Knowledge and Experience

For Women, Which Form of Job Satisfaction?

2011-12-13T21:20:00.003-05:00

Julie White has a post worth reading on the Chronicle of Higher Ed's blog: "A Career Dilemma." She points out that it's not only women who are less well off when this dilemma holds, but students as well.

The proportional imbalance of women (as well as other minorities) creates a career dilemma for some of us. We can work at a community college, where it’s likely pay and job satisfaction will be better for women than at four-year colleges, but we will have less time and energy to get our scholarship out into the world. Or we can work at a four-year college with more prestige and opportunities for research, but where we are more likely to feel underappreciated and culturally isolated.

....

When the perspectives of groups with different cultural experiences are left out (whether based on sex, race, ethnicity, gender, class, ability, or other points of societal stratification), gains in new knowledge will inevitably be incomplete, inaccurate, or downright injurious to the underrepresented or misrepresented groups.

Engineers are Smokin' Hot

2011-12-07T20:57:00.004-05:00

My university has posted this recruitment ad on their homepage. I'm not sure if it's targeted at 18-year-old women or 18-year-old men. Is the intended message "You can be a woman, can study engineering, and can STILL be smokin' hot," or is it "You can come study engineering at RIT and STILL meet some smokin' hot (and fast!) women"?

The male voiceover says "Around here, there's only one thing we expect from our students..." and then the on-screen text flashes the phrase "Beautiful Solutions."

Anecdotally, the women in the video are not actually on the Formula team.

Update: The women in the video apparently are on the Formula team in some role, but not in the roles portrayed. Also, after the college president received negative feedback "from a number of people," including students, the video was taken down from the RIT homepage.

Gendered Language and Textbook Examples

2011-11-10T14:03:00.005-05:00

I've been going over rough drafts of term papers, and I have as many students writing about "the future of mankind" and "the well-being of men" as ever. When I suggest that they consider writing of "human well-being" instead, they look puzzled. Wasn't gender-neutral language something that was adopted by professional and academic writers in the 1980's? Thirty years ago?

My kindergartner showed me a page in his math workbook. There were little pictures of people to count: girls dressed as dancers and boys dressed as soldiers (yes, with little rifles complete with bayonets!). I asked him if he knows any real-life dancers: yes, one, named Jeff. I asked him if he knows any real soldiers: yes, one, named Jenn. Will those real-life examples override the images which are put before him?

I was considering which textbook to adopt for a critical thinking class and came across this McGraw-Hill quiz. The 10 quiz questions concern a Senator ("he"), a Professor ("he"), Mr. Equalminded, Tom, and Mr. Theist. There are no feminine pronouns on the quiz. I thought we were free of this by now. How do these texts make it past the review process?

New APPS on women, again

2011-09-20T14:22:00.002-04:00

The New APPS blog has consistently been a clear voice for not overlooking the women among us. After all, to give women in philosophy what they are due is only a matter of logic and of fairness, two qualities that philosophers claim to specialize in.

Here's the latest: an overview of how women fare as authors and subjects in prominent book series.

Zeno's paradox

2011-09-09T13:34:00.003-04:00

When I'm teaching an Intro course, I frequently take time to present and discuss a paradox. I frame this activity as a warm-up exercise at the beginning of class, and I make clear that it's not a time to disengage but rather is a time to enjoy how intellectually stimulating philosophy can be--it's not something that folks have to take notes on or which I grade.

In crafting a mini-lecture on Zeno's paradoxes I came across the following Youtube video on Achilles and the tortoise, which is so charming that I couldn't believe it had had only 250 views (at that time)!

What Does a Philosopher Look Like?

2011-08-22T08:29:00.002-04:00

I'm at a philosophy conference outside of the US. I think there may be even fewer women in philosophy in this country and its neighbors than in mine. The conference hotel is small, and philosophers don't look quite like most of the other guests. There are no nametags, and the conference just started today.

I got on the elevator this morning, on the 6th floor, to go down to breakfast at the designated time. On the 5th floor a young man got on, sporting a ponytail and sport coat (i.e., our uniform). On the 4th floor, a white-haired man got on. The young man turned to the older man before the doors were even closed and asked him "Are you a philosopher? Are you here for the conference?" (the lingua franca is English) and introduced himself.

I may as well have well been wallpaper. Female, and visibly pregnant to boot. No chance of my having deep thoughts or being someone worth knowing. Or--maybe I'm just overly sensitive, and it was the white hair that made the young man snap to. Someone 10 or 15 years older than me might be someone worth schmoozing with. Then again, I don't often see my white-haired female colleagues getting that treatment, either.

Conference papers and professional courtesy

2011-08-10T13:47:00.002-04:00

What are the rules regarding conference paper submissions and fresh work in philosophy?

I've presented at and attended some scientific conferences, and the rules at those conferences are usually explicit in the calls for papers: submitted work must be presented at the conference for the first time, and it must not yet have been published. I think the rules on work that has been accepted for publication but not yet published vary, and they depend on how crucial it is to get information out to peers.

Granted, there are ways to bend these rules. Often, a scientific research project has been produced by a whole team of people and the data can be analyzed and presented in many different ways. If the team members come from different disciplines, then they may be able to present their research from different disciplinary angles at various conferences. Also, there may be different products that come out of a single study--one paper might focus on methodology, another on a new use of a technology, while another analyzes the consistency of that study's results with similar studies. But in any case, it's widely recognized as wrong to submit the exact same paper to two similar conferences, just as it would be wrong to submit it to two journals.

In philosophy, though, our work builds and our views shift in a more organic way, and there may be a good reason to present the same work to two quite different audiences. It seems fully acceptable to give a paper at a local symposium and also at a national conference. Is it acceptable to submit the same paper or abstract to more than one conference simultaneously, without intending to make any changes? To submit to more than one division of the APA? To submit to a group session and to the main program at the APA, perhaps betting that one would be rejected or could be withdrawn? To submit to an APA session some work that has been accepted by a journal but is still forthcoming? To submit to an APA work that has already been published? Where is the line?

More than once, I've attended papers delivered at the PSA which I've also seen delivered in a similar or exact same form elsewhere. In some cases, I've already read the journal article. In one case, I had read the journal article 4 years before seeing the presentation. Something like that might be acceptable if it extended or modified a prior published article, but in this case no changes had been made and the article's publication was not mentioned.

Conference program committees should review papers anonymously (that is, without knowing who the authors are, their affiliations, or their status). Is it fair for them to look up paper titles to see if a paper has been published or presented elsewhere? Or doesn't that undermine anonymity since many people now post paper drafts online?

Innovations in Ethics Curricula

2011-06-24T11:30:00.003-04:00

Innovations?! Well, no. Here is yet another of my frequent complaints! Textbooks in ethics (and in Intro to Philosophy, and in Philosophy of Science, and in Environmental Philosophy, and I'm sure in most of our other areas) go through frequent editions but each edition contains the same old topics with the same old papers.

Yes, some of the old papers are classics and nothing else compares. Judith Jarvis Thomson on abortion. But in general, except for the addition of pieces on climate change, an ethics anthology now looks almost exactly like an ethics anthology when I was in college--over two decades ago! And some of the pieces seemed dated to me then.

Today's exemplar just arrived in my mailbox--Social Ethics: Morality and Social Policy, edited by Mappes, Zembaty, and DeGrazia and in its 8th edition with McGraw Hill. I don't think this text is any worse than all the others, but it's not better, either.

Take the example of the chapter on climate change. It contains 10 selections, but only 2 of them were written in the last decade! Both of those pieces are written by philosophers but were originally published in the popular press.

And let's look at the gender breakdown--something that should be informative about the degree of currency and creativity in an anthology. Women constitute 20% or so of professional philosophers but a much higher percentage among ethicists. In addition, this text has sections s on issues that have been extensively examined from a feminist perspective: sexual ethics, abortion, marriage, pornography, and global and economic justice. Finally, the text includes selections written by practitioners (rather than exclusively by philosophers) and published in the popular press (rather than just in philosopher journals).

So what can possibly explain this breakdown?

Of the pieces with named authors, only 15% have a female author. Some of those female authors have more than one piece in the anthology, so that only 12% of authors are female!

The cost of the text is over $100. Do any of these pieces come with an expiration date? I drink fresh milk, eat fresh eggs, and insist on fresh fruit. My mind requires fresh nourishment as well.

CfP: Feminism and Climate Change

2011-06-16T13:50:00.002-04:00

CALL FOR PAPERS

Hypatia: Special Issue on Climate Change

March 15, 2012 submission deadline

Volume 28, Number 3, Summer 2013
Guest Editors: Nancy Tuana and Chris Cuomo

Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy seeks papers for a special issue on Climate Change. We welcome new feminist scholarship on the scientific, ethical, epistemological, economic, and cultural dimensions of current global climate change, as well as case studies that critically engage specific questions in local, regional, national, and/or global contexts. In addition to essays developing feminist analyses of the science, ethics, and politics of climate change, we encourage investigations of the gendered, neo-colonial, and other power-laden frameworks which shape the discourses and power flows that influence various parties’ understandings of and responses to climate change.

There has been a great deal of work in the natural and social sciences on various aspects of climate change, and there is increasing acknowledgement in the literature that extreme weather events and ecological disasters tend to have greater negative impacts on women, girls, and those who lack economic and social power. Nonetheless, little attention has been given to the complex ways in which hegemonic conceptions of gender, race, nation, and knowledge are implicated within institutional frameworks of climate policy, media representations of scientific knowledge, and suggestions of planetary redemption through "eco-engineering," carbon markets, or profit-generating green technologies.

In addition to critical case studies focused on specific regions or trends, some questions and issues that might be considered in this special issue include (but are not limited to) feminist analyses of the following topics:

Geopolitics of climate change treaties and political processes
Ethics and politics of approaches to climate justice, including cosmopolitanism, human
rights, human security, indigenous rights, and eco-centric perspectives
Critical analyses of industrial, scientific, policy and activist discourses
Climate change denial and epistemologies of ignorance
Intersections and tensions of development ethics and climate ethics
Epistemologies and ethics of climate modeling, including economic models
Naturalization of fossil fuel dependence and consumerism
Climate change and the resurgence of reactionary notions of population control
Critical analyses of the influence of popular media, from misinformation to education

Deadline for submission: March 15, 2012
Papers should be no more than 8000 words, inclusive of notes and bibliography, prepared for anonymous review, and accompanied by an abstract of no more than 200 words. For details please see Hypatia's submission guidelines
Please submit your paper to manuscript central. When you submit, make sure to select “Climate Change” as your manuscript type, and also send an email to the guest editors indicating the title of the paper you have submitted: Chris Cuomo: cuomo@uga.edu, Nancy Tuana: ntuana@la.psu.edu

CFP: SAF at the Central APA, Feb. 2012

2011-06-15T09:39:00.002-04:00

That's a lot of acronyms!

