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Ratiocination

Beefing up on my M & E


I hereby vow to do all that is in my power to read the following two books in their entirety by the end of the year: Peter van Inwagen's Material Beings and John Hawthorne's Knowledge and Lotteries. If I can maintain a pace of a handful of pages every day, this is quite doable. I expect to learn much about contemporary metaphysics and epistemology (respectively) from these two highly regarded books and their authors.

I'll soon have John Martin Fischer's My Way: Essays on Moral Responsibility on pre-order; I look forward to reading it come next March 10th.

Miscellany


1. Today I re-read the exchange between Richard Rorty and Scott Soames on his Philosophical Analysis in the 20th Century. Rorty's initial review is a bit of a tirade, not just against Soames' book, but against the entire project of professional academic philosophy. It's well worth reading, as is Soames' respose (scroll down to read it). I particularly liked his modest defense of specialization in the last paragraph:

Rorty’s distrust of specialisation and his desire for a grand synthesis ignore the quality and quantity of what there is to synthesise. The value of specialisation is that it increases the chances of getting things right in each of the areas to be synthesised – something that great philosophers from Plato to Descartes, Hume and Kant have always recognised. In earlier eras, when it was not obvious that the scope of human knowledge far exceeded what could be encompassed by a single mind, the challenge of explaining how everything hung together was not so clearly unmanageable. Today, it is, and the solution is not to do badly what cannot be done, but to do well what can be: to construct a series of limited, but accurate and overlapping syntheses that together illuminate reality as we know it. This is what we should ask of analytic philosophy.

Brian Weatherson comments on the entire affair here.

I've never been quite sure what to think of Richard Rorty. He's clearly a bright fellow, and his writing sparkles with wit. All the same, it's sometimes hard to take him seriously when he writes about the state of analytic philosophy (as he is wont to do); his tone seems too often to be that of an embittered outsider insisting that he's not bitter (all appearances notwithstanding).

2. Desert Landscapes offers a fun tip toward outfoxing student plagiarism.

3. For a philosophically informed introduction to the study of consciousness/cognitive science, check out these 18 lectures, available for free care of Caltech. I'll be working through them in my spare time in the coming weeks.

4. I'll be commenting on Mike Huemer's "Paradox for Moderate Deontology" at the upcoming Seattle University Philosophy Conference.

The weekend after that, I'll be presenting an interation of my Rights Externalism paper at the Southern California Philosophy Conference (Cal State Northridge). For me, highlights from the conference look to include Sean Choi's paper on Principle Beta, Scott Soames on Kripke, Peter Ross on free will and Neal Tognazzini on counterparts.

A Change


All of my online assets have moved to my domain name, andrewmbailey.com. Please update bookmarks accordingly.

More on Serenity


Orson Scott Card has called Serenity the "best science fiction movie ever." That's high praise from the author of Ender's Game. Jeff Overstreet has also posted an in-depth review of the movie, with plenty of interesting interpretive work.

Professor Ratings


Wired has a story about college professors' objections to RateMyProfessors--"6-year-old site that archives student critiques of most popular and least liked profs."

Such protest is silly.

First, students always have and will talk about their professors: about teaching skills (whether lackluster or stellar), their clothes, their haircuts, pet peeves, messy chalkboard writing, grading practices, and nearly anything else you can think of. This is inevitable. It is especially so given the increasingly commercial nature of higher education (where college is a good bought and paid for by consumers). RateMyProfessors only facilitates this pervasive and perfectly natural aspect of college life.

Second, no privacy rights are infringed by RateMyProfessors. The classroom is not (usually, at least) a sacrosanct environment from which no information may permissibly leak. What professors do before their students is (or should be) an important factor in the granting of academic appointments, promotions, and tenure. It often is or should be a relatively public matter. RateMyProfessors allows this important information to flow freely.

The system can be scammed, of course. I have no doubt that some professors log in only to rate themselves highly or that some, as the article suggests, rate their colleagues poorly to raise their own relative ranking. Students, too, may game the ratings by leaving multiple comments. But precautions exist (like a presumption against multiple comments from the same computer), and the danger of system-gaming seems just as possible or likely as with standard student evaluations.

