Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

The Use Theory of Meaning (J. Stanley)

MOVED UP FROM MARCH 9. I HAVE MOVED THIS POST UP BECAUSE THE COMMENTS THREAD REMAINS QUITE ACTIVE, AND I HAVE RECEIVED MANY E-MAILS ABOUT IT.

Like any area of philosophy, there are researchers in philosophy of language with very different conceptions of what it is. One project in the philosophy of language centrally involves the thesis of deflationism about the semantic notions of truth and reference. According to the deflationist, truth and reference play no significant explanatory roles. But the great discovery of philosophy of language in the Twentieth Century is that, with the use of these semantic notions, one can give a tractable account of meaning. Indeed, this work has given rise to semantics, an empirical discipline in linguistics with which philosophers of language are now expected to be conversant. But there is a group of philosophers who are skeptical of the presuppositions of all the work on linguistic meaning that has been done in the Twentieth Century. They are trying to come up with an alternative account of meaning, a “use theory of meaning”, one that does not advert to semantic notions such as reference and truth.

Recently, I had cause to look at some of the work in this tradition to evaluate the progress they have been making. Unfortunately, I saw little to give me optimism in the project of rewriting semantics in terms of use. In Paul Horwich’s paper “A Use Theory of Meaning”, I find that the meaning of a word is given by “a set of sentences that are regularly accepted in such-and-such circumstances”. Unfortunately, this doesn’t give me much help if I am interested in, for example, tense and time, and want to see what the most recent theories of meaning say about tense in natural language.

Those philosophers who are outside of philosophy of language and semantics look to philosophy of language for certain kinds of resources. It is a cost to a metaphysical theory that it results in an error theory about certain central regions of discourse. For example, it is a familiar cost to presentism about tense that it seems to falsify many statements that we regard as obviously true (e.g. "England has had several kings named ‘George’"). It is a cost to an epistemological theory if it predicts that (say) knowledge-attributions are context-sensitive, when they are not. It is a cost to the view that a statue and the clay that constitutes it are identical that it invalidates certain apparently valid Leibniz’s Law inferences. In each case, we need a viable philosophy of language and semantics to gauge these costs. The use-theory of meaning will never be developed in a form that can play the role that current semantic theories do in these ongoing philosophical projects.

Some philosophers look at the theory of meaning through the prism of the project of deflationism. As a result, they regard those of us who operate with the notions of reference and truth as shallow un-philosophical technocrats, since we are not busy challenging these presuppositions. On the other hand, we regard their work at best as useless for the philosophical project of understanding the language-world relation, and at worst as a vain attempt to reinvent the wheel.

Blogging Hiatus (J. Stanley)

I'll be off giving talks for the next two weeks, first at UC Santa Cruz, where I'll be speaking first to the linguists and then to the philosophers, and then to the Pacific Division APA, where I'll be responding to Gil Harman and Stephen Schiffer in the Author Meets Critics session for my book Knowledge and Practical Interests, available in Wal-Marts everywhere. So I won't have time to blog at all, though I may pause in various cities to accept comments on previous postings.

Philosopher Peter Ludlow also distinguished Rap Artist (J. Stanley)

Details here.

UPDATE: The Wikipedia folk seem to have decided that the public couldn't handle the truth, and so have deleted the details about Ludlow's other life in the newest version. The link is to the version of February 28.

A telling detail in the Zogby poll (M. Stanley)

Following up on Bill Edmundson's post on the recent Zogby poll of U.S. troops in Iraq, I found one detail to be particularly telling.  Fully 85% of troops polled said that the U.S. mission was to "retaliate for Saddam's role in the 9/11 attack".There seem to be some misconceptions here. 

Writing on Steve Sailer's web site,  Greg Cochran gives the following insight on what might be driving these beliefs:

I think this is pretty easy to understand: the alternative [to the Saddam/9-11 link] for the average Joe is to conclude that we invaded for no reason that he can understand at all: i.e. that the government is insane. So, many people make up a reason. Because the alternative is too disturbing - more so if they think of the government as being run by _ their side_.. I had figured that the fraction  of our armed forces in Iraq that believed that we were retaliating (for things that Iraq never did) would be higher than at home, because a volunteer army  would self-select for such beliefs, and because the idea that friends would have been crippled or killed for no reason that anyone could understand would  be hateful.  I had guessed about two-thirds of the Army would believe this, but it's higher than that.

That observation lines up very well with my own beliefs about human nature.  There has been a curious unreality in the public debate about the war.  I think it is driven by just this type of cognitive dissonance.  People can't quite seem to handle the truth.  Especially in the case of soldiers serving in Iraq, I don't really blame them.

For Fans of Syracuse Basketball (J. Stanley)

We may have lost to Georgetown this weekend, but we've got Etan Thomas.

Gerald Dworkin's rhetorical question (J. Stanley)

Over at left2right, Gerald Dworkin poses the following rhetorical question:

If you wanted someone to aid you in making a difficult ethical decision about medical treatment for your child would you be better off consulting a moral philosopher, or a physician who has dealt with similar cases for 30 years? I know whom I would choose.

The thought of leaving a significant personal moral decision in the hands of a moral philosopher in the analytic tradition would of course send a shudder through any professional philosopher. I myself also wouldn't be aided a great deal with the decision by a physician who has dealt with similar cases in the past, except insofar as she could provide me with additional facts about the consequences of past decisions.

The people I would turn to for aid in such a decision are those friends of mine whom I regard as having a certain kind of wisdom and insight about the human condition. I can think of a few moral philosophers who have this quality, and I can think of a few doctors I know who have this quality. But in my experience, moral philosophers as a group do not saliently have this characteristic any more than metaphysicians do (which is to say not much at all). Moral philosophers are not even more likely to be well-informed or concerned about history and politics than any other group of philosophers. In short, moral philosophers are no more likely than other philosophers to be humanists, with all that that vague word connotes.

It's clear to me why (say) someone working in metaphysics is not likely to have more insight into the human condition than the average mortal. It's because many people working in metaphysics are captured principally by the problem of working out the consistencies of an abstract problem space with only dubious connections to how we live our lives. Moral philosophers tend as a whole to be exactly the same as metaphysicians, except they have chosen a somewhat different problem space to explore the logical relations between theses. There are of course also strong practical considerations in favor of choosing this problem space, as it is more likely to result in gainful employment.

This is not to deny that medical ethicists have an important role to play in hospitals. Medical ethics boards in hospitals play important roles in helping doctors and families make difficult decisions. Some of these decisions are perhaps guided by the moral philosophy done by analytic moral theorists. But I would bet a considerably larger portion are guided by the factors cited by Dworkin, namely "sympathetic feelings, experience with the subject matter, and intuitive insight". As my physician wife has pointed out, the members of these committees are often doctors who are respected for their humanity by other doctors.

The fact that we professional philosophers clearly don't regard even those members of our community charged to reflect upon the good as exemplars of wisdom raises once again some of the issues about the relation between philosophy as currently practiced and philosophy as a humanistic tradition that we have discussed before.

UPDATE: David Velleman has some comments on the topic of this post here, which raise the issue of the responsibilities academic philosophers (not just moral philosophers, I think) have in the non-academic sphere. I hope to return to this topic later this term.

Some Thoughts on Strawson (J. Stanley)

When I got an e-mail informing me that Sir Peter Strawson had died, I was sitting at my desk in my office at home. Next to my computer was a copy of Introduction to Logical Theory. I have spent the first half of the academic year writing a history of Twentieth Century philosophy of language, in which I set up the latter half of Twentieth Century philosophy of language as a reply to the vision of language Strawson lays out in this work and in other papers. I am probably not the only philosopher who can plausibly reconstruct the recent history of their discipline as being a development of or response to some view most elegantly articulated in Strawson's writings.

For every professional philosopher, there is a small group of philosophers whose work led her to the decision to devote her life to the study of philosophy. In my own case, Strawson was certainly in that group. I have spent over half my life reading, writing about, and teaching his contributions. I have taught Strawson's work in my introduction to philosophy classes, in my upper-level classes, and in my graduate seminars (the very first graduate class I taught was on Individuals and Bounds of Sense). Perhaps I am unusual in this regard, but I doubt that I am that unusual.

My own thinking about the nature of philosophy is very much a product of his work. Like many people, I originally stumbled upon Strawson via Kant. Strawson's elaboration of the project of descriptive metaphysics was a good description of what I liked so much in Kant's metaphysics, and Strawson's attention to language suggested a way of coming closer to a description of common sense metaphysical categories (though of course Strawson was explicit that the descriptive metaphysician cannot only rely upon language in her investigations).

The project of descriptive metaphysics has fallen out of favor again. So I'm ending this post with the following quote from the Introduction to Individuals:

....there is a massive core of human thinking which has no history -- or none recorded in histories of thought; there are categories and concepts which, in their most fundamental character, change not at all. Obviously these are not specialities of the most refined thinking. They are the commonplaces of the least refined thinking; and are yet the indispensable core of the conceptual equipment of the most sophisticated human beings. It is with these, their interconnexions, and the structure that they form, that a descriptive metaphysics will be primarily concerned.

    Metaphysics has a long and distinguished history, and it is consequently unlikely that there are any new truths to be discovered in descriptive metaphysics. But this does not mean that the task of descriptive metaphysics has been, or can be, done once for all. It has constantly to be done over again. If there are no new truths to be discovered, there are old truths to be rediscovered. For though the central subject-matter of descriptive metaphysics does not change, the critical and analytical idiom of philosophy changes constantly. Permanent relationships are described in an impermanent idiom, which reflects both the age's climate of thought and the individual philosopher's personal style of thinking. No philosopher understands his predecessors until he has re-thought their thought in his own contemporary terms; and it is characteristic of the very greatest philosophers, like Kant and Aristotle, that they, more than any others, repay this effort of re-thinking.

I wouldn't place Strawson with Kant and Aristotle. But his thoughts nevertheless handsomely reward re-thinking.