CFP: call for papers

SAF: Society for Analytical Feminism

APA: American Philosophical Association, meeting in Chicago

Here's the call. This is a good opportunity for graduate students (and others!) who are working in feminist philosophy in an analytic style. Ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of science--all are welcomed. It's also a supportive organization for women in philosophy, with reasonable dues and frequent networking/philosophizing opportunities.

*************************

CALL FOR PAPERS

Society for Analytical Feminism: Feminist Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition

SAF Session at the Central Division APA

Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois

February 15-18, 2012

The Society for Analytical Feminism invites submissions for a session at the 2012 Central Division APA meetings.

The Society seeks papers that examine feminist issues by methods broadly construed as analytic, or discuss the use of analytic philosophical methods as applied to feminist issues. Reading time should be about 20 minutes. Authors should submit either (1) a paper, or (2) an extended abstract, as detailed as possible (up to 1000 words) accompanied by a bibliography. Please delete all self-identifying references from your submission to ensure anonymity. Send submissions as a word attachment to Robin Dillon (rsd2@lehigh.edu).

*** Deadline for submissions: August 1, 2011. ***

Graduate students or underfunded professionals whose papers are accepted will be eligible for the Society’s $250 Travel Stipend. Please indicate on a separate page (or in your covering letter) if you fall into one of these categories.

The Society for Analytical Feminism provides a forum where issues concerning analytical feminism may be openly discussed and examined. Its purpose is to promote the study of issues in feminism by methods broadly construed as analytic, to examine the use of analytic methods as applied to feminist issues, and to provide a means by which those interested in Analytical Feminism may meet and exchange ideas. The Society meets yearly at the Central Division meetings of the APA and frequently organizes sessions for the Eastern Division and Pacific Divisions. Information can be found on our website.

Membership in the Society is open to all who are interested in and concerned with issues in Analytical Feminism. Annual dues are $25 for regularly employed members, $15 for students, unemployed, underemployed, and retired members. To join, send your check for the appropriate amount payable to the Society for Analytical Feminism to Robin Dillon at the address below.

Robin S. Dillon

Department of Philosophy

15 University Drive

Lehigh University

Bethlehem, PA 18015

Reading Coded Language

2011-06-10T09:38:00.002-04:00

In online discussions about stereotype threat, combative attitudes (as opposed to adversarial method), and distinguishing exclusionary or sexist/racist language from innocuous language, it is often pointed out that an accused speaker need not be intending to exclude or accuse or intimidate others. Furthermore, some see sexist/racist language where others merely see colorful or humorous examples.

This is a legitimate issue, worth discussing. How can sexist language be identified? Can language be sexist even when the speaker has no such intent? And what about cases where many people in an audience wouldn't identify the language as exclusionary? Are those who would (usually those who feel targeted by it) just overly sensitive? Possibly even paranoid?

First, the question about intention. It's certainly possible that a speaker be sexist without a conscious intention. In a male-dominated (white-dominated) environment, using language that reinforces males/whites as the norm may seem just that--normal--while also achieving an exclusionary effect. Sometimes we aren't even aware of the coded language we use or what our actions indicate about our beliefs. Indeed, it is the rare bigot who is so aware and proud of the bigotry as to reach for offensive language.

For example, in the town where I went to college if someone said "I know the Safeway is farther away, but I'd just rather go there than the Winn-Dixie," this could reasonably be interpreted as conveying an unspoken attitude toward race. And many at my college would have said it. There was no need even to reach for a more explicit code: "The Winn-Dixie? Only townies shop there!"

I attended a talk not too long ago during which I spent much of my time wondering if others in the room (and who) were as offended as I was at the low-level but constant aggressive nature of the talk. What do you think? Does a pattern emerge from the following statements? (The talk/slideshow was about the nuts-and-bolts of collaboration--ostensibly about how to deal with the practical side of working with collaborators.)

"Know that in some collaborations, you will wind up jumping into bed with people you won't want to build a relationship with."
"Figure out what people expect out of a collaborative relationship. Some are even genuinely concerned about the issues, so try to figure that out."
"Always tell people the deadline is earlier than it really is," with a stock photo of a war game.
Slide title: "Surprising Sights," with clipart images of a fat lady and a bearded lady.
military jokes and drinking jokes and drinking-in-the-military jokes (and no other jokes).
Slide title: "Different goals and agendas," with clipart image of someone being stabbed in the back with a knife.
"Before you jump in bed with a collaborator, find out how much they'll want from you."

I'm trying to decide if the talk was offensive only because of its insincere attitude toward the goal of inquiry or for other reasons as well.

Parental Choices

2011-06-01T12:18:00.003-04:00

I think a lot about my parenting but don't often write about it. But there are two independent things in the news lately that have provoked similar responses, and I want to explore them.

Namely, why is it that there is such controversy over "the right way" of raising kids when so many ways seem to do just fine? And the higher-level question, what should guide us parents in decisions about how to raise our kids, and, in particular, how we allow them to spend their (non-school) time? Why does the baseline belief seem to be that parents should conform to a typical parenting mode, something that comes from outside of themselves and is rather like a community standard? Why, that is, when we are a multiplicity of communities and do make these decisions for ourselves all the time? Why not also make those decisions for our very young children (assuming that children will be able to make more and more decisions for themselves as they grow up)?

Here are two stories:

via Feminist Philosophers, a Canadian mother who hasn't revealed the gender of her infant receives media attention, much of it negative.
the National Association for the Education of Young Children released guidelines advocating incorporating electronic technology (computers, etc.) into all early childhood educational settings (including preschools and outdoor summer camps).

My reaction to the mother who won't reveal the gender of her infant is to wonder "Who cares?" Some even call it child abuse, in part, no doubt, because she lets her toddler and her pre-school boy wear dresses and long hair. But who cares? Some grown men wear dresses. Let them. Some men, e.g. Moroccans and Egyptians, wear long robes as a matter of cultural identity and dress their boys that way, too. Children seem to do just fine in this world so long as their clothes are safe and comfortable.

Likewise, some parents clearly do want to make this choice for their young boys: you will wear boy clothes in boy patterns. That seems fine to me, too. In my house, we don't wear images of violence or meanness--no sharks with huge teeth or skulls or guns on our t-shirts. (We do have lots of pictures of trees!) This is due to me exercising influence as a parent. I made the decision, and as my boy grew older I let him know why. He may challenge me sometime, but that will be between us, and I don't see why it's anyone's concern whether I make it a matter in which I give him freedom or enforce my authority.

The second problem seems different. In the absence of evidence, why would an educational body recommend some technologies over others (gameboys rather than baseballs, cellphones rather than soap bubbles) across all contexts? The impulse seems to me related to the background belief in the first case: electronic screens are something we all do now, so childhood exposure should prepare little ones for it.

I don't see why, in these cases, we would treat little ones as smaller versions of young adults. It might be disruptive for a 7th-grade boy to wear a dress to junior high. He would get teased, among other possible problems. But a toddler? Not so much. It might be deficient for a 7th-grader to lack computer skills these days. But a toddler?

The Tiger Mom gets called out for being too strict, too demanding. The hippie mom gets called out for being too lenient, for misguiding her child's gender image. But both have kids who seem well-adjusted.

Both of these parents are self-conscious about their parenting, and that seems to me to be what matters. Both are proud of their kids, and of themselves, for reaching their goals.

But I don't withhold judgment entirely. The parents I don't understand are the ones who don't like how their children have become but continue to raise them to be that way. I don't understand the parents who seem concerned that their child gets in trouble for bringing toy weapons to pre-school and drawing images of weapons and violence--and yet the child continues to have access to those objects and ideas. In the case of a 5-year-old with a fetish for swords and parents who are disturbed by it, why not inundate that child with musical theater? How can there be room in a young brain for laserguns when it's filled with Rogers & Hammerstein?

Sometimes I think I'm just lucky: my boy loves to play UNO with me and work spatial puzzles! We hike together, we sew together, and we watch nature documentaries. But really, that's just childhood. Little kids know what they know, and they don't know what they don't know. I'm mystified by parents of little kids who say "I wish my kid didn't love X so much"--unless that parent secretly loves X, too.

Philosophy: The Root of All

2011-05-25T13:54:00.001-04:00

This may be my favorite XKCD comic ever. Not embedding because you'll want to see the rollover.

Filosophy Festival = Fun

2011-05-25T08:25:00.003-04:00

From the Telegraph, via 3 Quarks Daily--an announcement of a philosophical festival in Wales.

Says the organizer, Hilary Lawson:

I'm interested in philosophy because it's about understanding the world and our lives. When we started the festival three years ago, philosophy was more likely to appear in Monty Python. It was a laughable matter, it was technical and analytical – not about our lives. Our aim is to overturn the current intellectually conservative environment, where ideas and philosophy are not valued or taken seriously. Our goal is to create an open, vibrant, intellectual culture which combines innovative thought with rich experience.

The festival partners philosophical debates with film, poetry, music, and fun. Yes, there is professional philosophy--and then there is philosophy. The world needs both, and it's likely that professionals could use more philosophy in their lives, too. (Just none of that metaphysics.)

The poet Ruth Padel says of the festival

Poetry and philosophy matter in everybody's lives.

This reminds me of a scene in Examined Life when Cornel West says that anyone can be a philosopher and that it doesn't take fancy schooling, but that it's not easy, either, and requires great courage. (Clip is here, with that passage right at the start.)

Adaptation to a changing climate in Chicago

2011-05-24T12:13:00.004-04:00

In my academic life, there is much discussion of adaptation to climate change, often in the terms of a moral imperative to protect the disadvantaged and poor and to consider assisted colonization (or assisted migration) for desirable plant and animal species which are unable to migrate to a new environment quickly enough to keep up with rapid climate change.

There is less awareness of the necessity of climate adaptation in society at large. We more often hear about global warming in a context of trying to slow it down (mitigation), with less attention paid to how we will cope with the inevitable changes already underway. Except for insurance companies, which seem to be paying close attention!

Yesterday the NYTimes reported on how Chicago is working to get ahead of the curve, taking predicted climate change into account in its urban planning. Fifty years from now, Chicago's seasons and climate may be much more like Alabama's! Having experienced frigid Chicago winters, I'm wondering what it would be like to have such long, dark nights without the cold and snow.

Some of Chicago's actions include:

new street tree plantings are species from more southern ecosystems, eliminating the native white oak in favor of sweet gum.
more street trees in business districts to help control run-off water and to cool the air.
light-colored permeable pavers in parking and bike lanes to control run-off, to channel water to street plantings, and to lower the temperature.
rubbery additives to pavement assist with expansion and contraction due to extremely hot and cold seasons.
investing in air conditioners for public schools.

Philosophical language and the gender norm

2011-05-23T21:12:00.004-04:00

The surprising encounter with the accusation that someone who fails to articulate disagreement is a 'wuss' has heightened my sense of gender normativity in language over the last few days. (This is public radio, not Howard Stern!) I'm happy to see that I'm not the only one who sees gender bullying played through language games.

