenment, of course.

More below the fold.