Philosophy of Language in the Twentieth Century (J. Stanley)

A while ago, I somewhat insanely agreed to write a paper on the Philosophy of Language in the Twentieth Century, for the forthcoming Routledge Guide to Twentieth Century Philosophy, and my writing this year has been entirely devoted to this task. The way I managed to complete the paper I wrote was to write a narrative I thought would be at least helpful for any graduate student in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, and meta-ethics to read. The topics I discuss, and the elementary lessons I draw from them, are ones that I would want my own graduate students to master in their first year of graduate school. So if you feel curious about what I think introductory graduate students in Metaphysics and Epistemology broadly construed should minimally know about the philosophy of language, then this paper would be of interest to you (warning: it's a first complete draft, so there will be typos and the occasional substantive error. For the error-free version, please purchase the Routledge guide).

Plan when you graduate...(J. Stanley)

The most recent Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about the excellent job market in history, entitled "Job Market in History Heats Up". The same is true of the philosophy job market; there are many, many more jobs than there were in the 1990s. For example, when I went on the job market, in 1994-5, I remember there were less than 25 jobs in all of metaphysics and epistemology broadly construed, and only two Leiter top-twenty departments were advertising, Cornell and UCLA. UCLA ended up deciding that year that no one was appointable in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and related areas, and so did not make an offer.

In contrast, this year alone there are junior positions in M&E broadly construed at NYU, Princeton, Michigan, MIT, UCLA, Berkeley, Cornell, Harvard, USC, and many other leading departments (and more than one of these schools have multiple positions). In addition, there are a healthy raft of positions at departments along the full spectrum. Whereas people in M&E in the mid 1990s would apply for 20-30 total jobs, job candidates now in M&E regularly apply to more than 100 jobs. I was incredibly fortunate to get a great job, and the consequences were extraordinary in several ways. First, because I was offered what seemed to me to be an essentially unique opportunity, I could afford to invest my self-confidence completely in my work. In contrast, this sacrifice would have been more difficult if I had been at a much less prestigious institution. I would have probably pursued other projects outside philosophy to protect myself against the more salient risks of failure. Furthermore, I had graduate students to help conduct my research. Finally, I had that all important 2-2 teaching load.

My peers who were essentially indistinguishable from me in terms of philosophical promise in graduate school (e.g. David Hunter at Buffalo State College, Lenny Clapp at Illinois Wesleyan) have had great difficulty moving up from their difficult teaching positions, despite impressive records of publication (records that are especially extraordinary considering their high teaching loads). It appears that in times of academic plenty departments of all kinds clearly prefer to hire students right out of graduate school over people who would have gotten outstanding jobs, had they not finished their PhDs during lean years.  Furthermore, my impression (though this is definitely anecdotal) is that in years in which there are fewer jobs, more departments decide not to hire at all. None of this behavior seems rational; after all, it's not like there are worse philosophers graduating in years with fewer jobs. Perhaps the air of desperation during lean years removes the mantle of confident genius than departments prefer  their candidates to wear during interviews.

Conference in Santa Barbara (J. Stanley)

Here is a link to what looks like an excellent conference in the philosophy of language in Santa Barbara. I couldn't help but notice, however, the following rather strange proclamation in the conference announcement:            

Despite extreme skepticism and pessimism from some quarters, the theory of meaning—central to the philosophy of language—has shown steady progress since the turn of the previous century. The most important advance in the past 50 years is the idea of what has come to be called direct reference.

The theory of direct reference, for those of you who do not know, involves the thesis that ordinary proper names refer "directly", without mediation by a mode of presentation of their referent. Direct reference theorists believe, among other things, that the only propositional contribution of an ordinary proper name is its referent. So, direct reference theorists spend their days defending theses such as that the proposition expressed by "Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens" is the same as that expressed by "Mark Twain is Mark Twain". Direct reference theory is an interesting if controversial view of the semantics of ordinary proper names and belief ascriptions, and debates about it have occupied a small but lively corner of the philosophy of language (though the theory has had little or no impact in the semantics of natural language). So the declaration in this conference announcement is a little surprising, to say the least. According to its author, the thesis of direct reference constitutes a more important advance in the theory of meaning than any of:

1. Grice's theory of conversational implicature.
2. ALL of Richard Montague's contributions to the theory of meaning.
3. Stalnaker and Lewis's analyses of subjunctive conditionals.
4. Lewis's triviality results for indicative conditionals.
5. Davidson's analysis of action sentences.
6. Kaplan's character-content distinction.
7. Generalized Quantifier Theory.
8. Supervaluational semantics.
9. All work done on cross-sentential anaphora (E-type theories, DRT, dynamic semantics)
10. All work done on the semantics of tense in natural language.

Exhuberance about one's corner of study is a virtue, but still...

Many thanks to Jason & Marcus Stanley...

...for a rich feast of ideas and arguments over the last week.  For those who missed it, you can see their postings by clicking on the link, below, for "Guest Bloggers."  I thought the Stanley brothers made particularly effective use of comments.  Comments sections on most blogs tend to be embarrassing spectacles, but thanks to the high quality of the readership and the judicious editing by the Stanley brothers, I found the comments sections last week extremely informative.  Time permitting, I shall try to make a bit more use of comments myself in the future.

Thanks again to the brothers Stanley, whom I will try to bring back again before too long.

Brian

Back to Work...

Thanks to everyone for tuning in (and please feel free to continue on the various comments threads). There is no time left, unfortunately, for my 'top ten most overrated' list, so you're just going to have to wait until next year (when I will also rank my friends!). I hope we achieved our major accomplishment, which was to occupy in a mildly entertaining and occasionally irritating way some of your time. Now, it's back to my day job (I work for editors of various journals and guides to philosophy, refereeing papers and writing survey articles).

                                                                                    -Jason

Sovereignty

Sovereignty is a useful construct to avoid international conflicts, but is there in any moral sense a "right" to sovereignty?  Do I have a "right" not to have my country ruled by "foreigners"?  I'm asking this because it seems quite obvious that the hostility to foreign rule turned out to be at least as important a factor in Iraq as all the nice individual rights (voting, speech.) that we bestowed on the Iraqis after our invasion (assuming for now that those rights have some reality, and aren't just a way to prop up a puppet government).  It’s also pretty clear that in modern history the quest for national sovereignty or self-rule has had a lot more influence and a lot more popular support than the quest for the right to vote, for free speech, etc.  Yet we hardly ever see a violation of national sovereignty defined as a human rights violation. In fact people seem to see no contradiction at all in occupying or invading a foreign nation in order to guarantee the human rights of their population.

This would seem to imply that sovereignty is not a “right”.  Indeed it’s hard to make sense of sovereignty starting from an individualistic view of rights, as we tend to do since our intellectual life is so soaked in methodological individualism.  The right must in some sense inhere in a “people”, not an individual.  One must define the meaning of “foreigner”, and what counts as the “self” in “self-rule” (were the Iraqi Shi’ites being ruled by foreigners under Saddam)?  Is it possible for there to be a “right” to sovereignty when the sovereign government is violating some rights (say free speech) of the individuals under its control?  But there are a number of rights that can’t be individually defined.  The right to vote can only be defined relative to the legitimacy of an entire system of governance that the voter is participating in.  And it’s worthwhile to think about these issues, I think, because it forces us to think about the meaning of nation and community as conceived by their populations, instead of applying an individualist perspective on rights.

I really have no problem with this issue because I’m a thoroughgoing consequentialist when it comes to rights – I see them as useful rules that pre-commit us to courses of action that usually turn out to be better ex ante, and allowing ex post violations of rights for utilitarian reasons is usually a bad idea because the ability to violate them will be abused by those in power.  So the “right” to sovereignty is a comittment based on the belief that people who share my culture and background will in general rule me more effectively, competently, and respectfully than people who don’t know me well.   But I don't know whether this kind of rule-utilitarianism is the accepted way of looking at it.

Any moral philosophers want to weigh in?

Marcus

Europe vs. America

Jason's last post on Germany made me speculate on some differences between Europe and America.  Now that the Soviet Union is gone, the major contrast between economic models in the advanced world is the U.S. vs. Europe (if I can for simplicity group the varied OECD styles of welfare state into a single alternative model to the U.S.).   Which is the proper contrast to be looking at, the Soviet Union was mostly just an old-style Russian despotism with little relevance to a modern economy (just as pre-Leninist Marxism would have predicted, the attempt to go straight to socialism in an underdeveloped nation and bypass the capitalist phase led nowhere).  The right points to Europe's recent record of slow growth and comparatively high unemployment, while the left emphasizes high middle class quality of life, egalitarian wage outcomes, greater leisure, and in some cases lower crime.  I'm mildly left of center in this debate. But there are lots of interesting arguments on both sides,  and I'm not going to get into them here.

The point I want to make is that while America is *economically* far more unequal than Europe, we are in many ways a much more culturally egalitarian nation than Europe is, especially for non-blacks (still the great majority here).  Indeed, I would argue the two facts are connected.  The economic evidence seems to show through the 19th century white America really was a quite open and egalitarian business culture, with much higher wages and social mobility than Europe.  One can argue that it is this heritage that has allowed business interests to have so much political power here.  The only major period when labor got real traction politically (1930-1970) was due to the Depression.  Europe's history of exploitation and inequality has led to a much more class conscious politics and established redistributive institutions firmly there.

Even though the formal institutions have switched places -- in my opinion the American "working class" is the one getting ripped off at the moment, though to nothing like the degree that took place in 19th century Europe -- cultural traditions don't move so quickly.  It's my impression that America is in numerous subtle ways a more open culture than Europe.  Openness to immigrants is an obvious example, as Jason's previous post mentions.  But I think this is also true in terms of all kinds of hierarchies.  I've had lots of friends tell me about more formal relationships between bosses and workers in Europe, with superiors being less open to criticism than they are here, and less opportunity to criticize traditional ways of doing things.  "Eurosclerosis" might have as much to do with the cultural heritage of less open and more class-bound nations as it does with the contemporary economic institutions the right is so eager to fault for all of Europe's troubles.  Likewise, American hospitability to innovation might have more to do with our traditions as a basically middle-class and egalitarian culture than with the opportunity for lucky CEOs to earn many hundreds of times what their workers do, without paying particularly high taxes on it.

The irony here is of course that American hostility to redistributive institutions, born out of the lesser need for them in our history, might in the long run create self-perpetuating class hierarchies like the ones our ancestors left Europe to escape.  Certainly that was what the Founders thought when they instituted a redistributive tax on large inheritances...the so-called "death tax" the Republicans recently repealed. 