Reading essays in Paul Horwich's Truth, Meaning, Reality (2010), he writes in "A World without Isms":

Of course it was wishful thinking for me to have suggested in my title that this could spell the end of all 'isms'. For there was bound to be one for the very point of view that I'm recommending. "A bloodless quietism" is how Crispin Wright has labeled it—"the bland perspective of a variety of assertoric 'language games', each governed by its own internal standards of acceptability, each sustaining a metaphysically emasculated notion of truth, each unqualified for anything of more interest or importance." Well, Crispin, sorry for being so anemic, boring, and effeminate...

This move allows the unconscious (and unthinking) sexism to be its own insult.

What does 'Wuss' Mean?

2011-05-20T10:05:00.002-04:00

I sometimes download and archive podcasts but find that I don't listen to them as often as I intend. But then something will strike my fancy. And that's how I came to listen recently to a Philosophy Talk podcast dated 12/5/10.

The topic is "Disagreement" and the interview is with Jennifer Lackey of Northwestern, a social epistemologist who examines testimony as a source of knowledge. The topic is a fascinating one, and the sort of thing that I would encourage my students to think about.

But I got caught on this piece of dialogue:

"What should I do in the face of disagreement? Should I change my opinion just because you disagree? If I change my opinion just because you disagree, that seems kind of wussy. On the other hand, if I don't at least reconsider, that seems kind of arrogant. So what should I do: be wussy or arrogant? chuckle"

Lackey: nervous laughter

Why the chuckle and the nervous laughter?

Could it be because 'wuss' is a not-quite-polite word to use here? What does 'wuss' mean, anyway, and what is its origin?

I've always thought of 'wuss' as one of those words that is like the phrases 'that sucks' and 'it really blows.' They've become part of the vernacular, but we are marginally aware of their sexual origin. You wouldn't say it to your mother-in-law. At best, isn't it like substituting 'witch' for 'bitch'? The meaning is the same, and the substitute doesn't eliminate the sexist nature of the insult, or does it?

I looked up the origins of 'wuss' and found much speculation but no authoritative origin. Suggestive, though. It means 'wimp' and comes from the expression 'pussy-wussy,' meaning 'sissy.' It became popularized in the US in the 1980's. Strangely, some seem to say that 'sissy' does not have a sexual reference, and that 'pussy' in this context refers not to women's anatomy but to men who act timid, subservient, weak, and ineffectual and in this way are like women.

Either way, the term is a way of insulting a man by calling him either gay or feminine, and it plays either directly or indirectly off the slang word 'pussy.' I wonder what Jennifer Lackey, philosopher of language, thought at the time of the interview. The word gets additional power, of course, by being directed at a woman by a man, and in the context of a male-dominated profession.

I checked my instincts by asking a few of my colleagues. Some guys said that it's just a slang word, not too polite, meant to be insulting, but basically harmless. Some guys said it was insulting to gays. But women said it was sexist: "Oh, that's a way of saying 'pussy' without saying 'pussy'."

Molyneux and Puzzles of Vision, Part II

2011-05-14T19:14:00.004-04:00

I recently wrote about Molyneux's problem (2 posts ago, see the long quote from John Locke).

It's still on my mind, and by a stroke of luck I'm reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Chapter 2 is on seeing, and a passage addresses Molyneux's problem explicitly, recounting something she had read about the effect of cataract surgery on children and adults who had never before seen. Her summary reaches to the emotional impact of first sight, its wonders and its frustrations:

I chanced on a wonderful book by Marius von Senden, called Space and Sight. . . . For the newly sighted, vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning: "The girl went through the experience that we all go through and forget, the moment we are born. She saw, but it did not mean anything but a lot of different kinds of brightness." . . . In general the newly sighted see the world as a dazzle of color-patches. They are pleased by the sensation of color, and learn quickly to name the colors, but the rest of seeing is tormentingly difficult. . . . The mental effort involved . . . proves overwhelming for many patients. It oppresses them to realize, if they ever do at all, the tremendous size of the world, which they had previously conceived of as something touchingly manageable. . . . A disheartening number of them refuse to use their new vision, continuing to go over objects with their tongues, and lapsing into apathy and despair. . . . On the other hand, many newly sighted people speak well of the world, and teach us how dull is our own vision.

The full passage--almost 10 pages--is worth seeking out. After reading about the experience of newly discovered vision, Dillard experiments with her own sense of sight, trying to see space as flat colored patches rather than as already-interpreted spatial objects.

When the doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw "the tree with the lights in it." It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The lights of the fire abated, but I'm still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had my whole life been a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.

Photo: Beatrice Murch

Major in Philosophy, Not Business

2011-05-11T12:55:00.000-04:00

Not for the first time, a business blog lauds the skills of humanities majors over business majors, referencing this original post from Harvard Business Review.

The argument is precisely what we tell our majors to expect about how their degree will set them apart (and it's also the reason why assessment is so tricky in the humanities!):

Any great work of art — whether literary, philosophical, psychological or visual — challenges a humanist to be curious, to ask open-ended questions, see the big picture. This kind of thinking is just what you need if you are facing a murky future or dealing with tricky, incipient problems.

Humanities majors, these business leaders seem surprised to learn, spend their time in college practicing these general-purpose and adaptable skills:

thinking carefully about situations which involve complexity and ambiguity
creative problem-solving
clear writing and sophisticated oral presentation skills
understanding the subjective perspective of other people.

I would add to that list one more essential skill:

thinking for oneself and developing the courage to speak one's thoughts

Not only do business colleges encourage lock-step thinking, but their rigor has come under scrutiny by educational and sociological researchers who look at things such as average earning potential, exit exams, and time spent studying. One of the authors of Academically Adrift writes:

We found that students concentrating in business related coursework were the least likely to report spending time studying and preparing for class. If one considers simply hours spent studying alone, undergraduates concentrating in business coursework invest less than one hour a day in such pursuits. Given such modest investments in academic activities, it is not surprising that business students show the lowest gains on measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication.

Molyneux's Problem: Can the Blind Know How Shapes Look by Touch Alone?

2011-05-03T15:15:00.004-04:00

In my modern philosophy class, we recently read this excerpt from John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. 9:

To which purpose I shall here insert a problem of that very ingenious and studious promoter of real knowledge, the learned and worthy Mr. Molyneux, which he was pleased to send me in a letter some months since; and it is this:- "Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and the other, which is the cube, which the sphere. Suppose then the cube and sphere placed on a table, and the blind man be made to see: quaere, whether by his sight, before he touched them, he could now distinguish and tell which is the globe, which the cube?" To which the acute and judicious proposer answers, "Not. For, though he has obtained the experience of how a globe, how a cube affects his touch, yet he has not yet obtained the experience, that what affects his touch so or so, must affect his sight so or so; or that a protuberant angle in the cube, that pressed his hand unequally, shall appear to his eye as it does in the cube."- I agree with this thinking gentleman, whom I am proud to call my friend, in his answer to this problem; and am of opinion that the blind man, at first sight, would not be able with certainty to say which was the globe, which the cube, whilst he only saw them; though he could unerringly name them by his touch, and certainly distinguish them by the difference of their figures felt.

John Locke's theory of ideas was that all of our most basic, simple ideas have their origin in direct experience. Thus, someone who is deaf and has not experienced sound cannot know what a musical note sounds like, and someone who is only mild-mannered cannot even imagine what a homicidal rage feels like.

But this has remained a philosophical riddle for over 300 years--until a couple of weeks ago, when a study was published in Nature: Neuroscience. This new study confirms the intuitions of Locke and Molyneux, who were in the minority at their time--other philosophers thought that a blind person would immediately be able to make use of restored sight.

The study worked with 5 subjects in resource-poor countries who had been born with severe cataracts or correctible corneal disorders but who had not been treated. The subjects were old enough (8 years or older) to have language skills and be able to interact with the researchers. Within just a couple days of corrective surgery, the subjects were not able to correlate the sight of Lego shapes with shapes they could feel but not see. However, within days to weeks, they were able to make the correlations--showing that experience is needed but that learning progresses rapidly. NYT article here.

Exploring scientific frontiers

2011-05-02T16:03:00.002-04:00

A student in my modern philosophy class gave me the link to this video after we talked about some of the scientific advances made in the 17th and 18th centuries, and particularly how the discovery of microscopic life in water (protists) inspired the thought that there were "worlds" within in this world of which humans were unaware.

Likewise, if I were an aspiring physicist, I would be vulnerable to the excitement this video conveys about discoveries in particle physics and cosmology.

Dark Matters from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

The Limits of Business Ethics

2011-04-17T14:34:00.003-04:00

One thing going in my academic life while I wasn't posting has been work related to reconceptualizing our university's general education curriculum. We've always had a liberal arts and science "core," though it has dwindled in credit hours over the years. Right now, students must take two introductory-level humanities courses (two courses chosen from among English, fine arts, history, STS, and philosophy). Right, it's not much. In our new curriculum, any department, anywhere in the university, can apply to teach a course in the arts and science core. And the business college has decided that their business ethics course ought to count.

Many, many arguments have been constructed, dressed, gussied up, rearranged, and presented to the committee made up of people from all over the university, most of them with no background in liberal arts or sciences, to explain why this is a bad idea. What amazes me, though, is that the quality of arguments don't seem to matter to the committee nearly so much as the...well...the marketing. But isn't that the point?

The business college has resorted to constructing case studies to show why it's so important to teach ethics to their students their way. Imagine, they say, that someone is asked by her employer to do something immoral and illegal, but her job or her raise or her bonus hinge on it. She has a lot to consider! It's not easy to think through the ethics of such cases!

After watching Inside Job, I don't doubt that there is a need for ethics education in business, finance, and accounting. I do doubt whether it can come from inside.

And there is the recent case of the LaSalle University professor who somehow worked strippers and lap dances into an extra credit class meeting for a business ethics class. One wonders: bad egg, or just positioned at one end of a spectrum?

Thoughts on a long hiatus

2011-04-17T14:26:00.003-04:00

Can it have been over a month since I last posted? Other bloggers sometimes announce a hiatus. I just seem to take them from time to time with no prior warning or intention. I fall into the habit of blogging and then...I just fall out of it. Strangely, I can't discover a correlation with whether or not I'm otherwise busy...or whether I've been working on research. It's certainly not for lack of material, the supply of which is constant. The blog archive likewise shows no particular pattern--except that when there are posts, there tend to be more posts soon.

I think habits frequently have this contingent nature, including habits of reading and writing. If one is a runner, you can't imagine not running...until you stop...and then can't imagine starting again...until you do. Both conditions have some inherent stability.

Philosophy and Conceptual Art

2011-03-15T16:20:00.004-04:00

There is much that I know I don't know. But I often am aware, roughly, of what it is that I don't know. So I was thrilled today to learn something new about someone I should have known more about.