RateMyProfessors is, incidentally, not the only site of its kind. I know of at least one other and there are assuredly more.

Will Power: Muscle or Fund?


CSU Northridge economist Glen Whitman draws attention to some implications of the metaphor one adopts for understanding the psychology of will power. The alternatives: will power as a muscle, or will power as a fund. An interesting post.

A Defense of Common Sense


In Louis Pojman's widely-used epistemology anthology (The Theory of Knowledge), selections from two classic G.E. Moore papers ("A Defense of Common Sense" and "Proof of the External World") are presented together. Following is my summary of Moore's argument and strategy.

Moore takes as obvious the truth (and his own certain knowledge of) two expansive sets of propositions. In the first set are propositions like, 'there is a human body, and it is mine,' 'this body was at some time born and continued to exist after its birth,' 'this body has at all times been very near to the surface of the earth,' and 'I have had numerous experiences.' Also members of the first set are analogous propositions about other humans and bodies—that they exist, have had experiences and so forth.

In the second set we find propositions like 'very many humans beings have at sometime certainly known each of the propositions that are members of the first set with regard to themselves.' Many humans have known, then, that they have bodies and experiences and that others have bodies and experiences (and a host of other related propositions).
That sets one and two contain many true propositions and that Moore and many others know with certainty is so obvious as to be a truism. Moore makes explicit his commitments only because some have disagreed on the point. I take these truisms to be laid out towards a methodological end, viz., specifying boundaries of reasonable discourse.

Sets one and two are the data used by Moore to answer a claim of Kant's that, prior to the Critique of Pure Reason's publication, no philosopher was able to provide a satisfactory proof of things outside us, and that there is only one such possible proof (the one Kant gives in said Critique). Moore expresses doubts about Kant's own proof and claims that there are as many satisfactory proofs as there are members of sets one and two.

Moore takes 'things outside us' to mean things that are logically independent of any perception of them. More precisely, a thing A falls in this class if A's existence at t does not imply the existence of any (human) mind perceiving A at t. For example, while an imaginary soap bubble implies the existence of some mind (an imaginer); a soap bubble does not imply the existence of any (human) mind.

Moore's proof of the existence of things outside us is simple; he need only lift up his left and right hands and observe 'here is a hand and there is a hand.' From this it follows that 'there are hands' (members of the class of things outside us).

The conditions of a satisfactory proof are three-fold, and Moore's argument meets each. First, the premises must differ from the conclusion. The condition is met since the premise and conclusion are logically distinct; we might say that there is a conditional but not a biconditional between 'here is a hand and there is a hand' and 'there are hands.' Second, the premises must be certainly known; given what Moore has had to say about sets one and two, this is the case. That 'here is a hand and there is a hand' is a member of set one—a truism known certainly. Finally, the conclusion must follow from the premises, and Moore takes this as obviously being the case.

Moore's proof is repeatable by many; it can be used to prove the existence of external objects at any time. If hands are not available, other similarly certain and known propositions in sets one or two will suffice.

The method can be extended to prove the past existence of things outside us, too. If one certainly knows that 'I held up my left and right hands just a moment ago' it follows that 'just a moment ago there were hands.'

Moore considers two objections. First, that the notion that the premises in the proof require proof themselves; this Moore rejects, since it is unclear what such a proof might consist of and Moore might have conclusive evidence for some premise even should he be unable to provide proof of it. Second, that since the premises cannot be proved, they cannot be known (a necessary condition of satisfactory proof). But this is mistaken, since many humans know many propositions without proof—the many members of sets one and two, for example (though one not convinced by the proof will not be convinced by this claim either).

1st Annual On-line Philosophy Conference


Thomas Nadelhoffer (Florida State University) is organizing the 1st Annual On-line Philosophy Conference, which will begin in April 2006. There will be invited papers from a number of prominent scholars (listed on the conference blog), as well as a handful of at-large papers from junior philosophers and graduate students. This conference will be a good read when it happens, I think; I look forward to witnessing some high level exchanges from thinkers I respect.