Liberals might favor moving some moderate distance toward the European model in terms of formal economic institutions, but we also favor maintaining or increasing traditional American cultural openness.  Unlike conservatives we deny that that cultural openness is dependent on a completely untrammeled free market; in fact over the long run some forms of redistribution might be necessary to maintain it.

Marcus

Ruminations on "Multiculturalism" in Germany

In today's New York Times Magazine, Peter Schneider has an interesting report on the current state of relations between Germans of Turkish descent and Germans of non-Turkish descent. The issue, as usual, is how much the failures of integration between these two populations are due to the nature of German society, or due to the nature of the traditionally Turkish society in which many of the parents and grandparents of Germans of Turkish descent were raised.

The topic is especially interesting to me. I was raised in one of those German-Jewish households with copies of Goethe's works on the shelves (my father left Berlin in August, 1939, at the age of 7, and came from a distinguished Berlin Jewish family). Since my mother was less nostalgic about her Heimatland (she was born and raised in a Siberian labor camp), the identity that took hold was largely the German-Jewish one. My first year in Germany was as an exchange student at the age of 15 (in 1985-6). I went thinking of myself as an American of German descent, and spent the year in an industrial city right outside of Dortmund, living with a host family and attending the local Gymnasium. I soon realized that I looked a bit different than many of the locals, and in fact the people who looked most like me were the Germans of Turkish descent. For one reason or another, I spent quite a bit of time around some members of that community, and Schneider's article has vividly reminded me of many of my daily experiences.

Two of my acquaintances at the Gymnasium were a brother and sister pair who were Germans of Turkish descent. Since they both were at Gymnasium (rather than Hauptschule or Realschule), they were both very integrated into German society, and must have had rather liberal educated parents. But then the sister went on a date with a German of non-Turkish descent, who was an acquaintance of mine and a friend of the brother. The brother warned the man never to talk to his sister again, and then, when the warning was not heeded, beat him severely (he was quite a good kick-boxer). His sister was extremely upset, but there was nothing she could do. I remember trying to argue with my friend; I just could not grasp the situation. My friend was smart, educated, apparently quite integrated, and bound for the university. But there was no way that his family was going to allow his (equally educated) sister to date a German of non-Turkish descent.

On the other hand, my own expected happy homecoming into German society wasn't necessarily working out as planned. One of the teachers at the Gymnasium told me that Heinrich Heine wasn't really a "German" poet, but rather was a "European" poet. My absurdly well-meaning and wonderful hostfather regularly repeated that "Deutschland ist kein Einwanderungsland" (which is, as Schneider points out, a common theme among Germans of a certain generation). Whenever I told people I was of German descent, they would argue with me -- then upon discovering that I was Jewish, would say "Oh, so you're not German, you're Jewish" (strangely, I never heard anyone say to someone, upon discovering that they were  Christian, "Oh, so you're not German, you're Christian"). Among my German friends, there was a pervasive sense of the strangeness of other cultures, which alternately manifested itself as either irrational disdain or irrational admiration. There was certainly a very vivid sense, among even the best intentioned of my German friends of non-Turkish descent, that (like me) the Germans of Turkish descent were not German (there was also a kind of befuddlement about what it meant to live in a genuinely multicultural society. I remember my hostfather saying that Germans and Jews will not be reconciled until he could shake his fist at a bad Jewish driver who had cut him off in traffic, and yell "You dirty Jew!").
 

I still identify as an American of German descent, and I have a number of strong emotional ties to my father's homeland (and indeed, returned for a year of college). There are a great many things I admire about current German society, from their remarkable acceptance of the sins of their forebearers to their social welfare system. But in the end, I probably couldn't live there. The fact that most Germans would view a blond person from Pennsylvania whose great-grandparents were German as more German than me would be a perpetual annoyance. The fact that most Germans still can't really think of the German Jewish population of the past as genuinely German makes me pessimistic about their ability to eventually accept Germans of Turkish descent as genuinely German. And perhaps the inability to think of Germans of Turkish descent as genuinely German is part of what leads them to accept e.g. the abuses of women in that community of the sort that Schneider describes.

On the other hand, I wonder whether some of the same problems are present in the United States. For example, in certain ultra-orthodox Jewish communities (a group with which I have some personal acquaintance), women can be discouraged from pursuing advanced educations, and married off at relatively early ages. Certainly, there are large pockets of unassimilated groups in the United States, which clearly is an Einwanderungsland. So, while I've engaged in some no doubt irresponsible speculation about specifically German roots of the problems with immigration Schneider describes, I also wonder whether similar problems crop up in countries where those features are utterly lacking.

                                                                        -Jason

Victory in Iraq

I'm waiting with interest to see if the Bush administration can successfully head off public debate over whether we should withdraw from Iraq without ever defining why we're there in the first place.  The White House "strategy for victory" defines victory as the following state:

"Iraq is peaceful, united, stable, and secure, well integrated into the international community, and a full partner in the global war on terrorism."

I wish all that would happen too.  It was very generous of us to invade in order to help Iraq become peaceful, stable, and secure, although it seems to have been a bit counterproductive.  I think the "full partner" thing may be a little outbreak of honesty...is it shorthand for having a puppet government in the heart of the Persian Gulf?  I'm can't see how that would actually help America, but from the Cold War we know U.S. policy elites are fond of such constructs.

The whole thing is more than a little surreal.  Especially the stuff about staying until the Iraqis learn how to fight.  The Iraqis definitely already know how to fight, they seem to do a fine job so long as they're fighting against our troops and not for them. 

Our current situation there is so 20th century...straight out of the post WWII guerilla war playbook for a poor country against a rich one.  France in Algeria and Vietnam, the U.S. in Vietnam, Israel in Lebanon, Russia in Afghanistan, there are essentially no cases of a major power subduing a determined guerilla resistance in a foreign country by force of arms.  In every case the foreign power has tried to arm and prop up a puppet government, and in every case that government has been weak and corrupt despite the obvious military ability of the population.  It tends to be the most corrupt elements who cooperate with the invader.

The X factor in Iraq is the possibility of a closer alliance with the Shi'ite majority.  In Vietnam we were allied with a Catholic ruling group that would never be anything but a disliked minority.  But if we become the de facto allies of the Shi'ites in consolidating their power over the Sunnis, then we may eventually get a determined and motivated army on "our side", at least nominally.  Of course we'll then be participating in a civil war and probably helping the Iranians too, but never mind.

What a mess.  The Syrians and/or the Iranians could probably help if we were willing to offer them a genuine say, they know the culture and territory.  I'm sure they don't want their neighborhood trashed any more than it already has been.  But we don't seem disposed to look in that direction.  Our consistent hostility to Iraq's neighbors is a telling indicator that we are still less interested in seeing a peaceful, stable Iraq than an Iraq that furthers some mysterious geopolitical scheme.  After all this, do we really know what that scheme might be?

Marcus

NYU Graduate Student Strike

Several people have asked that I post something about the graduate student strike currently happening at NYU. As many of you know, things are about to take a turn for the worse, with the administration making some pretty grave threats. I haven't posted about this until now, for three reasons. First, I tend to be pretty uniformly pro-labor. Secondly, I'm nervous about the fact that the Bush administration has been chiefly responsible for the legal rulings that are allowing the NYU administration to do what it is now doing. The first and second fact conspire to make me somewhat suspicious of the NYU administration's position. Third, I haven't followed the details of the situation at NYU, and some people whom I respect a lot agree with the NYU admininstration's position. So I am quite open to the possibility that knowing more about the details of the situation would affect my bias from the outside (e.g. perhaps the union is being unreasonable).

Nevertheless, I'd thought I'd link to the following interview, since in it, the distinguished NYU philosopher Paul Boghossian defends the administration position (and thereby adds himself to the list of people I respect a lot who agree with it). Prof. Boghossian raises the worry that having a union will change the relationship between professor and graduate student. But Michigan and Rutgers both have strong graduate unions, and I don't perceive any difference between my relationship to my graduates at those institutions, and the relationships I had with my graduate students at Cornell (perhaps I always had a managerial relationship with my graduate students? I had better ask Susanna Siegel). Furthermore, the Rutgers philosophy department competes very successfully for graduate students with the departments at NYU and Princeton. No doubt, this has mostly to do with our departmental make-up. But I know of at least one  case of a student who was attracted by the health insurance package available for his family at Rutgers, the generosity of which was due to union bargaining. However, I don't know what the union's demands are, and perhaps they are more unreasonable than (as their representative claims) simply wanting to return to the table with the administration.

                                                   -Jason

UPDATE: I had closed the comments thread on this, since it had seemed to me that every side had said their piece. But I guess I will leave it open, and let Brian make the decision how long to continue with it. Post away.

The "Exile" on 90s politics

Here's some stuff from the latest issue of the Exile (home of the always interesting War Nerd) on the most annoying things about the 1990s.  A few of the comments on politics during that fat, prosperous decade are definitely worth passing along, those guys have a talent for cutting away the BS:

35. Hating the Clintons/Hating the UN

The Sham:What do you do if you live in a period of the greatest prosperity and geopolitical power that your country - and indeed just about any country in history - ever experienced? If you're 150 million of America's 300 million citizens, you hate the President who oversaw this Golden Age. And you hate his wife too. And for good measure, you also hate the UN, precisely because America finally found a way to completely co-opt it by making it believe it was becoming more powerful and multilateral, when in fact it served America's imperial ambitions like no organization on earth. So naturally, this same 150 million-strong demographic hated the UN too, on the Waco-chic theory that the UN was preparing to occupy and control America. The hate was and still is pure undistilled venom, mean in that special Made In America way. There's no point trying come up with a clever, insightful explanation for this hatred. It's just stupidity expressed emotionally. Ten, twenty years from now, when America becomes the England of the 21st Century, people will look back at the 90s and...no wait, they won't. They'll be Americans. And they'll probably still hate the Clintons and the UN. Because that's what mean, petty morons do.

"Just stupidity expressed emotionally"...not a bad summary of some of the stuff comes bubbling up out of the American populist subconscious.  Although this is a touch unfair since if you look at the actual opinion polls Clinton was pretty popular throughout the 90s, despite a concerted attempt to smear him through the legal system.  Much more popular than Bush is now, despite the fact that Bush faces no enemies nearly as powerful as Clinton's.