One of my students has been talking to me about women artists, and in particular about feminist conceptual art. Today she was teaching me about the conceptual artist Adrian Piper, and I was so curious because this seems like an unusual name, and I've read work by the ethicist Adrian Piper. And guess what? Same person!

This realization is more surprising because I don't expect academics to have time in their lives to develop other careers, and I don't expect to see an analytic philosopher (that is, someone not primarily writing aesthetics) be a figure in the artworld.

Adrian Piper studied with John Rawls at Harvard, and had a number of teaching posts after that. She was the first African-American woman in philosophy to be tenured, and left a teaching post at Wellesley in 2008. She's written much on Kant, on ethics, on history of philosophy more broadly, and on discrimination and identity. Her artistic career as a conceptual artist continues and seems to draw on some of the same themes as her philosophical work--the construction of personal and social identities and selfhood--but through a modality very different from analytic argumentation!

Here is an interesting interview with Piper from 2001.

Yarnbombing

2011-03-11T16:24:00.003-05:00

My latest posts have been complaints. I need something to brighten my spirits. Ahhh...thinking about yarnbombing is just the thing.

Yarnbombing is like street art or graffiti, but it uses yarn, fiber, etc. as its medium. Thus, it's not permanent but it lasts longer than something like chalk, and it can be removed rather easily--if that were necessary. The point is usually to bring art into drab public spaces, but it serves other purposes, too, and it makes a political point about the value of handmade work in a mass-produced public culture. I also like the way it turns the usual gender expectation of graffiti on its head. Many of these works are by women. Men also participate, of course, and in that, it's a way of breaking down the stereotypes of women's work and women's crafts.

Photo by Aria.

Why I'm Ambivalent About Women's History Month

2011-03-09T16:06:00.005-05:00

March is Women's History Month. Eventually, it would be nice to be able to do away with it.

Women's History Month serves a purpose in foregrounding women's history and thus helping educators to brush up on histories they might otherwise overlook. But the goal of that attention is to mainstream this history--to make it easier and more natural to include the lives of women and their historical influence into the curriculum.

But these efforts have to be sincere, and they have to be useful. We feminist scholars and educators have a duty to use Women's History Month to include women in our syllabi and our lectures, and then to keep including them, even in months where we don't get the reminder.

What doesn't work is to focus attention on women in a way that can be used to further belittle, marginalize, or trivialize. Because by calling out women for special treatment, we're already taking the risk of reinforcing the beliefs that people come with--so the occasion has to be used effectively to redirect or change those beliefs, not re-entrench them.

In my last post, I mentioned that the Women's and Gender Studies Program on my campus was celebrating International Women's Day. They've also celebrated Women's History Month--by sending around a homemade image to all faculty and staff with the suggestion that we use it for our "desktop wallpaper" during the month of March.

It is a composite image of 6 of what I take to be their ideas of prominent and influential women in history:

Queen Elizabeth I (nice start)
Frida Kalho (well, OK)
Harriet Tubman (so far, so good)
Oprah Winfrey (judge for yourself)
Marge Simpson (blue hair and so influential! DOH!)
a busty image of Eve (SEDUCTRESS!!! ORIGINAL SIN!!!)

It is a 72KB file, it is not sized to fit my screen, and it uses the Comic Sans font.

I could not make this stuff up.

Why I Hate International Women's Day

2011-03-07T13:01:00.003-05:00

I don't hate it for its Soviet roots.

The Wikipedia caption for the poster at right:

The 1932 Soviet poster dedicated to the 8th of March holiday. The text reads: "8th of March is the day of rebellion of the working women against kitchen slavery" and "Down with the oppression and narrow-mindedness of household work!". Originally in the USSR the holiday had a clear political character, emphasizing the role of the Soviet state inthe liberation of women from their second-class-citizen status.

Indeed, I'm all in favor of liberating women from the status of second-class citizen. And I think that doing so means demanding equal treatment for women in education, employment, and politics. Those are difficult tasks, and they require work on a daily basis, and I have no problem with a day that calls attention to the politics of gender.

But what I do have a problem with is a patronizing day for celebrating femininity analogous to Valentine's Day or Grandparent's Day. In Italy, and in some other countries, men give women flowers or chocolates on March 8. And then they elect, and tolerate, Berlusconi.

This gets personal:

At my university there is Women's and Gender Studies program, and it has an event budget. But it has not brought in an academic speaker in years, and its only event this year will be to hand out tulips to women--for being women--in the student union tomorrow. No political involvement on campus, no programming. Just tulips--symbols of love, symbols of unblemished beauty.

We also have a Women's Center, part of the Student Life part of campus. To recognize International Women's Day, they're holding a henna workshop.

Great. Flowers and make-up. So much for being modern women.

Thomas Kuhn's Ashtray

2011-03-07T12:53:00.002-05:00

A story and video illustration by Errol Morris, concerning his time as a student of Thomas Kuhn's, at the Times.

In the comments:

That's the problem with relativism: Who's to say who's right and who's wrong? Somehow I'm not surprised to hear Kuhn was an ashtray-hurler. In the end, what other argument could he make?

Being a Good Girl

2011-03-03T09:53:00.003-05:00

A student I was privileged to have in my feminist theory course last term is a graduate student in the fine art photography/video program. I've found myself thinking quite often about her work, which simultaneously portrays and critiques stereotypes of good girls. The stereotypes she chooses juxtapose images of good little girls with conformist adult women, and juxtapose past norms for female discipline with contemporary expectations.

I haven't developed expertise in thinking about visual culture and art, but I'm immediately struck by the difficulty of what she proposes to do. How can an image simultaneously present a role and critique that role, and do so with multiple levels of meaning, making depth available to the viewer. And all while anticipating the expectations and assumptions that viewers will--or won't--bring to what they see.

This conundrum, which I expect is common in photography--especially in photography that reaches toward social commentary--is also familiar in feminist theory. For instance, consider my post below--on the one hand, in striving toward gender equality, we hope that, soon, gender won't matter, but for the sake of the striving, we must call attention to it. A point has to be made, but in making that point we risk undermining the eventual goal. This blog on politics and photography often addresses similar themes.

Whitney considers a related question in this post:

Do you have to rebel to be liberated? Does liberation dictate a change in appearance or only a change in mindset?

And this is a puzzle which I saw the young feminists in my course struggling with. On the one hand, they felt that they wanted to graphically mark their feminist consciousness--by how they dress or by not wearing make-up. But they also, rightly, questioned whether marking themselves was either required by feminism or effective as a feminist action. (And it's true, the people I know who have adopted a hippie persona are rarely radical, and the radicals I know don't usually look it but live their lives in ways that set them outside the mainstream. More on this thought soon.)

Below is one of Whitney's video installations. My first reaction was to love it--it's beautiful, and it seemed to me to find that tension point between, on the one hand, showing how much care feminine appearance and performance requires, and on the other hand, showing that the costuming, while perhaps adopted to fit others' expectations, also becomes adored in its own right, as we fit ourselves inside the role we are expected to inhabit.

Interestingly, Whitney reported that all of the women she has shown it to say they like it for reasons similar to mine, and all they men she has shown it to describe it as trite or clichéd--including my male colleague who does aesthetics.

Untitled from Whitney Warne on Vimeo.

A Film about Mathematicians, with Hilary Putnam

2011-03-02T13:54:00.003-05:00

The film below sounds like it would be interesting, just because of the interesting subject matter. I've been thinking about women in math and science, so it's worth saying a few words about that. I'm conflicted when it comes to pointing out that I'm looking forward to seeing this film because the mathematician featured is a woman. I think that I'd be interested in it regardless of the gender of the main character. But in a social context where those of us who are women and interested in math and science are made to feel odd, there is added value in highlighting the work of women. Yes, there is a paradox here: gender shouldn't matter, but gender has to matter.

A while back, without a tenure-track job but having full access to university courses, I decided to take a year to construct a solid foundation in science (and to do the pre-req's for a master's program in science). That required taking a year of calculus. A friend and colleague, teacher of women's studies courses, and supporter of women in the sciences, could not help but express the doubt-ridden question "Why in the world would you want to take calculus? Math is so hard! Aren't you worried you won't do well?" Why would I have such a worry? Me, with a PhD--why would I be worried that I couldn't do what so many 18-year-olds can? And why project such doubts?

This week a student, a graduating senior woman majoring in business, told me that she signed up to take a physics course in the spring to complete her last general education requirement in science. She happens to enjoy math and has done well in physics in the past. Her academic advisor discouraged her from taking the course.

Here's the trailer for the 2008 1-hour documentary film Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem. It's not easily available, but I plan to ask our library to order it. I think it would be a nice fit for a Women in Science course.

Hilary Putnam and Natalie Portman

2011-03-01T14:05:00.002-05:00

Here's a riddle:

What do Hilary Putnam and Natalie Portman have in common?

Why, of course, they share talents in common. They are among the very, very few to have Erdos-Bacon numbers--indeed, these two have the same Erdos-Bacon number of 6.

An Erdos number of 1 refers to coauthorship with the mathematician Paul Erdos, (an Erdos number of 2 belongs to those who have coauthored with an Erdos coauther, and so on).

Degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon are calculated by appearing in a performance or film in which Kevin Bacon also appeared.

Hilary Putnam has an Erdos number of 3 (and if anyone can show the coauthorship path in comments, I'd be interested), and a Bacon number of 3 from having appeared as himself in the documentary film Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem.

Natalie Portman has a Bacon number of 1. As an undergraduate at Harvard, she co-authored a paper in neuroscience, giving her an Erdos number of 6. She also won a Westinghouse Prize (Intel Science Talent Search)--making a unique combination with her Oscar for Best Actress.

Not surprisingly, xkcd has illustrated the Erdos-Bacon dream.

One Color and One Sex in Philosophy

2011-02-16T13:27:00.005-05:00

I just got an announcement in my inbox for a new Intro to Philosophy text. This one is written in a way that makes liberal use of contemporary films so that students

"will not only discover a new relevance to their own lives, but will dissect the key readings with a perspective they were previously unaware of."

One wonders if the book is supposed to be relevant to women students, too. Out of 42 authors, the majority of them 20th- and 21st-century authors, only 2 are women. That's less than 5%! Not only is that far lower than the percentage of Intro to Philosophy students who are women, it's lower even than the still-very-low estimate of women teaching philosophy.

The text is called "Introduction to Philosophy in Black, White, and Color" but--ahem--the only color I see is White.

Access to Power

2011-02-15T13:11:00.003-05:00

Here's one of those questions on which my intuitions pull in opposing directions.

How important is it for us in academia to have informal access to folks in positions of authority? And if informal access to people in power is a good thing--either for the people who get the access or those in the positions of authority, then how important is it that the access be fair, especially given that people in positions of authority have very real, burdensome demands on their time?