Nonsense in the Academy


Meaningless and wasteful writing can be found in too many places. Against this, Universities ostensibly stand as an ivory tower, a place of intellectual sophistication and progress. There are pockets of nonsense and sophistry in higher education, however, and these have always interested me. I here briefly describe two such pockets of nonsense, each in a similar vein.

The structure these cases share (and there are more like them) is something like this:

1. A piece of clearly and intentionally meaningless work or writing is submitted to a journal or conference.
2. It is accepted for publication or presentation after ostensive peer review.
3. The work or writing is revealed to be a hoax.
4. Editors and conference organizers backpedal in an effort to save credibility.
5. Hilarity and ridicule ensues. The Academy turns out to be not so pure as it seemed or claimed to be.

When cases like this occur, I think it is good evidence of low academic standards, to say the least: an area of the ivory tower in which intellectual sophistication has been thrown to the dogs in favor of fashionable nonsense. What reigns is not reason but writing that conforms to stylistic standards and pays homage to the Big Names, saying little or nothing. This is quite literally a fraud; no academic deserves to get tenure (especially at a state school!) on the basis of such output, though some apparently do.

The first case is increasingly well-known, mostly because its perpetrator is a well-equipped publicist and clever writer. Nearly ten years ago, Alan Sokal, (full) Professor of Physics at New York University, submitted a set of post-modern-sounding babblings, replete with name-dropping and grandiose claims about the nature of reality, language, social constructions, and quantum physics. In the words of the author, "my article is a mélange of truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs, and syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever." Curiously enough, it worked. The paper was accepted and in fact published. A bomb of sorts exploded when Sokal revealed the piece was a hoax, though, and the journal, Social Text suffered a good deal of ridicule (rightly so). Needless to say, the entire affair was an embarrassment to the editor(s).

A few links on the first case:

1. The hoax paper: "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"
2. Alan Sokal’s first person account of the affair.
3. "What the Social Text Affair Does and Does Not Prove," also by Sokal.
4. Thomas Nagel’s review of Sokal’s resultant book on the matter.
5. Stanley Fish's critique of the Sokal hoax, published in the New York Times
6. Sokal's response to Fish (I think this is a smashing little bit of writing)
7. Interview with Sokal by the Philosophers' Magazine
8. The New Criterion's account of one public discussion between Sokal, one of the editors, and other intellectuals.

The second case happened earlier this year, and is evidence, I think, that this sort of fraud is not unique to the humanities. A group of MIT computer science students devised a program to automatically generate academic computer science essays—complete with presentation slides, charts, and a grammatically correct text full of jargon and technical-sounding vocabulary. This effort, too, worked. A paper generated by this program was accepted for presentation at a rather large conference. The conference organizers pulled out at the last moment, once the hoax became publicized, but, as in the Sokal affair, the damage had already been done. The ensuing events were rather funny, and the page maintained by the MIT students (linked to below) documents these well.

A few links on the second case:

1. News story summarizing the MIT students hoax
2. The essay generator used to make the presentation
3. Further information on the MIT students’ page (see links on above page)

Serenity


The new film Serenity is well worth the price of a theater ticket. It effectively combines all the best of the original Star Wars trilogy and the Matrix, with a dash of zombie movie madness. The characters are generally compelling, and the plot is original and interesting. Of special note are the sets. As in the original Star Wars trilogy, we are treated to the site of old, broken-down, dusty space ships. Not every surface is polished and shined, and this only adds to the realism of the environment. The viewer gets the sense that the Serenity is a ship someone could actually live in. I like that. Well-written, and with a libertarian spin to boot, I enjoyed it immensely.

Incidentally, though the writer-director is a bit of a leftist himself, he recognizes the film as a bit of a plug for libertarian ideas. The Sci Fi Wire quotes:

I've actually said once or twice that the difference between TV and movies is that TV shows are a question, and movies are an answer. And so in this we had to have a definitive statement about freedom and humanity and what we need and what we should be allowed to have as people, which is all our flaws. And then I answer that. I make a definitive statement. I put a period or, hopefully, an exclamation point on that, as opposed to just sort of pursuing the question for years, which is what a TV show would do.