And here's what I think is a rather accurate assessment of Noam Chomsky...good guy and all, gets things right most of the time, but if he's your leading leftist, you don't have a left:

Sure, Chomsky is the kind of guy you want on your team, the perfect leftie fullback whose books on politics, media and language move the chains, yet are perfectly devoid of surprise. You want to criticize the mainstream media's silence on US imperialism in Latin America on a third and short yardage situation? Chomsky will get you your two yards of criticism and a cloud of dirt. But you can't build a franchise around him. Which is exactly what the Left has done....The best thing about Chomsky is that he raises the blood pressure of anti-Lefties far more than he deserves.

No wise-ass comments from British readers who can't follow the American football metaphors.  Learn the game, it's the greatest spectator sport on earth.

And they toss in a final slam on the one part of the American left that has managed to affect history recently:

Liberals Who Voted For Nader Because There Was No Difference Between Bush and Gore

The Sham:Admit it: you fucked up. Big time. There was a huge difference between Bush and Gore. Voting for Nader was a vote for Bush. You just didn't have the courage to accept the ugly reality of politics in 2000 because as an over-read liberal, you wanted your candidate and your party to be more authentic than the plastic show that made you gag. You were too pampered and vain to lower yourself to vote for Gore, and you're the reason why America is in the shit-hole it's in today.

Marcus

“Scientific” vs. “Humanist” Philosophy

Much of my blogging has been devoted to trying to figure out which distinctions between kinds of philosophical approaches are merely sociological (e.g. reflections of the personal connections and academic credentials of particular philosophers) and which are genuinely substantive. I do think there are rather fundamental distinctions between kinds of philosophers, but (as I’ve been arguing this week) I don’t think they correspond to any kind of “division between departments” or “nexuses” that clearly divide two or three kinds of departments (such nexuses exist, but they are considerably more sociological in character). Nevertheless, I think that Brian Leiter has been on to something by his division of “naturalistic” vs. “humanist” philosophy. I just don’t think that this division explains anything about the sociology of department relations. I just haven’t been able to put my finger on what it is. But this morning, I received an e-mail from the prominent Rutgers graduate Michael Strevens, which was a reply to my grouping Fodor and Stich into a natural kind in the comments thread of a previous posting. Strevens’s comment it seems to me comes as close as I’ve seen to describing an actual natural divide between kinds of philosophers. It does so furthermore by remaining within the space of Rutgers philosophy. I think this suggests that the actual divisions between philosophers (as opposed to the merely sociological ones) do not divide departments into distinct nexuses. Anyway, here is Strevens:

I was bemused to see the names of Fodor and Stich used together to pick out a “Rutgers style” of philosophy. It seems to me that Fodor and Stich are as different as it is possible for two philosophers to be. More precisely: Fodor and Stich lie on opposite sides, indeed opposite extremes, of the most important division in philosophy, which might as much as any be called the humanistic/scientific divide.

Fodor is a humanist insofar as his work on the mind is an attempt to vindicate our self-understanding, our human picture of the mind: it is a law-governed, representation-involving, inference and planning machine in which what is inferred from what depends on the content of the representations involved. That is to put things in modern vocabulary, but the general picture is familiar from way back, and constitutes, in the eyes of many psychologists, the core of a “folk psychology” common to all humankind. Philosophy, in Fodor’s hands, fights on the side of humanity, attempting to justify our ways to the world.

Stich, by contrast, uses the tools of philosophy to undermine our conception of ourselves, to alienate us from our own minds. The aim is to produce discomfort, uncertainty, the sudden dropping away of foundations that had seemed secure. This is genuinely “scientific” philosophy. It fights against humanity, or at least against human culture, which it conceives as an accretion or insulating layer of prejudice, misapprehension, and half-truth. It is an attempt to undercut our ways by appeal to the way the world really is.

For the humanist, philosophy ought never to stray too far from common sense. For the scientist, “common sense philosophy” is about as attractive as “biblical biology”. Humanists may very well perceive scientists as shallow, because scientists distrust and therefore keep their distance from ways of thinking that are central to our conception of ourselves. Scientists may very well perceive humanists as obscure, because until their work is done, humanists must point to aspects of our self-understanding without fully articulating them, or deluded, because without justification or even articulation, they commit themselves to the validity of this self-understanding.

Of course, both camps have equal disdain for technical problem-solvers..."

Strevens’s comment raises a number of important points.

First, the use of logic or technical tools cross-cuts the humanist-scientific divide described by Strevens. Many of the very best a priori metaphysicians, such as Kit Fine, heavily exploit logical and technical tools. But these tools are placed in the service of capturing our intuitions about fundamental metaphysical facts having to do e.g. with modality and essentialism. The appeal to “technical” in the recently much-abused phrase “technical problem solver” distinguishes metaphysicians such as Kit Fine, who makes use of such tools, from metaphysicians such as Sydney Shoemaker and Alvin Plantinga, who generally do not use them. But this is an utterly superficial distinction. In all substantive senses, Fine, Shoemaker, and Plantinga engage in the same project (though with different conclusions). They take many our common sense metaphysical categories at pretty-much face-value, and assume that our intuitions about them are guides to metaphysical reality (though particular intuitions may be explained away by clashes with other plausible a priori principles).

Logic is most often used as a tool to represent points, rather than a point in itself. Some people have great facility with this tool, and others less facility. But use of logic or mathematics does not help make any kind of distinction between kinds of philosophy or philosophers. 

Secondly, appeal to historical sources doesn’t help shed light on humanist vs. scientific distinction. Fodor is clearly a humanist, and Stich is a scientific philosopher, and neither makes central use of historical sources (notwithstanding Fodor’s recent foray into Hume scholarship). Appeal to history of philosophy is a tool to make a philosophical point, a source of evidence, rather than a kind of conclusion.

Strevens’s distinction is reminiscent of the distinction Strawson made between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics in the introduction of Individuals. Revisionary metaphysicians think it is a legitimate option to end up with conclusions that validate very few features of our ordinary conceptual scheme; indeed, such philosophers assign no epistemic significance to facts about our ordinary conceptual scheme. Descriptive metaphysicians take the task of philosophy to vindicate central features of that scheme. Strevens’s distinction between “humanist” and “scientific” philosophy is similar, but not identical. First, there are strongly revisionary metaphysicians who are motivated by considerations other than scientific ones (think of Van Inwagen’s Christian motivations for his ontology). Secondly, there are philosophers of science (think of Tim Maudlin) who undertake in their work to justify central features of our conceptual scheme (but maybe this shows they aren’t scientific philosophers in Strevens’s sense). I do think Strevens’s distinction explains certain departmental proclivities (e.g. Michigan, when Leiter was a graduate student, minus Velleman, was mostly a “scientific” department). But in general, I think each department, and indeed each area of philosophy (even, as I’ve suggested, philosophy of science) contain representatives of both attitudes.
                                                                        -Jason

Yale Offers to Gendler and Szabo

The distinguished philosophers Tamar Szabo-Gendler and Zoltan Gendler-Szabo, at Cornell University, have just received offers from the Department of Philosophy at Yale University (some portion of Tamar's position will be in Cognitive Science). Obviously, recruiting Tamar and Zoltan would be a huge coup for Yale, and losing them would be a heavy blow for Cornell.

I have lots of mixed emotions about this one. The Cornell department has for a century been one of America's great philosophy departments (it was, after all, Wittgenstein's American home). It also has exhibited (in my somewhat biased view) excellent judgment in recent years, hiring a series of outstanding young philosophers (in addition to Tamar and Zoltan, Graff, Fara, Hellie, Weatherson, and Eklund). They should be rewarded for making such intelligent decisions, rather than having their young faculty constantly fleeing the relative isolation of Ithaca. Furthermore, the field has an interest in ensuring that the Cornell department always has a number of energetic philosophers well-acquainted with the most recent literature, because their in-house journal, The Philosophical Review, is one of the most important journals in philosophy (the same consideration applies to Columbia). The Philosophical Review simply has become a much better journal for M&E since Zoltan, Tamar, and Brian became tenured faculty at Cornell (and Zoltan did an outstanding job as chief editor). On the other hand, having Zoltan and Tamar near the New York area would be wonderful for New York area philosophy.

Globalization

One of the most important economic facts to understand right now is what Richard Freeman explains in this excellent piece (pdf file): the world labor supply has effectively tripled over the past twenty years, from about 1 to about 3 billion employed persons in the common global market.   Part of this is due to population growth, but most is because China and the ex-Soviet states were not in the common global market in the mid 1980s; effectively India was not either due to trade barriers.   If these enormous countries had not entered our common economy, there would only be about half as many workers competing for the world's available jobs. 

Freeman emphasizes that this is not simply an increase in low-skilled labor supply.  He estimates that almost 40% of the world college enrolled population is located in China, the ex-Soviet Union, and India.  We've only just begun to feel the impact of that growth, as information technology helps make it possible to outsource more sophisticated tasks. 

This is almost certainly the largest and fastest growth in labor supply in all of human history.  One can view this change as throwing us back into a situation that is *conceptually* (though not practically, things are too different) similar to the situation Marx was theorizing about in the mid 19th century, when the rural population was a huge "reserve army" whose availability helped to blunt wage growth.  Capital owners have a huge pool of underemployed and underpaid labor to draw on, and this increases their power very significantly compared to labor.  So what we are looking at is a huge shift in the relative bargaining power of capital vs. labor.   

This is a very different perspective from looking at globalization as just a win-win increase in economic efficiency due to "free trade", accompanied by a lot of lectures about the wonders of comparative advantage, as economists tend to do.  It emphasizes the effects of economic change on power differentials and distribution instead of the effects on overall wealth creation.  This does not mean that the wealth creation effects aren't there; they most certainly are.  The increase in effective productive resources has massively increased global wealth as well, but it has simultaneously made it harder for workers in advanced countries in particular to access that wealth.  (Although we do get some benefits through drops in prices).

One of the difficulties in thinking about the "right" way to respond to this is that the interests of the world working class are somewhat divided, at least in the short run.  Globalization appears to represent a substantial increase in wages for the "new globalizers" in India and China.  But this increase in many ways comes from the pockets of advanced country workers.    But in the long run, interests are not so divergent.  Workers in all countries would like to see wages for workers in less developed countries (LDCs) increase rapidly and eventually equalize, so that there is no longer such a cheap labor pool for capital owners to draw on.   This will take a while but it need not take an infinite amount of time; if Chinese wages grow by 10% per year they will be at U.S. levels in 21 years, by 7% per year in 30 years. 