Here are some reasons to support informal access:

1. In organizations and communities with democratic elements, informal meetings across levels of hierarchy strengthens the impression of equality.

2. Those in power can lose touch with "regular folks," and formal means of access deliver messages that are funneled along only certain lines, often adversarial ones. Say there is some sort of structural problem that could lead to a grievance, isn't it much better for someone in a position of power to hear about the potential problem before it becomes serious? Plus, informal access is more likely to create positive relationships rather than adversarial relationships.

3. If people in a community or organization feel close to figures of authority, perhaps they are more likely to be supportive of the community or organization in general.

But here's the concern. Genuinely informal, causal, social interactions are more likely to happen in social circles that are coincident with the leader's own social milieu, but that can serve to entrench the interests of that social milieu while doing nothing to create access for others.

Here are some examples, and I'm genuinely conflicted about most of these:

1. The dean's office runs a series of breakfasts. They are open for anyone on faculty or staff to stop by and chat or share ideas and problems. However, they take place while some people are teaching and are always held at the same time.

2. A provost holds frequent private parties at his home. Invitations are offered liberally and generously. But there is a group of regular invitees, and these become known around campus as the provost's inner circle.

3. A provost with a very busy schedule creatively schedules his downtime as a chance for students, faculty, or staff to chat with him informally. This regular 3-mile running event is called "Pace the Provost." He has a 20:34 5K time.

4. A dean holds informal "meeting hours" at a local pub, after hours. Some untenured faculty make it their business to attend, figuring that sharing beers with the dean is a form of insurance.

What do you think of these cases?

I don't see a problem with #1. Presumably if the dean's office is reaching out, they'd be open to individuals setting up meetings. #2 is slightly more problematic. However, public figures still have private lives. And it seems to me like a provost is actually rather removed from decisions that will affect faculty members as individuals (except for tenure decisions).

#3 raises a different problem. On the one hand, it's very creative, and, as a runner myself, it sounds fun. But then, it creates access for certain people (runners, more likely men than women) and not others (if you're fat or blew out your knees, too bad).

#4 creates the most conflict between my intuitions. On the one hand, extending business conversations in more comfortable surroundings sounds absolutely unobjectionable. On the other hand, of these 4 situations, this one seems the most likely to result in someone receiving favorable treatment--not as a result of conscious favoritism, necessarily, but as a result of having had the chance to develop regular old familiarity and trust.

Books with nice covers and nice pages

2011-02-11T16:41:00.002-05:00

Don't judge a book by its cover?

Why not?

The Modern Library hardbacks on my shelf have such lovely brass-colored dust jackets with black-and-white images, nice firm cloth bindings, and smooth, impossibly thin pages which never seem to yellow. Are they still being published? I just floated around the Random House site, here, and only found paperbacks. Even brand new, the hardcovers had prices only a hair above the competitors' paperbacks. I loved them!

I'm teaching Modern Philosophy in the spring, for the first time in over 10 years. And imagine my shock: E.A. Burtt, The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill is entirely out of print! Strangely, its companion volume, Monroe Beardsley, The European Philosophers from Descartes to Nietzsche, is not. But that one is available only in paperback.

What's a good solution? What are other folks doing? I ordered The Empiricists instead. But I hate having a mismatched set. And are Locke and Hume not worth reprinting when Spinoza et alia are?

At C

2011-02-10T21:49:00.003-05:00

I'm approaching the end of a term. Just one more week, and I have many students in my upper-level classes who have not turned in work. Major assignments, minor assignments. Some are brilliant when they participate in discussion, but it seems they can't get around to the written comments which make up 35% of the grade. When the students in question are math majors, engineering majors, physics majors...failing to understand numerically how that will affect their grade is not possible.

One of the classes I'm teaching now I haven't taught since 2005. Some reading materials which students found a reasonable challenge 6 years ago now completely stump a significant portion of the class. They don't even attempt the reading. Not to mention that more than one can't read cursive, so how are they getting the notes I write on the board?

Have standards at my university changed in only 6 years?

Is there something unusual about how or why students enrolled in this particular class?

Is there a larger pattern?

The book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roska has been getting some attention and does point to a larger, even national, pattern.

From an interview with Salon:

Fifty percent of the kids in a typical semester say they haven't taken a single course where they've been asked to write 20 pages over the course of the semester. And 32 percent have not taken a single class the prior semester for which they've been asked to read more than 40 pages per week on average, and in terms of homework, 35 percent of them say they do five or fewer hours per week studying alone.

OK, guilty as charged. In one class I'm requiring students to write over 20 pages but most are coming in far below the expectations I expressed--both in terms of quality and quantity. In the other class, I'm only requiring about 15 pages of writing. Both classes have over 30 students. I think I spend too much time on grading. My students tell me I require more writing than many of my colleagues--particularly those in other liberal arts disciplines. I believe them. Because if they were practicing writing regularly they'd be better at it than they are.

So here's the bind. My colleagues are requiring less work. My students are expecting to do less work. I want to set them tasks which are challenging but possible. And the bar for what is possible falls a little every year. We are stuck in a pattern of decline, and it seems to be a problem of collective action. No one is positioned to make a change without paying a cost.

Ernan McMullin

2011-02-09T13:45:00.005-05:00

Michael Ruse has written a memorial piece for Ernan McMullin at the Chronicle.

Hearing McMullin speak about the history of the development of early modern philosophy in tandem with modern science was one of the delights of my first year in grad school. I appreciated that it was a good story, well-told. Thinking about science and philosophy as sharing metaphysical commitments which were particular to the Church and to origins in Hellenistic philosophy implicitly presented the thesis that if Church history had been different, the questions and tools available to 17th century science would also have been different. This was consistent with my learning to take a historical and sociological approach to the development of scientific methods and institutions (but in a way that respects, rather than undermines, the intuition that science and philosophy are progressive). That lecture probably reinforced the track I was already starting to follow. In hindsight, much about the talk was probably already obvious to many in the audience, and I know of others who have given more detailed accounts of how scholastic metaphysics affected the development of modern science (Dan Garber, especially), but at the time I was happy to be able to absorb these historical points and to hear them in the form of a fascinating narrative.

I've also found his talk on "Values in Science" to be provocative at several points and useful for several projects. I just learned from Michael Ruse's piece that it was the PSA presidential address that year--I don't believe it's marked in that way in the printed collection.

How Do YOUR Clothes Fit?

2011-02-08T21:14:00.003-05:00

I love finding an opportunity to bring a gendered insight to bear, even on another feminist.

I assigned Ron Giere's piece "The Feminism Question in the Philosophy of Science" for one of my classes, and I'm enjoying re-reading it. Giere's central point is that just about any current theory of scientific theories allows for the possibility that influences on theory choice may include cultural background beliefs or individual bias.

This is obvious for post-Kuhnian theories. It's less obvious, but still true, for theories which rely on subjective probability (following Richard Jeffrey) because there are no constraints on how individuals assign initial probabilities to theories, and those initial probabilities may be conditioned by all sorts of beliefs. Likewise, for theorists such as Laudan and Lakatos whose historical theories of theory change impose stricter rationality constraints than those implied by Kuhn, there is still the possibility that one theory has become developed enough to be a serious alternative because of its relation to cultural values.

Giere goes on to build up his position of perspectival realism (which he later developed in his book Scientific Perspectivism). While logical positivists, as well as some contemporary realists, look for theories (in the form of statements) to be true representations of the world, Giere's perspectival realism abandons truth as a criterion for judging theories. Indeed, he rejects linguistic statements as representations for something more in line with scientific practice--it is models, not statements, which are representations. Judgments are made not about the turth of statements but about the degree to which scientific models fit the world.

Giere writes

Unlike truth, fit is a more qualitative relationship, as clothes may be said to fit a person more or less well.

I would point out that, for a typical man (other than David Byrne!), we can often quite easily say that his clothes fit more or less well. But for women, we need to know something else. Namely, we need to know what the fashion is this season.

I have a lovely Irish linen blouse, suitable for only dressy occasions, which I bought in the 1990's. According to the size label it should fit, but I'll have to wait for fashions to cycle around to the roomy end of the scale first.

The point is that judgments of truth cause difficulty for realists precisely because they are bivalent, and so realists reach for "approximate" truth (an idea which, in my opinion, does not fly). Being qualitative, fitness accommodates judgments about the degree of precision which is required for different models in different contexts. Nonetheless, one wouldn't expect fashion to be a factor in making judgments of fitness, though the analogy seems to invite this conclusion.

In the end, I'm not sure that Giere would be troubled by it. I'm not. It does seem to be the case that epistemic values vary from one scientific community and historical moment to another, and that epistemic values are an influence on judgments of which theories (or models) are best. Some communities look for simplicity, others look for breadth--either of these are bound to be considerations in making judgments about whether models fit the world.

Gender and Germs

2011-02-05T19:23:00.004-05:00

How does feminist philosophy of science make a (muddy) splash?

Shari Clough adds gender insight to the germ hypothesis, and shares the word with an interview on npr.org. Snappy reasoning!

Shari's abstract:

The hygiene hypothesis offers an explanation for the correlation, well-established in the industrialized nations of North and West, between increased hygiene and sanitation, and increased rates of asthma and allergies. Recent studies have added to the scope of the hypothesis, showing a link between decreased exposure to certain bacteria and parasitic worms, and increased rates of depression and intestinal auto-immune disorders, respectively. What remains less often discussed in the research on these links is that women have higher rates than men of asthma and allergies, as well as many auto-immune disorders, and also depression. The current paper introduces a feminist understanding of gender socialization to the epidemiological and immunological picture.

Photo by katiew.

Beautiful Connections

2011-02-05T15:58:00.004-05:00

Tinadot posts a collection of provocative images of neural cells: here.

What Do You Know?

2011-02-01T15:37:00.003-05:00

Wikipedia is asking for more female contributors.

This is important in that it recognizes that, if Wikipedia says something about our cultural worldview, then the perspective of that worldview is skewed if those who write it don't represent the full diversity of interests.

I don't buy the line that it's because women don't use computers as much or in the same ways as men. I think the cause is a more broadly rooted phenomenon--women being less like to recognize their own epistemic authority or to recognize that what they have expertise on counts as knowledge.

We philosophers have a word for this--agnotology, or the epistemology of ignorance. Some sorts of things are deemed worth knowing, and others not; and social practices, some of them gendered, dub people experts. Feminist philosophers have examined how cultural values shape the understanding of what counts as knowledge--including Nancy Tuana, Shannon Sullivan, Lisa Heldke, Nancy McHugh, and Carla Fehr.

Thanks to Zoe for the link!

Neurosexism

2011-01-28T09:56:00.004-05:00

Cordelia Fine's fantastic analysis of "neurosexism" and exposé of the sloppy reasoning that feeds misconceptions about gendered brain differences to the popular press is reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement by Carol Tavris.