So the best long run strategy should emphasize increasing the bargaining power of workers in less developed countries, so that their wages increase rapidly.  The problem is that our most powerful institutional structures all operate at the national level, so it is difficult to bring those kinds of pressures internationally.  Fair trade agreements based on worker rights could be one way.  Of course national institutions probably tend to be dominated by employer interests as well.  But U.S. employers have some collective interest in increasing purchasing power in less developed countries if they can access them as export markets.

Another way to increase wages in less developed countries is by increasing U.S. savings rates to lower the U.S. balance of payments deficit.  Right now, too much of the capital gained by LDC producers from selling to us is being loaned right back to the U.S. to finance our borrowing.  It should be be invested to make the Chinese economy more productive and thus raise wages there.  In effect money that should be going toward growing LDC economies even faster so that they can converge with us is instead being spent on U.S. real estate and military spending.

In the short run though what we should want in advanced countries is a redistribution from capital owners to workers of the benefits of global economic growth.  We should all benefit from the wealth creation made possible by the expanded market without unfairly penalizing workers for a decline in bargaining power that is no fault of their own.  In other words, globalization strengthens the case for progressive taxation and other ways of redistributing money from rich beneficiaries of globalization to those who are victimized by it.  But you wouldn't know this from the neoliberal rhetoric about globalization, which has an ideological emphasis on wealth growth instead of changes in bargaining power.

Marcus

Amateur reflections on analytic v. continental

Jason has forbidden me in no uncertain terms from any commentary at all on his last post, which is a shame because as a non-philosopher I found it very entertaining. Some of us live in desirable locations, others in undesirable locations, but you know, in a deeper sense we’re all brothers and sisters. Can’t we all just get along?

I’m going to indulge myself here and do the undergrad philosophy-major thing, which all you professionals are probably going to find about as much fun as being trapped next to someone on an airplane telling you all about their “philosophy of life”. Leave now, you’ve been warned. Anyway, I think there is something to the standard division between a humanistic “wisdom tradition” and a “scientific tradition” in philosophy. There is one sense in which philosophy has historically been about “the meaning of life” – what values are or should be most central to how we live – and another sense in which it’s been about how best to describe the world. It’s the difference between culture creation and knowledge production. That humanistic/scientific distinction maps in a way onto at least the clichéd version of the analytic/continental division.

The gap between these traditions was bridged for a very long time by belief systems like Platonism, Christianity (not to mention various forms of displaced Christianity) that essentially claimed that “the truth will set you free” – contemplation of truth was the highest way of life, or at least supported the best way of life. There was an assumed harmony between truth and virtue.

The downfall of that synthesis with the advance of natural science is well known, no need to rehearse details. But I want to focus on Nietzsche in particular. Partly because I just know him somewhat better than other philosophers (not saying much). Partly because I want to use him as a sort of “type” of the continental philosophical tradition (probably unfair, but if you can’t wing it a little than what’s the point of blogs?).

Nietzsche of course makes a ferocious attack on traditional connections between truth and virtue. He wants to debunk both metaphysics and morality as destructive forms of wishful thinking born of the desire to see our particular psychology reflected in or ratified by nature. In that sense there are almost a few similarities to some variants of positivism. But Nietzsche does this in the name of a “humanist” vision of philosophy. The purpose of philosophy in Nietzsche is to create culture, not to produce knowledge. He does I think find it necessary to have particular sorts of (true) knowledge (say about human psychology) in order to effectively create healthy cultures. But that is knowledge in the service of culture, not the other way around. And of course he famously also claims that certain kinds of falsehoods or lies are psychologically necessary to the creation of healthy culture. I don’t think Nietzsche denies the truth of science, or the utility of science. His writing is full of what I think he considers empirically true and in their own way scientific claims (again, particularly about psychology, or perhaps more properly physiology). He simply thinks it’s not the point. He is indeed rather explicit in “Beyond Good and Evil” that science makes bad culture, in the sense that scientists themselves are not “noble”, not the kind of higher man Nietzsche is concerned with influencing or creating or speaking to. (He identified scientists with not just natural scientists but humanities scholars in general, e.g. philologists, historians, etc. In terms of their institutional role anyway these were the analytic philosophers of his day).

One can also point in the same book to his hilarious attack on the British empiricists. He doesn't really criticize them for being *wrong*, but for being uncultured…my translation has him railing about the “English-mechanistic doltification of the world”, “what is lacking in England…real power of spirituality, real profundity of spiritual perception; in brief, philosophy”. Show me the analytic philosophy department that makes tenure decisions based on profundity of spiritual perception.

As a side note: science does of course play a major role in Nietzsche’s idea of European culture. He feels any modern European higher culture will be deeply influenced by the desire for unmediated truth reflected in science, even though that culture will not produce “scientists” as such. Certain kinds of reliance on unquestioned tradition to ground culture may no longer be accessible to us because of our scientific and historical awareness; it is a very deep question in Nietzsche whether this is a “good” or “bad” thing.

So in answer to Jason’s question from a few days ago: “So if the conclusions don’t distinguish clear instances of analytic philosophy from clear instances of continental philosophy, what does?” The purpose does, philosophy as a humanistic discipline isn’t about producing conclusions, it’s about understanding and producing culture. Analytic and continental philosophy can share plenty of beliefs but have completely different methodologies and goals. 

Also since Nietzsche, a good deal of the hostility to science in the “continental” tradition hasn’t been necessarily been about doubting the truth of science on its own terms, or at least the predictive utility of science, but about the cultural effect of scientific assumptions. I’m talking here about the suspicion of “instrumental reason” in e.g. the Frankfurt school.

Marcus

A Splinter in Philosophy or just some departments in flux?

In one of the comments threads, Brian Leiter gives voice to a view he has been promulgating for a while about the philosophical community in the United States. As he writes:

 

“there is "agreement over methodology and approach" within particular sub-communities of English-speaking philosophers (e.g., the Princeton-MIT-Rutgers-Arizona-ANU nexus, or the Berkeley-Chicago-Pittsburgh-Harvard nexus, etc.).”

 

“I have it on rather good authority that when members of the Rutgers Department voted several years ago on the philosopher who had had the worst influence on the field, every member of the faculty but one voted for Wittgenstein (one voted for Kant, for rather oddball reasons). Obviously the vote would have been different at Pittsburgh or Berkeley. This might suggest that precisely what there is NOT is "agreement on methodology and approach" among English-speaking philosophers.”

 

I take it Brian is claiming that there are divisions between kinds of philosophy emerging in the United States. I used to think that Brian’s claim was right, and even moderated a discussion about it last time I blogged here. There is, after all, some evidence for Brian’s claim. In areas outside of ethics, the universities that Rutgers competes for graduate students with are Princeton, NYU, MIT, and occasionally Michigan. We don’t compete with Berkeley, Chicago, Pittsburgh (except in phil science), or Harvard (or at least we certainly don’t lose prospective students to them). At an APA last year, I talked with a Harvard-related person who denounced “Rutgers-NYU mainstream metaphysics and epistemology” as shallow for hours. Late at night at APA parties, Pittsburgh graduates will tell MIT graduates that they’re not really deep, and ugly besides.

 

However, in past year, I have changed my mind (essentially coming around to the view that Alva Noe was urging last year). There is a lot of evidence against Brian’s claim. Try as you might, you’re not going to find any differences whatsoever in the kind of work done by Pittsburgh graduates in M&E such as John MacFarlane, Doug Patterson, and Ram Neta, Harvard graduates such as Michael Glanzberg and Stephen Gross, MIT graduates such as Delia Graff, myself, or Zoltan Szabo, and Chicago graduates such as Robin Jeshion. Harvard graduates such as Alva Noe and Chicago graduates such as Jesse Prinz are as naturalistic as Rutgers graduates. MIT graduates such as Richard Heck are as distinguished contributors to the literature on history of analytic philosophy as Ian Proops, the best and most successful of the Harvard history of analytic students. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find even Harvard professors maintaining that the most prominent Rutgers graduates, such as Michael Strevens, are shallow. There is a difference in the kind of personal connections we have to older senior figures, but that’s about it.

[Update: I've been convinced by the comments I've received that my speculations about the source of complaints of the shallowness of "mainstream" M&E were too speculative. So I've replaced them with the following paragraph, since the central purpose of my post was actually supposed to be that I don't see the big difference between two "nexuses" of philosophy among my peers in other departments.]

So what is the source of the so-called "splinter" idea? Well, I suspect it is because Berkeley and Harvard have suffered serious declines after losing so many distinguished faculty to retirement and death. That fact alone is bound to cause some ill-will towards departments that now occupy the status they once did. After all, once upon a time, "mainstream" meant Berkeley and Harvard, and now it doesn't.

Whatever grumbling there is about the evils of mainstream philosophy among certain faculty at those institutions, Berkeley and Harvard’s younger faculty are uniformly excellent mainstream philosophers, who are friends and regular interlocutors with their peers at the leading departments. The most likely scenario is therefore that the two departments will slowly recover past glory, and all this talk about different kinds of philosophy will be forgotten.

The comment thread on this post should be fun...

   
                                                                                        -Jason

Tenure economics

I was thinking about posting this anyway, but it's quite relevant to some of the things Jason says in the post below.   You see the occasional conservative argument that tenure is a corrupt institution designed to give cushy lifetime employment to soft left-wingers who don't want to deal with the rigors of competition.  But most labor economists I think view tenure as a pretty rational market adjustment to the particular circumstances of the academic labor market.  For a couple of reasons.

One is precisely the reason Jason discusses in the post below -- the mixed motives of senior faculty in hiring junior faculty.  Academia is a field where it is very difficult for outsiders to assess quality at the cutting edge, and where (partly for this reason) departments self-govern.  Concretely this means that it is generally senior faculty within a department who are deciding what junior faculty to hire in that department.  If there were no tenure, then senior faculty would in effect be hiring their direct competitors for future employment in the department.  There would be a very strong incentive not to hire people who you felt might become better than you and throw you out of a job.  Therefore tenure makes it possible for the senior faculty to manage the department.  Without that you would have to have some kind of cumbersome and difficult external review process for every new hire.  But note that the difference from Jason's discussion is that the problem is within-department; there's no need to assume that senior people want to blackball junior people within the entire profession.  Within-department is really where incentives for senior people to game the system would become pretty overwhelming without tenure.

There are a couple of other reasons tenure makes economic sense as well.  In most academic fields people are asked to devote many years to learning very specialized knowledge.  There is a very thin market for their services, with often only a few institutions in the world that would pay them for their specialization.  It's reasonable for people to ask for job security in exchange for devoting a lot of time to learning highly specialized knowledge; otherwise they'd essentially be screwed if they lost their jobs.   The alternative would be to pay people very high wages to compensate them for the risk they take in specializing so strongly.  Academic institutions probably couldn't afford the wage premium.  Think about the wages that would be necessary to attract people to spend five years in grad school followed by an uncertain job market if there wasn't the prize of tenure at the end.  Essentially, academic institutions are promising something they feel they can afford to give (freedom and security) in exchange for something many can't afford to give (lots of money). 

Ex ante then, tenure makes a lot of economic sense.  Ex post (once people have received tenure), there may be a moral hazard problem in the sense that some people slack off.  But those costs can well be worth it once you look at the utility of tenure for the institution over the overall academic career.  If tenure didn't exist, we'd probably have to invent it.

By the way, these arguments are strengthened to my mind by the fact that the most decentralized and competitive higher education market in the world (the U.S.) is also the one that makes the most universal use of tenure.

-- Marcus

Tenure and Academic Evaluation

[Full disclosure: I’ve benefited immensely from the current system of evaluating academics]

Evaluating philosophers is fun (indeed, stay tuned this week for my list of ‘top ten most overrated New York Area philosophers’). But I’m increasingly suspicious of the way philosophers are evaluated in the field, and I’m sure my concerns here hold for many other disciplines besides philosophy. Academic evaluation in philosophy (e.g. tenure review) is performed by the most senior members of our profession. The views of the most senior figures carry enormous weight. I guess the natural thought here is that the most senior figures in an area are the most likely reliable and fair minded judges of who among younger participants is doing the best work. But I think there are a lot of reasons to think this natural thought is incorrect.

First, and most obviously, conflict of interest. It is in the interest of the most senior members of the profession to support the careers of those younger scholars who share their views, or at the very least their conception of what is important in the field.  Supporting scholars who disagree with one’s views is dangerous; it may ensure a shorter lifespan for one’s work. Even more clearly, supporting scholars who have an alternative conception of the discipline is an even more reliable way to undermine one’s own interests. A system that expects senior scholars to make objective evaluations of younger scholars that obviously involve conflicts with the older statesperson’s public statements and stated views places an unfair burden on those senior scholars. Finally, and most worryingly, a number of academics possess what one might call “the limited attention space” conception of the field. They think that there is a limited amount of attention in the field, and any attention that is drawn to someone else is attention that is taken away from them. I myself am convinced that the limited attention space conception of the field is incorrect; my work has clearly been made better by engaging directly and openly with the work of many others. But whether it is right or wrong, the limited attention space conception of the field is widely assumed, often tacitly, and sometimes explicitly. If “the underlying dynamic is a struggle over intellectual territory of limited size”, as Randall Collins has maintained (p. 81 of his The Sociology of Philosophies), then the very fact that a younger scholar is particularly promising should lead a rational, self-interested senior figure to try to subvert her career, whether that younger scholar’s work conflicts with the senior figure’s work or not. A system that is predicated on the irrationality of its members is not a very good system.

Secondly (and I’m more hesitant here, since there are many exceptions) it is my experience that (generally) the more senior one becomes, the more one loses contact with (broadly speaking) the profession at large. My peers in the profession and their juniors have quite a good sense not only of what others around their career stage and younger are working on, but also have read a good deal of their work. When I meet a philosopher, if she has published a few articles in Metaphysics and Epistemology, broadly construed, I generally am aware of some paper she has written. But my sense is that this isn’t true of most very eminent philosophers over a certain age (I don’t hit the journals as much as I did three years ago, and I’m just 36). I don’t know what accounts for this, and certainly there are notable exceptions. But by and large, I encounter a lot of very distinguished philosophers who have only a dim sense at one is happening outside their sub-disciplines. Yet these are the people many administrations rely upon to give them a sense of “what is happening” (e.g. it is the most senior philosophers who make up the constituency of visiting committees). In my experience, the best way to find out “what’s happening” in the profession is to ask advanced graduate students.

It seems to me that the system of having the most eminent and distinguished scholars be the gatekeepers for advancement has failed in Europe. In most European countries, a few grand eminences control distribution of the jobs in that country. This has been very good for American academia, because they often choose their students or followers for distinguished chairs rather than the younger scholars doing the most innovative work, and the latter migrate to us. My suspicion is that the American system thrives because it is so large, relative to the systems of individual European countries. If one publishes work that attracts a lot of attention, then even if some senior figures think you are “getting too much attention”, some department will hire you anyway. But that suggests that what is guides advancement in the long run is doing work that attracts a great deal of interest, and the system of evaluation by the most senior members of the profession is only an impediment.

Now, what can be done about it? Obviously, evaluation of philosophers isn’t a science. But I have never encountered people appealing to citation indices in discussing whether to hire someone, or any other kind of measure along that dimension. I am not suggesting that this sort of data should be relied upon in a definitive way. Nothing is a substitute for close reading of work (and for the reasons given above, certainly “getting more letters” from senior figures isn’t either!). But the fact that someone has published a good deal of work, and it has generated a substantive literature among people who are not personally connected to them is a measure of objective evidence of some kind. Since there are good independent reasons to think that high-status academics are going to be particularly resistant to promising younger scholars (whether knowingly or not), we probably should have such evidence available in contexts of evaluation. Of course, one concern here is that the aforementioned measures are not a reliable guide to future productivity, given the short tenure clock. Perhaps this is an argument for extending that clock, then.

                                                                    -Jason

USC offer to Byrne

Alex Byne has been offered a position at the rapidly improving Department of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. So now he has to decide between Boston, Princeton, and Los Angeles. Though I’d love to have him nearby, Alex has been a crucial figure in graduate education at MIT in the last decade, and I’m really pulling for my Alma Mater to retain him (realizing full well that Alex’s chances of getting a film cameo as a philosophy professor are slim to none if he stays in Boston).
                                                                                        -Jason

Catch-all Solutions to Philosophical Problems

I’m now entering my second decade as a professor, and feel like I have amassed enough experience to point out certain trends. I’m not sure if the trends I want to talk about are the “normal science” of philosophy, or if they’ve been particularly noticeable in recent years, as philosophy has gotten more professionalized. What I’ve noticed is that a certain methodology for addressing a philosophical problem will arise in one particular sub-literature, where by “methodology” I mean some kind of quasi-technical mechanism for resolving disputes in any area. Then, that strategy will start to replicate (much like a computer virus); people will apply it to all the other fields where it has not yet been applied. For example, at first fictionalism was advanced to treat the problem of negative existentials; then it was applied by Gideon Rosen to modal metaphysics. In the intervening years, fictionalists have appeared in every discipline (fictionalism about morality, fictionalism about abstract objects, etc.), and in the late 1990s, being on a job-search committee meant wading through endless stacks of papers advocating fictionalism about this or that. Contextualist solutions to philosophical problems arose in a more haphazard way; in philosophical logic, in application to the liar paradox and the sorites paradox, in epistemology to the problem of skepticism. Now, a contextualist solution is part of the standard tool-box of possibilities when faced with an apparent philosophical problem. Now, we’ve got relativism about truth, the idea that the truth of a proposition is relative to an evaluator, and no doubt serving on a junior job search committee will involve wading through stacks of papers applying relativism to this or that apparent dispute.

Over a year ago, Brian Weatherson declared that relativism was going to be a central topic in philosophy in the next decade:

 http://tar.weatherson.net/archives/002685.html

Brian has turned out to be correct. For example, at the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in Portland next year (not the MLA!), there are two invited symposiums on Saturday on relative truth; you can spend all day listening to philosophers dispute the topic. It's like fictionalism five years ago.

Over the years, I’ve written papers or chapters of books criticizing fictionalism, contextualism, and relativism. At each point, I thought there were specific features of the methodology and its applications to which I was reacting (and certainly, each strategy raises different issues). But I’ve realized that I have a uniformly negative reaction to methodologies application of which would resolve a host of apparently distinct philosophical problems. I think there are two sources for this. First, I think the philosophical problems are sufficiently distinct from one another that I’m immediately suspicious of any attempt to resolve several of them by appeal to one mechanism (be it covert fictions, context-sensitivity, or relativism). I could be convinced (though I haven’t been so far) that some traditional philosophical problem (be it future contingents, or skepticism, or the problem of abstracta) is due to our failure to recognize context-sensitivity, or truth-relativity, or that we’ve stumbled unknowingly into a fiction. But I think it is prima facie pretty unlikely that the right account of the sorites paradox will have much to do with the right account of skepticism. Secondly, since the methodologies are usually awfully easy to apply, I worry about how to constrain them. In short, each methodology seems to make philosophy too easy. I’m certainly not saying these worries can’t be answered by advocates of catch-all methodologies. Many of the profession’s very best and most careful philosophers are attracted to them. But I do think there is a special burden, when advocating a catch-all methodological solution to a philosophical problem, to respond to these two worries. 

                                                                                                     -Jason

Waynflete Professorship

My colleague John Hawthorne has been offered the Waynflete Professorship of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford. This culminates a series of high-profile offers in recent years that John has declined to stay at Rutgers, including Princeton and Yale. John is from England, so we all realize this will be sorely tempting for him, as will of course the opportunity to join Timothy Williamson as a colleague.