This is a good book to use in class--not just a class on feminist theory, but also in a philosophy of science class that examines the structure of evidential claims and the ways that values can influence scientific research and the communication of science.

From the review:

Fine’s romp through the fields of neurosexism is sandwiched between two other sections; in the first, she explores the unsexy, low-tech, but primary causes of gender differences in achievement: the persistence of discrimination, subtle and blatant, that convey the message to women – “You don’t belong here”, and the institutional rules, explicit and implicit, that impede advancement – or make it possible; after all, the international rise of women in law, medicine, science, bartending and the military did not occur because their brains became less lateralized. The final section examines the socialization of children and the phenomenon that draws so many parents to the notion that sex differences are innate: the sex-stereotyped play choices and behaviours of their toddlers. Parents aren’t wrong in what they observe. They are wrong only in assuming that their child’s preferences at the age of three, four or five has anything at all to do with what that child will grow up to become.

Argument from Partial Understanding

2011-01-25T19:19:00.002-05:00

The argument from ignorance is a fallacy which runs like this:

We have not proven beyond all doubt that X is true.
Therefore, X is probably not true.

Its close cousin is the argument from incredulity:

I would hardly be able to believe it if X were true.
Therefore X is not true.

It also takes this form, which I call the egoistic form of the argument from ignorance:

If X were true, then I would know it were true (or I would understand claim X).
I don't know for a fact that X is true (or I don't understand claim X).
Therefore X is not true.

I just saw a version of this argument applied to the question of scientific realism, call it an anti-realist argument from the position of egoistic partial understanding:

Realists believe in the literal truth of scientific statements about both observable and non-observable (or theoretical) entities, while anti-realists grant this level of belief only for statements about observable entities.
Bridges are observable, concrete is observable, and cracks in concrete are observable; molecules and molecular bonds are not so observable.
I'm an engineer, and I understand bridges, concrete, and stress fractures; I never really understood what was going on in my organic chemistry class.
Therefore engineers like me should be anti-realists.

What the student in question thought was really mind-blowing about this argument was that until he came up with it, he thought he was a realist. But then he realized that was only a case of naive realism, and that engineers like himself can treat most scientific claims as if they're true, whether or not they're really true, and that this is good enough for their purposes.

The real absurdity is that bad reasoning or not, there's validity to this explanation of what engineers' belief in science requires!

Johnny Can't Write

2011-01-20T13:36:00.003-05:00

When I complain that my students can't write, what I usually mean is that they can't form coherent arguments, or that their writing style is pedestrian, or even that the sentences are ungrammatical. But today I have something more shocking to report.

I've had a student ask if I could develop an alternative test-taking arrangement for him, not because he has a formal academic accommodation (he doesn't), but because he never learned handwriting skills. He can't write in cursive. And after seeing a sample of some notes he took, I believe that he can't print either. Some letters were small case and some were capitals, with no rhyme or reason. I would not be able to read an essay test written in this handwriting.

The student's explanation was that he went to a Montessori school through 6th grade, and that this school just didn't teach handwriting. He said he had a really hard time in 7th grade, and tried to learn to (hand)write, but by then most of the students' work was in typed form anyway. When I started looking around for more information, I found that the problem is not isolated and doesn't seem to be just in Montessori schools. It's widespread. From a Cincinnati newspaper:

Cursive writing is "not addressed as a skill anywhere in Kentucky's core content, and there are so many other things that are," said Terry Price, director of elementary education for Bullitt County Public Schools. "Students need to be able to sign their name and be able to read it, but I think we'll get to a point in the future where it's not necessary at all."

For now, however, most educators are still teaching cursive writing, said Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham, who conducted a study on the subject in 2008. He and other researchers surveyed about 170 first-, second- and third-grade teachers across the nation and found that 90 percent taught handwriting.

The time spent on those lessons averaged about 60 minutes a week, but some spend as little as 10 minutes a week on it, and the majority of teachers said they didn't have any real training in how to teach penmanship, Graham said.

Others call cursive writing skills "quaint" and tell stories of 7th graders unable even to read cursive handwriting! I'm shocked to learn that 10% of primary school teachers are not teaching handwriting, and that some spend only 10 minutes a week on it.

I made some calls around campus to see about whether this student could write his exam with a keyboard and one of the people I talked to proctors SATs at our testing center. SATs are now entirely electronic, except there is a one-sentence statement that students must copy, swearing to their identity and honesty. She says that handwritten statement is the hardest part of the exam for some students, that it can take them up to 20 minutes to copy, and that they absolutely cannot write it in cursive.

Do (or should) teachers deduct points for bad handwriting? I tell my students that if I can't read their ideas, I can't give credit for them.

Academic Discrimination and Pregnancy

2011-01-18T20:54:00.004-05:00

Dr. Isis has the details. UC-Davis is not looking good on this one. At least the chancellor has responded appropriately.

The only bright side I can think of is that it would be unimaginable if an explicit and supportive maternity policy for students didn't come out of the situation--eventually.

The apparent issue is that people lose their compass directions when it comes to making decisions about pregnant women.

Climate Change and Disease

2011-01-18T12:05:00.003-05:00

The American public's concern about climate change continues to decrease even as the evidence supporting the urgency and potentially harmful implications of the problem grows. Some studies have argued that this disconnect has as much to do with psychological responses and defense mechanisms as it does with serious reflection.

For instance, the issues are complex, so it is possible to focus on problems which we as individuals can distance ourselves from. Though I may feel it's too bad that some coastlines will shrink, I live a thousand feet above sea-level...

Among my own students, I've noticed a higher degree of worry about the possibility that climate change could spur the movement and introduction of diseases to humans than about other implications of climate change. But this worry is countered by evaluating those as being too indirect and lacking in examples.

A recent report will perhaps fill that gap. The New York Times has reported on a discovered link between climate change and the spread of hantavirus, a disease that can be fatal to humans.

From that article:

The spread of hantavirus among mice in the wake of the aspen die-offs should already be considered an “unintended consequence of climate change,” Dr. Lehmer said. She noted that other studies have shown an increase in human hantavirus infections in Germany during years of above-average warmth.

...

“The bottom line is that climate change is tending to introduce diseases where they haven’t been before, because it’s changing the entire dynamics of plant and animal ecosytems,” she said.

Paradigm Shiftyness

2011-01-17T20:59:00.004-05:00

Yay, today my philosophy of science course discussed paradigm shifts. So fun.

After class a student asked me whether the news of the discovery of a 13th zodiac sign counts as a paradigm shift.

Me: Huh? A 13th zodiac sign?

Student: Oh yes, it was the Babylonians who discovered the zodiac, but the north star has shifted since Babylonian times. So now the line that is where the zodiac is includes an additional constellation that people didn't realize was actually in the zodiac line before this.

Me: Huh? Do you mean declination? You know the axis of rotation of the earth wobbles...

Student: Oh yes, that's it, and this is so freaking me out. And my mom is freaked out, too, because she says she's been a Cancer her whole life but she was mistaken and didn't even know it!

Me: And you think this is a scientific paradigm shift?

Student: It has to be! And we're living through it! It changes our whole outlook, you know? On life and stuff?

Me: And it's scientific?

Student: Totally. And I just don't know what to think about my sign and my personality now. I mean, who am I really?

Me: So what sort of scientist made this discovery? A historian? An archaeologist?

Student: This is totally huge. It was all over facebook.

Me: Huh?

I'm trying to figure out if I flubbed this one. Was there any better response than saying "Huh?" over and over. I tend to think not.

I found this on the ABC news website:

An astrological controversy erupted online Thursday after a newspaper article erroneously suggested that the dates that determine the Zodiac signs had shifted by about a month, throwing millions of believers into self-doubt and panic.

"Erroneously?" How can a NEWS site make a claim one way or the other about an astrological claim being right OR wrong? Hello? There is no truth value to claims that have no referent?

And I just don't know what to say about this being "all over" facebook. My facebook newsfeed includes these items: Quebecois winter humor, a recipe for tortilla soup with plenty of friendly commentary on tasty variations, pictures of kids, pictures of ski tracks in the snow, pictures of kids in the snow, a feminist rant (Dear Pandora, I don't appreciate the Match.com ad, followed by the Plan B Pill ad, followed by an ad with a giant cupcake...I don't like what your trying to say. Go screw yourself Pandora), a recommendation for independent theater, lots of fine art photography, and more than one person commenting on today's XKCD on string theory.

So as an antidote to frustrating thoughts about astrology and its "millions of believers," here you go:

Teaching Philosophy, Early

2011-01-16T10:16:00.002-05:00

Though a few weeks late, a memorial article for Matthew Lipman just appeared in the NYTimes. (I had coincidentally looked at his Wikipedia page on Dec. 27 and was startled and sad to see that he had the previous day. It also affected how I think about Wikipedia!)

Lipman believed that the habits of critical thinking could and should be taught early, and he started the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children.

While some people (including some of my philosopher friends) believe that even college freshman don't yet have the cognitive maturity to tackle philosophy, Lipman believed that children, who are engaged in figuring out the mechanics of a complex world, have the ability to learn tools of logic and ethical and critical thinking. His working group has harnessed the natural curiosity and questioning of children to stimulate philosophical patterns of thought, such as drawing distinctions and discovering implications. And if test scores show success, then this program has had success.

The NYTimes quotes from one of Lipman's books for children:

Harry, like his author, came to believe that the most important thing in the world is thinking.
“I know that lots of other things are also very important and wonderful, like electricity and magnetism and gravitation,” Harry said. “But although we understand them, they can’t understand us. So thinking must be something very special.”

Language Shapes--or Reflects--Reality?

2011-01-14T09:54:00.003-05:00

All men are created equal

2011-01-13T11:35:00.005-05:00

Another thought on language and gender.

Sentences such as "all men are created equal" are ambiguous. Does the word "men" refer to men, or does it refer to men and women? Usage today is mixed, with most people saying "people" when they want to refer to men and women, and some people using "men" to refer to all members of humanity.

But when this phrase was written in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, to announce the value of democratic government and speak against the divine right of kings, it did refer to men specifically, and in particular to white, property-holding men. For this reason, Elizabeth Cady Stanton referred to but modified the phrase in her 1848 Declaration of Sentiments to say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal."

Some students in my feminist theory class say they see no harm in referring to humanity as men. One argument given in favor of this practice is that everyone already knows that 'men' in this context means 'everyone.'

However, the question of whether 'men' really means 'men and women' (or even 'white men and black men') becomes politically relevant in the context of originary interpretations of the Constitution. Originalists believe that the Constitution grants only those rights which were actually intended by the people who wrote it or who approved its later amendments.

At times, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia appears to be a strict originalist. For instance in an interview he recently denied that the 14th amendment can be used to protect the rights of women (in spite of decades of Supreme Court precedent). While saying that it could be used to deny them those rights.