I've known John since 1996, and have followed his work and his career with great interest. I'm certain there are jobs John didn't get basically because his PhD was from Syracuse. So the arc of John's career is a big victory for the possibility of advancement on the basis of merit in philosophy (John started out at the University of New South Wales, then went to Arizona State, then back to Syracuse, then was hired at Rutgers as part of the 'big three' hiring of Hawthorne, Sider, and Zimmerman, and now I guess is contemplating a step down to Oxford). I wonder if there are similar cases of rapid advancement to the top of the profession from a mid-rank graduate program in (say) economics?
                                                                     -Jason

Analytic and Continental

As everyone knows, there is supposed to be a large difference between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy. The problem is of course that nobody has any clear idea of what analytic philosophy and continental philosophy are. We’re all very good at spotting clear instances of analytic philosophy (e.g. anything by David Lewis) and continental philosophy (e.g. anything by Lacan). But it’s very hard to spot any distinction of content between analytic and continental philosophy. For almost every doctrine espoused by continental philosophers, there is some analytic philosopher who has given mind-numbingly dull step-by-step arguments for that conclusion.

Two examples from the most recent literature in philosophy are pragmatic encroachment into knowledge and relativism about truth. According to advocates of pragmatic encroachment (such as myself, John Hawthorne, and Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath), what distinguishes knowledge from true belief is not just a matter of traditionally epistemic factors. One needs to take into account the putative knower’s practical situation as well; I think a similar thesis is true about other epistemic notions. The idea that ordinary epistemic notions are “impure” in this way does not seem like a traditionally analytic conclusion. According to relativists about truth, two people can disagree, and both be correct, since the truth of certain kinds of claims is relative to an evaluator. Both of these theses are ones that are usually associated with figures in the continental tradition (the former perhaps somewhat more Germanic, and the latter somewhat more French). An example from classic literature is skepticism about meaning facts. Different arguments for skepticism about determinate meaning-facts are central to both traditions (e.g. compare Derrida’s Of Grammatology with Chapter 2 of Quine’s Word and Object).

 So if the conclusions don’t distinguish clear instances of analytic philosophy from clear instances of continental philosophy, what does? I am certainly no scholar of continental philosophy. But one hypothesis worth entertaining is that it’s the style in which the philosophy is done which distinguishes it from analytic philosophy, or more precisely, the kind of considerations that are provided (often for very similar conclusions). While an analytic philosopher might give certain arguments for relativism about truth, or the social dimension of rationality, she will do so in such a way as to make vivid her commitment to an inter-subjective standard of rationality or truth according to which her arguments can be judged. In contrast, perhaps continental philosophers (as Marcus suggested to me last night) intend the literary style in which they make their arguments to underscore their view that there is only a spurious distinction between allegedly epistemically pure, truth-tracking disciplines, on the one hand, and literature, on the other.

 
-Jason

The point of my blogging...

Last time we blogged, I was asked by a few people somewhat bemused by what I wrote what message I was trying to communicate by my blogging. I don’t have a message to communicate by my blogging. I’m certainly not blogging because I think I have any brilliant insights (if I think I have a brilliant insight, I try to write a paper or a book). It should be obvious, but I'll say it anyhow: the point of my blogging is to entertain people who are procrastinating.

-Jason

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

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

The awesome effectiveness of massively parallel processing

There was originally a post here quoting an article from something called the "Hoosier Gazette".   Within two hours of the post hitting the net, Brian received the following email:

"The Hoosier Gazette is a satire site.  For the record, I fell for it for
a short time, and I live in Indiana..."

The error correction capacities of the decentralized net really are pretty awe-inspiring.  Isn't there some kind of way to harness this for journals doing peer review? 

Is economics a "science", revisited

I wanted to comment on Brian's excellent past post on this issue.  When the question is raised it usually bogs down pretty quickly into the dreariest sort of outdated Popperian philosophy of science (we make falsifiable claims!  we do empirical tests!).  This has the dual problems of ignoring the problems with falsificationism as philosophy of science and ignoring the fact that many economic theories don't seem to be all that falsifiable.  Anyway, Brian takes the falsification defense apart, and goes on to press hard on various disciplinary sort spots...poor predictive track record, generic predictions that are obvious to common sense psychology, etc. This sort of thing is especially cutting since it is exactly the sort of dismissiveness (some) economists like to direct at sociology.

In my experience, when the scientific nature of economics comes up it is often about justifying various disciplinary privileges relative to other social sciences.  There undertone is that we *do too* deserve the Council of Economic Advisors, the Nobel, the higher salaries, the op-ed slots, etc.  At least more than those other guys.   Well, maybe.  But if so it's not because economists are better amateur philosophers of science than people in other social science disciplines, or because we've solved the science demarcation problem when philosophers really haven't.  It would be because we produce better explanations.  Sciences ought to produce lots of true, useful counterfactuals (if you do X, then Y will happen) that aren't intuitively obvious.  Does economics do a better job of that than untutored common sense and/or the other social "sciences" and humanities? 

This is a different question from how similar economics is to some idealized science model (e.g. physics).  The accepted hard sciences differ greatly in methodology (e.g. geology is not a lab science), but one could argue they are and should be judged more by their predictive success than anything else.  So I think Brian is right to focus on predictive success. 

The truth is that in about a century of development economics has never been able to get to a really deep, truly reliable level of predictive accuracy about any economic phenomenon at all.  For a while people thought that level of accuracy had been reached in theorizing financial arbitrage (highly reliable predictions could be made about the future value of certain types of financial instruments), but then some very smart finance people lost a lot of money and it was back to the drawing board.  But I do believe economics generates counterfactuals that are true, useful, and an improvement on common sense alone.  (And an improvement on what other disciplines would produce if not supplemented by economic insights -- although I'll argue later that other disciplines can improve on economics taken alone as well).

The question then is what about economics makes it successful in generating those counterfactuals, and what limits its success in doing that (perhaps the more interesting question, as it points to the areas of potential progress).  Framing the question this way gets away from the project of physics imitation and toward the question of what useful social theory looks like.

I'm going to start by making a few posts describing what I see are some major strengths of economics as a predictive discipline.  Then (in a day or two) I'll post again on what I see as some major weaknesses of the discipline.

Strength #1) Economics measures things.  I'm not sure people realize how important economics has been in creating the basic concepts we use to think about and quantify the economy.  Unemployment rates, inflation rates, economic growth, GDP, trade balances, productivity measures, capital measures, predictors of economic growth like inventory measures or consumer confidence, are all creations of economics and in many cases use substantial input from economic theory.  (E.g. you can't really understand the idea of changing costs for a constant standard of living without thinking about how consumers substitute to different goods when prices drop, which comes straight from theory).  Different social sciences (e.g. psychometrics) also have their measures, but I would argue that these are less fundamental to understanding the phenomena than economic measures have been.  You can get a decent idea of whether someone is smart without administering them an IQ test, but modern economies are too large and too complex to understand without defining and consistently measuring concepts that reflect their state.   The macro level economy would be in some sense "unthinkable" -- we would have no common conceptual language to discuss it in -- if not for the 20th century contributions of economists.  The discipline realizes this too; I can think of at least three Nobel prizes given primarily for advances in measurement methods (pure measure development, not econometrics).

Because economists have developed consistent time series for these measures over long periods, we have an idea of trends.  This is very important by itself.  For example, the slow growth in U.S. family incomes during the 1970s-80s was probably related to slow growth in labor productivity.  But the slow growth in U.S. income from 2000-2004 was probably not due to this; it has something to do with how the returns from productivity are distributed. 

We also have some idea how different metrics have historically covaried.  That allows some general (and highly imperfect) predictions of what they will be in the future.  It also allows you to put bounds on the effects of at least some policy changes -- in particular limited redistributions of money across sectors of the economy that don't bring profound changes in social organization.

I wouldn't want to exaggerate the measurement successes of economists.  The measures economists use represent something real, but they are radically undertheorized and we often don't have that great an idea of what they really reflect.  To take just one example, imagine the pitfalls of using the same measure of business investment for 1970 (before the IT revolution) as you do today.  Yes, in both cases firms are spending money to buy a production input, but that input is so radically different that it could have completely different implications for economic activity.   

A side note: the computerization of administrative data sets means that economists' ability to track and measure the economy is starting to explode.  Purely descriptive new data on economic changes has had big effects on how we think about the economy.  (E.g.  Davis and Haltiwanger's complete accounting of job flows has helped us understand that the level of economic activity and dynamism underlying our aggregate numbers is much greater than we thought it was). 

Marcus Stanley

Iran

An important article in this months "Atlantic" reporting the results of a wargame which modelled options for a U.S. military strike against Iran.  Unfortunately it's behind the subscription wall, but the upshot is this:  the Iranian nuclear program is probably too well concealed and protected to be vulnerable to a limited strike/bombing.  And any full scale invasion of Iran would make Iraq look like Grenada in comparison. 

With Powell's retirement, the foreign policy hard liners appear to have swept the table in Washington.  But their desire to dominate the Middle East seems to be on a collision course with reality.   Will they understand that, or not?

The sad thing is that we have real potential common interests with Iran if we could drop the (to be frank) "must oppose Israel's enemies" blinders from our Middle East policy.  This interesting article by Leon Hadar in the contrarian "American Conservative" magazine is a realist take on the matter that is well worth reading if you're interested in the subject.  It's refreshingly common-sensical.

But here's a not very refreshing quote from the Atlantic Magazine article:

"Companies deciding which kind of toothpaste to market have much more rigorous, established decision-making processes to refer to than the most senior officials of the U.S. government deciding whether or not to go to war,"

Marcus Stanley

Language in Philosophy

I get asked a lot about the role appeal to language plays in philosophy, so I thought I'd write a little bit about that. According to standard lore, in the mid-Twentieth century, there was a movement called ordinary language philosophy. The ordinary language philosophers (or at least some of them) thought that all (most? some?) philosophical problems could be dissolved by appeal to ordinary language. The ordinary language philosophers turned out to be wrong. First, almost all the philosophical problems were not in the end problems about language. Once we were perfectly clear about language, the philosophical problems remained. Secondly, the way in which ordinary language philosophers appealed to language was misguided. Often, they appealed to "ordinary use", without any sense of the distinction between what was part of the linguistically determined truth-conditions of an utterance and what was merely implicated as a function of general conversational maxims. Paul Grice came around and made the relevant distinctions, and it became a lot harder to appeal straightforwardly to facts about use to draw conclusions about meaning (this was genuine progress in understanding communciation, progress that is threatened by advocates of now fashionable 'use theories of meaning').