From what I can tell in this interview, he does not deny that women can be given civil rights. But any rights that women have (other than the right to vote), would have their origin in legislation. Unlike men's rights, they are not constitutional rights.

Here's part of what Justice Scalia has said:

Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't.

More here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/darren-hutchinson/post_1524_b_804382.html

Gender embedded in language

2011-01-12T12:30:00.002-05:00

My feminist theory course talked about language today, and one of our exercises was to list some ways that gender is embedded in common expressions and ways that language is constrained by the gender of the user or the gender of the referent.

For instance, there are many more negative words referring to women's genitalia than to men's, and those words themselves can often be applied to a person to indicate that they are worthless, weak, cheap, or cowardly. Women and objects are beautiful, but most men don't want to be called beautiful, even if they are. Only women are described as shrill, and if a man performs in a way that would get a woman called shrill, he is unlikely to

be judged negatively at all.

The linguist at Dinosaur Comics does a great job with this, as usual:

To Every Debate, Two Extremes

2011-01-04T15:03:00.004-05:00

Forced abortion. This is not a policy I would have thought would get much traction in the US. Right? How would you expect to hear forced abortion described? As a human rights violation, no?

I'm teaching the subject of abortion debates in an upper-division feminist theory course right now. It's the second time I've taught about abortion debates at my current institution. Since it's the topic least likely to elicit rational discussion, I try to leave it off my agenda. But I'm using this great textbook which deals with the topic so nicely, I figured I'd give it a try.

The consensus which was voiced most clearly in the classroom was that--hold on to your hats--women should be legally forced to have abortions if the father of the fetus does not want to pay child support. One student argued for this idea and then, one by one, the other three males in the class jumped on board. Oh, to be fair, one student said that he wouldn't go so far as to require forced abortion, but men should be relieved of providing child support if the pregnant woman won't get an abortion when her partner asks her to. And another said that he's less in favor of forced abortion than he is in favor of the idea that abortion should be available to women only when their sex partner signs off on it. Which is to say that only men should be able to make decisions about women acquiring an abortion.

Out of about 25 women, only one spoke in defense of women's right to not have unwanted medical procedures forced on them.

Why did these students think that forced abortion is a position they could support in a feminist theory classroom, especially after reading a long and sensitive chapter in a feminist theory textbook? And where were the feminist voices? One student told me privately that the views expressed were so ignorant of what we had been discussing that it was impossible to know where to start. But I also worry that at this university, where women make up less than a third of the student body, students have become resigned to overt sexism.

An additional note: any ideas about whether I should return to this discussion in the next class meeting? It seems to me that a class occurrence this far from the basis for the rest of our discussion deserves more attention and can best be dealt with using humor. But, ummm, I don't quite know how to joke about serious proposals for forced abortions. Ideas?

Women, Explained

2010-12-21T11:50:00.004-05:00

As the owner of zero television sets, I miss nearly all of what's going on in the media. Usually this benefits my life. But every once in a long while, I miss something worthwhile on the Idiot Box.

Sarah Haskins' segments on "Infomania" on Current TV haven't been produced since 2009, but don't they still seem current? And very useful for my Women's and Gender Studies course. Many topics, very funny. How many clips can I show in class before I get to the point where time would better be spent talking about Judy Butler?

I'm More Free Than You Are

2010-12-17T12:02:00.005-05:00

Everyone thinks everyone else has less free will

"Social psychologist Emily Pronin at Princeton University in New Jersey studies the differences between how we perceive ourselves and how we perceive others. According to her research, we tend to view our own judgment as sound but the judgment of others as irrational; recognize the biases in others but not ourselves; and see ourselves as more individualistic and others as more conformist."

Yes, hard to disagree with that...but quantitative evidence is nice to have I guess. Also, the concept of free will in the study seems a little confused. But then, if people are mostly confused about free will in the same way, then it probably doesn't matter in terms of interpreting the results.

Harassment and Humor

2010-12-14T11:04:00.002-05:00

I'm teaching a course on Feminist Theory, and yesterday we discussed sexual harassment. Entirely by chance, that evening I watched Season 2, Episode 2 of the TV show The Office. The title of the episode is "Sexual Harassment," and it's streamable if you subscribe to Netflix.

First, let me say that I found it hilarious. I was laughing until tears were coming down my face. Part of what makes it so funny is that it works on several levels. If it were just offensive jokes, then it would be, well, just offensive. The humor requires the cognitive dissonance between the guys in the show thinking they're funny, when they're actually more pathetic and unlikable than funny. But everyone knows people who fall just short of their extreme. We can feel superior to them because we can see what they're missing--and the filming, of course, plays that up by showing the guys in the foreground cracking themselves up while the others in the office frown, cringe, and squirm. Those guys should be embarrassed for themselves, but they don't know any better.

However, I do worry about the effectiveness of shows like this for demonstrating the complete social dynamic if the viewer doesn't already get it. That is, I can perfectly well imagine some people I know watching this show alongside me, and laughing when I laugh, but laughing in sympathy with the poor guys who feel constrained by a sexual harassment policy rather than laughing at them in dismay and disgust. For example, a student told me recently that he has a family member who used to admire Stephen Colbert's conservative politics, thinking that Colbert was playing it straight!

Humor is an important tool for coming to terms with social anxieties, and it can be used to show the perspective of the overlooked other. And I'm glad to be living in a time when comedies make such effective use of improv. Still, I think the potential for multiple readings is an inevitable part of this brand of humor.

Here's part of another example (from Berit's blog) of the two (or more) readings that humor can allow:

Why Men Are Never Depressed

The garage is all yours.
Wedding plans take care of themselves.
 You can never be pregnant.
 Car mechanics tell you the truth.
The world is your urinal.

I have a family member who would routinely send me humor along those lines--but I know from talking to him that he thought this was funny because it is oh-so-true-and-right. Those poor ladies.

One theory of humor is that it works when it makes the hearer feel superior to someone. We tell Aggie jokes or Swedish jokes because we would never fall for the stupid idea that the Aggie or the Swede does. So a joke like this works for me because I interpret it as demonstrating the superiority of my own beliefs about gender difference and what they get me and the rigid, stereotyped beliefs expressed by the male voice here. Still, a certain kind of male can also relate to the joke by interpreting it straight--it shows the superiority of men over women. Am I wrong in imagining that this humor also has that straight reading?

Thought I'd Never Get Around to Posting

2010-11-12T10:43:00.003-05:00

In my Intro to Phil class several weeks ago we had a long discussion about rationality, about consistency of belief, and about consistency between belief, intention, and action. It coincided with the day of a campus lecture by Dan Ariely.

A student sent me this link to an article by David McRaney about procrastination and self-control. It took me weeks to get around to reading it. And now that I have, I thought: should I post it now or later?! (So you can see why I've posted so little over the last months. If this one weren't itself on procrastination, chances are slim I would have written it up.)

The article notes that for those of us with Netflix queues, most lists are very long, and the documentaries and historical dramas tend to build up without getting watched--moreso for those that are available Instantly than those ordered through the mail. Of course, that's because we all want to be good people who watch heavy, enlightening, worthwhile films. But that's in our future, and in our present we're just too tired to watch anything more challenging than Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

[Personal note: I have my own rules about this sort of thing! My queue is short, and the order is more or less strict. Earlier this week I watched a docudrama about conservation in Africa and tonight's show will be a critically-acclaimed war movie. Oh, but that's the point about handling procrastination...]

McRaney writes:

Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things done not because they have more will power, more drive, but because they know productivity is a game of cat and mouse versus a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty which can never be excised from the soul. Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push ups.

The trick to dealing with procrastination, then, is to anticipate when it may strike and to limit in advance your ability to make choices in the present which you would not have set up for your future self. That is, to develop good habits--by hook or by crook.

Here's Roz Chast's take on procrastination.

What Am I Worth?

2010-11-10T22:11:00.002-05:00

Salary reports for jobs like yours can be found at Payscale.com.

Curious about the answer without looking it up?

Here's what I came up with:

Assistant Professor of Philosophy: average = $57,500; starting salary = $43,700

(This ignores the fact that you really probably started with a stipend for TA'ing and took a lateral move to $3000/course as an adjunct before spending at least a couple of years in a postdoc or visiting position.)

Associate Professor of Philosophy: average = just shy of $60,000; starting salary of $42,000

(Hmmm...that assistant professor starting salary of 43K looks good in comparison. Doesn't much look like tenure is promising immediate fiscal benefits, does it?)

Full Professor of Philosophy: average = $105,500

(The range is from $71,000 to $152,500. Start totting up those merit increases early in a career because percentages will eventually accumulate. Your university still gives raises in these tight times, right?)

Assistant Professor of Economics: average - $73,616; range of $52K to $124K

(Ah...but those poor souls don't get to spend their days talking about trolleys rolling over babies, barn facsimiles, and brains in vats. What is a lifetime of that worth to you?)

Berkeley Begat Heisenberg Begat Wigner

2010-11-10T21:59:00.004-05:00

Check out today's XKCD comic.

Need this?

The Face of Philosophy

2010-11-02T17:05:00.003-04:00

Ordinary life and ordinary academic life have left me this term with little time to dabble or to play. I've been spending my time preparing for class and engaging in the rough politics of transitioning from quarters to semesters. The blogs have been busy, but I haven't been visiting them.

That's why I felt like I had found a lucky penny when I happened across this photo essay on philosophers. I found it a few days late but the sentiments are timeless. It's satisfying to see a representative percentage of women among the photos, as well as portraits of feminist philosophers with the accompanying essay.

My wish is that there will come a time when I won't even notice women philosophers being treated like this--treated equitably and simply as philosophers, with no need to comment on gender.

Check Your Calculations

2010-10-22T14:14:00.003-04:00

Can't wait to show this xkcd comic in a philosophy of science course when we talk about inductive risk. Click through and hover over the last panel for more...

Race to the Bottom

2010-10-18T16:31:00.003-04:00

My institution is about to convert from a quarter to a semester calendar system. Everything about the curriculum is already up for grabs, and so we're also completely remodeling the requirements for general education. The university-wide committee has submitted a proposal that would make it at least possible, and maybe even easy, for a student to complete a college degree without ever taking a course in the humanities or social sciences.

One other time I taught in a university in which there were suddenly fewer students taking humanities courses than previously, resulting in stiff competition for students. There are two ways to win that competition--by attracting students through word-of-mouth (e.g. by assigning all A's) and by attracting them with catchy course titles.

I have a title for an Intro course (a topical survey) all ready to go:

Philosophy from A to Z: The Unborn to the Undead.

Hooray, I'm not alone

2010-10-05T13:20:00.002-04:00

Announcing a blog about What It's Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy.

The blog accepts submissions from you: from any philosopher, teacher or student.

The blog has multiple goals. First, and most obviously, it is comforting to know that you (women with negative experiences) are not alone and that the causes of women-specific experiences are systemic.