In recent years, something like ordinary language philosophy has returned, but in a much different (and more modest) form. My friend Michael Glanzberg at UC Davis calls this technical language philosophy. First, instead of appealing to ordinary use, the new sort of philosopher of language appeals to facts about linguistic structure, fully informed by all the progress linguists, logicians, and philosophers have made in understanding language over the last forty years. Secondly, such appeals are typically made in the service of advancing our understanding of a philosophical problem, rather than seeking to "dissolve" it (it was never clear anyway how one "dissolved" a philosophical problem). So one might (for example) argue, as Kit Fine has recently done, that the statue is not identical to the lump of clay that constitutes it, on the ground that the statue is valuable, and the lump of clay is not, and there is no linguistic ground for treating "is valuable" as anything but a simple predication. Or one might argue (for example) as Tim Williamson and I have recently done, that knowing how is a species of propositional knowledge, since constructions such as "know how to ride a bicycle" are linguistically parallel to constructions like "know who to call in case of a fire". Since the latter are best treated linguistically as a species of propositional knowledge, so are the former.

On this model of the philosophy of language, appeal to language has two roles. First, it is a source of insight into possible analyses of philosophically important notions. Secondly, it is one among several ways to test the consequences of a philosophical view. If, for example, your philosophical view predicts that "is valuable" is not an ordinary predication, or "knows how to ride a bicycle" is linguistically quite different from "knows who to call in case of a fire", or that knowledge claims are context-sensitive, that's something we can now evaluate.

A second and more foundational role grappling with particular linguistic constructions has played in philosophy is in sharpening our understanding of the nature of representational content (Josh Dever's comment on a previous post makes this point too). That is, attention to particular linguistic constructions has genuinely advanced our understanding of how to represent content. In the mid-Twentieth century, there was some dim grasp of different models of meaning, e.g. that one could construe a discourse as fact-stating, or non-fact stating. But now we have a much better sense of what these models of meaning look like. Certain models of representational content (truth-conditional semantics, intensional semantics as descended from the philosopher Richard Montague) have proven very helpful for linguists in understanding how language works, and computer scientists in implementing these models. This provides some empirical evidence for these approaches to representational content. Secondly, as I've indicated in an earlier post, intensive investigation of certain linguistic constructions has raised the possibility of very different conceptions of meaning, of the non-fact stating variety. Philosophers such as Allan Gibbard who have intensively investigated some of these constructions (e.g. indicative conditionals) have done so because of their connections to these alternative conceptions of meaning, which they have then gone and applied in other domains (in Gibbard's case, to ethical language).

In my view, it was the intensive focus on modals, conditionals, and counterfactuals that gave us the serious original models of representational content that are now operative throughout philosophy, from philosophy of mind to metaethics. As a result, debates about the nature of content take on a much sharper and clearer focus, and progress is more easily possible. 

-Jason Stanley

GRE scores and Philosophical Aptitude

I've received a lot of reaction on the 'Graduate Admissions' post. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the e-mailers have urged me to take on the contentious topic of the role of standardized tests in graduate admissions.

Now, my brother and I might disagree on this topic, because he got perfect scores on the GREs (triple 800s), and I, er, did not. But despite the fact that my thesis advisor's father founded ETS, I myself am personally committed to a disconnect between philosophical aptitude and GRE scores. I think I did manage to top 600 on two of the three categories, but not by much. Most embarrassingly, the subject I did the worst on was the GRE analytic section (now I think defunct), where I scored somewhere in the mid 500s (out of 800). Fortunately for me, MIT (at least when I applied) did not consider standardized test scores.

I do get the sense that the great majority of my fellow philosophers are outstanding at standardized tests. So I'm probably a statistical anomaly (I've always suspected that they are mainly a good guide to being able to sit still for several hours). And now that I've outed myself as a standardized-test loser, perhaps my work will be viewed with (even) greater caution. But at least my case is some evidence that one can (if given the opportunity) have a successful career in philosophy while being utterly hopeless at the GRE. Another thing to keep in mind during graduate admissions season.

-Jason Stanley

Language and Mind

When I was in graduate school in the early 1990’s, we were told that philosophy of language was over, and philosophy of mind was the future of philosophical research. Here was the standard story. In the dark days of Twentieth Century philosophy, language had a privileged place; some philosophers even held that all philosophical problems were fundamentally problems about language. People soon realized that this was incorrect. Even after we were perfectly clear about the grammar and meaning of the philosophically controversial claims, many philosophical problems remained (such as whether the perfectly clear controversial claim was true). But the excessive focus on language remained. In investigating the philosophical problem of intentionality, the problem of how representational elements come to be about the things in the world they represent, philosophers focused in the first instance on linguistic representations. But this was a mistake.

     Paul Grice came on the scene, and showed how to reduce linguistic meaning to lots of facts about intentions. This led philosophers to recognize that questions about the intentionality of language – and indeed philosophical questions about language generally – were really misplaced questions that genuinely should be about mental states. Looking at properties of language was looking at the wrong place. As my thesis advisor put the point to me once, looking at language for elucidation about intentionality involved making the same mistake as the man who looks under a streetlight for the keys he dropped, on the grounds that the street where he dropped the keys had no streetlight. One of the central morals of Twentieth Century philosophy, according to this story, is that there really was no philosophical interest in studying language. Now that this confusion was cleared up, philosophical progress could really be made, as everyone turned their attention to studying the mind (if you want to get the flavor of those times, look at Tyler Burge’s contribution “Philosophy of Language and Mind: 1950-1990”, in the centenary issue of The Philosophical Review).

     As far as I can tell, the future that was supposed to happen never occurred. Though the philosophy of mind is a healthy sub-field of philosophy, no great revolution occurred there in the 1990’s, and the philosophical study of language (and its allied field, philosophical logic) continue to provide a rich and interesting source of problems and insights. Furthermore, considerations from philosophy of language continue to be deeply relevant in a wide variety of disciplines (e.g. epistemology, metaphysics, and metaethics). This is not to deny that interesting things have occurred in the philosophy of mind; the study of consciousness has flourished, stoked in large part by the innovative work of David Chalmers and others. But much of the debate in this area too involves reconfigured debates from the philosophy of language. 

     So what happened? Why is philosophy of language still a major source of philosophical insight and activity, and philosophy of mind (at least of the relatively a prioristic variety) perhaps somewhat less active than it has been in the past? I think there are several reasons. Looking back on the last thirty-five years, perhaps the most interesting and philosophically fruitful inquiry outside of political philosophy and ethics was the intensive study of conditional and counterfactual sentences. Real progress was made in understanding these ubiquitous linguistic constructions, and genuine puzzles emerged (such as David Lewis’s triviality results), with which we are still grappling. Some people took these puzzles (rightly or wrongly) to motivate radical new theories of content (expressivism). In general, intensive focus by the community on conditionals and counterfactual constructions clearly led to philosophical progress, both in understanding these constructions, and in recognizing new possibilities. It is this kind of work that inspired philosophers to look for other linguistic constructions, the study of which could be equally fruitful. In contrast, it’s not clear how to use the insight that the intentionality of mind is prior to the intentionality of language to break new ground. The intentionality of the mental is prior to the intentionality of language: now what? 

     Secondly, philosophy of language and philosophical logic have clear methodologies. In producing a systematic account of the meaning of a certain kind of linguistic construction, there are wrong answers (lots of them). If your theory of X in metaphysics entails certain facts about the meanings of some sentences, those are consequences that we know how to evaluate. In contrast, the methodology of (relatively a prioristic) philosophy of mind was the thought experiment, and the thought experiment proved to be a difficult methodology to control. Indeed, much of philosophy of mind became the study of this methodology, and why it is so difficult to control (i.e. questions about the relation between conceivability and possibility).

     I’m not sure what moral to draw from this tiny slice of the history of philosophy I’ve lived through. Perhaps it is that having a reliable methodology is the best path to breaking new ground, and if you don’t, what you’re going to be spending your time doing is wondering about the methodology. 

     UPDATE: I've received too many interesting e-mails about this, so now I'm opening up comments...

-Jason Stanley

Bloody Fallujah

The first stories from Iraqi eyewitnesses of the assault on Falluja are beginning to come out.  Pretty brutal.  Lots of civilians left, but you can't expect to evacuate the entire population of a city of a quarter million.  Oh well.  Lots of eggs apparently need to be broken to make the delicious omelet of Iraqi freedom!

Read the whole thing.  (If you like you can bypass LA Times registration using this account ID & password).  Found through Eric Umansky.

Marcus Stanley

I share your values!

From Ryan Lizza at the New Republic, here's a great little gaffe on Democrats and "American values".  Lizza got the following quote from a senior Kerry advisor (in reference to the Ricky Ray Rector case):

"Clinton went back and executed that retarded guy. That said, 'I share your values.'"

Like all the best gaffes, this is true but just a little too blunt.  The "values" the Dems lack aren't anything Christlike.  They are the values of authoritarianism, militarism, and bare knuckled social discipline.  But you aren't quite supposed to say that out loud.  The questions it raises about the relationship between morality and "values" are a bit too complex. 

I thought all the earnest social commentary about gay marriage after the election was pretty hilarious given that Abu Ghraib and the high level administration involvement in the planning of sexualized torture there was completely absent from the campaign.  The Bushies set up a sadomasochistic gay rape factory, but they sure held the line on consensual gay marriage.  Nothing says "I share your values" like sodomizing a suspected "evildoer".  You just know the Democrats would have been too squeamish for that.

The thing is, this makes emotional if not ethical sense.  It falls into place when you think of politics as a matter of identity, not ideas.  "Values" -- especially "conservative" ones -- are a shorthand for tribal identity, the willingness to police the group  and punish those who don't pay the proper respect to its mores.  Defending the tribe can be a pretty morally ambiguous enterprise.  As action movies teach us, a willingness to cut moral corners is evidence of true committment to the cause.   Hence the suspicion of a "liberal" party committed to universalistic and not just tribal values (global test, anyone?).

What's infuriating is that right now the morally superior path is also the more effective way to defend American interests.  It's patently obvious that Abu Ghraib harmed American security, that the lies behind the Iraq invasion did as well.  It's also obvious that Americans have benefited from alliances over the last century, not been harmed by them.  But in this election signalling tribalism, being "one of us" and not a suspiciously foreign-influenced intellectual type, was apparently more important than thinking about security.

Marcus Stanley