Secondly, the blog is not only about negative experiences. It can also be used to highlight how things have changed for the better over time, to share ideas for dealing with unexpected and unhappy encounters, and to create recognition for how small or minor negative experiences accumulate.

Michael Eldridge

2010-09-30T14:18:00.002-04:00

Pragmatist philosopher Michael Eldridge died unexpectedly on Sept. 18, sad news indeed.

Talking with Mike has always been a highlight of my attendance at SAAP. Always ready with something interesting to talk about, Mike was one of those philosophers, not as common as you might think, who led his life and interacted with people in a way that was of a piece with his philosophical convictions.

His personal support and his welcoming attitude at SAAP meetings were instrumental in turning me toward pragmatism. In his company, it was obvious that a philosophical attitude which is meliorist--optimistic about human progress--but pragmatic--grounded in factually assessing how to make a difference--is not only well-justified but also a fine way to lead a life.

Gender and Skepticism

2010-09-28T13:09:00.002-04:00

A colleague told me a disheartening observation/hypothesis concerning the students in his epistemology class.

The class as a whole has generally had a positive reaction to the readings assigned thus far in the course but had a negative, even hostile, reaction toward the latest article they discussed, a marvelous piece by Miranda Fricker called "Scepticism and the Genealogy of Knowledge."

My colleague is a contextualist, a feminist, and a pragmatist anti-skeptic. "I just realized how, if I wanted to, I could once and for all turn the class opinion against the skeptic," he confided. "All I'd have to do is to consistently refer to the skeptic as 'she'."

Baby Logic and a Question

2010-09-02T16:49:00.004-04:00

I've been talking with philosophers in my department about curriculum revisions and our logic course. Right now we only have one logic course. It would be nice to add an advanced course, but I don't particularly want to teach it--or rather, I'd like to teach it, but there are about a dozen courses I'd like to teach more than that one.

Some of us have referred to the course as "baby logic." This is a term I heard a lot in grad school, where there was a 1-quarter baby logic course and 2 further quarters of advanced topics--and none of those even touched on modal logic or many other possible topics in philosophical logic.

My question for you is why it's called baby logic and what baby logic refers to. Is it the content of a standard introductory course (even when "introductory" means "all you can ever get at this institution without taking your pretty self over to the math department")? That is, is baby logic sentential and predicate logic up to (or through) identity? Or is it less? One colleague thinks "baby logic" refers only to the informal logic that is typically taught in critical thinking courses. I could see how it might refer to sentential logic--on the grounds that truth trees are a mindless automatic procedure but models in predicate logic are not.

CFP: Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science

2010-08-17T13:06:00.003-04:00

METAPHYSICS & THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE CONFERENCE

Presented by the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto

and the Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine, University of Chicago

13-15 May 2011

University of Toronto

The philosophy of science has an illustrious history of attraction and antipathy towards metaphysics. The latter was famously exemplified in the Logical Positivist contention that metaphysical questions are meaningless, but in the wake of the demise of Positivism, metaphysics has found its way back into the philosophy of science. Increasingly, questions about the nature of natural laws, kinds, dispositions, and so on have taken a metaphysical cast. The metaphysics of science commands significant attention in contemporary philosophy.

While many philosophers embrace the increased contact between metaphysics and the philosophy of science, others are wary. Should science (and its philosophical study) lead us into doing metaphysics? If so, which metaphysical issues are genuine and which are illusory, and how might we tell? Such questions dovetail with similar soul-searching in metaphysics proper (sometimes under the banner of "meta-metaphysics", sometimes simply as methodology).

This conference will examine ground-level debates about metaphysics within the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of biology as well as broader methodological questions about the role of metaphysics in the philosophy of science. Participation is open and welcome from all parties to these questions: from those who hold that metaphysics must have a place within the philosophy of science, to those who hold it should not.

PLENARY SPEAKERS

Craig Callender (University of California, San Diego)

Anjan Chakravartty (University of Toronto)

Katherine Hawley (University of St. Andrews)

Jenann Ismael (University of Arizona)

James Ladyman (University of Bristol)

Kyle Stanford (University of California, Irvine)

Michael Strevens (New York University)

Robert Wilson (University of Alberta)

C. Kenneth Waters (Minnesota)

SUBMISSIONS

Essays of 4,000-5,000 words (30 minutes allotted for presentations) concerning any aspect of metaphysics and the natural or social sciences will be accepted for review until January 10, 2011. Please include a short abstract (200 words or so), a few keywords, prepare your essayfor blind review (do not include your name or other identifying references in the document), and submit it in PDF format here.

For more information, see http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/mhs016/MPSC2011/

Science and Policy: Deforestation

2010-08-17T11:05:00.004-04:00

Regular readers of this blog know that I do this more for myself than for you. Is there any handier, searchable, linkable way to keep track of the things I come across which might someday make useful handouts, references or exercises to use in my teaching?

Using the blog in this way is an idea I got from Rob Loftis, whose blog also files away his teaching ideas and notes from the AAPT conferences. I think I'll modify this one to use in my Intro to Philosophy class this fall, and I've thought about--but never actually stolen--his exercises on Twelve Angry Men.

****

Last time I taught Environmental Philosophy, we spent a week talking about deforestation at the end of the course. It's a messy environmental/economic issue that offered an opportunity to review and integrate a number of the theoretical topics from earlier in the course. To provide background, I assigned this New Yorker article about illegal logging. Now, a news story that gives a swift update.

In essence, illegal logging may have decreased in the past decade (by 22% globally). That would be good news. But, then again, if no one has any idea how much timber is passing from the tropics and Siberia into China, then how can this report be accurate?

Science and Policy: Climate

2010-08-17T10:45:00.002-04:00

Sometimes when teaching about the ethics of climate change, I hope to find a really short but authoritative newspaper article to give students. I like them to see some figures about the magnitude of climate change and to get an idea about the effects of global warming in terms that are easy to understand.

Here is a one-page news article from the AAAS, describing the contents of the latest NRC report.

The closest the committee comes to a policy recommendation is to point out the magnitude of the challenge. "Emissions reductions larger than about 80%, relative to whatever peak global emissions rate may be reached, are required to approximately stabilize carbon dioxide concentrations," it observes.

The paragraph sounds critical. Is such restraint from recommending specific policy choices required by objectivity, professional respect for policy-makers, common sense, or good taste?

On the one hand, a report focused on science should not make recommendations that can't be justified within the space given. So a recommendation for a cap-and-trade policy, or a rejection of a tax on emissions, or an expressed preference for investing more heavily in the development of tidal power, would certainly be beyond the scope of the report. On the other hand, reports, like journal articles, are rhetorical devices and are structured so that it is clear which parts are descriptive and which prescriptive. Other NRC reports have not shied away from offering prescriptions for change in education, in medical practice, and in other policy areas. There is no good reason the NRC couldn't maintain neutrality with regard to specific alternative energy development policies and conservation policies without offering much stronger verbal support that more needs to be done. Much, much more.

David Hull

2010-08-12T11:40:00.003-04:00

I'll remember David Hull for the support he showed to young philosophers and for the fierce and unwavering loyalty he had for his friends, who were many. Talking to David allowed one to make a molehill out of any mountain. Problems could be figured out, deconstructed, detoured around, or walked right over. The size of a problem did not discourage him from taking it on, even when doing so required 600 pages or decades of activism.

John Wilkins, at Evolving Thoughts, has posted a memorial note and a description of David's philosophical work and its impact.

Scientific Communities and Equality of Authority

2010-08-11T11:04:00.002-04:00

Philosophers theorize, and too often we're undisturbed by the tremendous gap that can appear between the ideal theories we develop and the practices that could actualize those theories.

In her study of the ideal structure and function of scientific communities, Helen Longino argued in favor of applying the Habermasian ideal democratic speech conditions to scientific communities. Thus, well-structured scientific communities would (should) be structured so that members:

a. are willing to genuinely engage with each other;

b. treat each other as moral, political, social, and intellectual equals; and

c. are willing to modify their beliefs in response to criticism and evidence.

Item c is actually not so hard. Peer review of published work and peer pressure in general exert some force. But how in the world can item b be accomplished?

Though many philosophers of science have written on and built on Longino's work, not much has been done to identify how to nudge real scientific (or our own academic) communities in directions that would meet these ideal conditions.

Atul Gawande suggests that one thing that can improve the communicative equality of communities of professionals working together is to use checklists. Huh? So simple? The bridge between theory and practice is constructed of little practical steps.

From Michael Goldman's review of Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto:

The safe surgery checklist that Gawande helped develop instructs the entire [surgery] team to introduce themselves by name and role and to discuss the unusual aspects of the case and potential problems. The checklist distributes power, so that a nurse reading a checklist acquires the authority, as a member of of the team, to stop the surgeon from omitting a critical step or making a stupid mistake.

Scientific communities do not usually work under the constraints and risk of crisis that surgery teams do, but the larger point is that formalizing working methods and instituting time for face-to-face communication between team members can change the social and power dynamic of collaborative teams.

You Must Read Heidegger!

2010-08-09T11:54:00.003-04:00

I don't read Leiter but someone who loves me does and passed along the link below. I am entitled to repost it, snickering all the while, because I did read Sein und Zeit in the original German, while tramping in the Schwarzwald and snacking on Spaetzle. Lucky for me, I took that lesson before even starting grad school.

Women in Politics: Not Even in Fantasyland

2010-08-06T14:07:00.003-04:00

I just received a brochure from my county elections board about the newly required Sequoia "Imagecast" electronic voting machine. It will replace the mechanical devices that many counties in New York state have used for decades. Those old-fashioned lever machines have the drawback that they don't record individual votes for recounts, but they also have distinct advantages, such as their simplicity of use, not permitting overvoting, and having some of the lowest error rates of any voting method.

Oh, but that rant was off-topic!

On said brochure, there is an illustration of how to fill in a circle next to a candidate's name. The imaginary candidates are:

Neil Diamond
Carrie Underwood
Kenny Rogers
Luther Vandros [sic!]
Pink Floyd
Toby Keith

The hidden message? Women are as unlikely to succeed in politics as in the music industry.

Maternity and Job Markets

2010-08-04T14:46:00.003-04:00

In academia, but not only in academia, maternity costs women job opportunities and advancement.

David Leonhart writes in the NYTimes that:

"[O]utright sexism is no longer the main barrier to gender equality. The main barrier is the harsh price most workers pay for pursuing anything other than the old-fashioned career path."

and

"Last year, 40.2 percent of married women with children under 3 years old were outside the labor force, up from a low of 38.6 percent in 1998. The increase, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis, “occurred across all educational levels and, for most groups, by about the same magnitude.” By contrast, women without children at home have continued to join the work force in growing numbers."

His proposed solution is the right one, which is not an easy one:

"The best hope for making progress against today’s gender inequality probably involves some combination of legal and cultural changes, which happens to be the same combination that beat back the old sexism. We’ll have to get beyond the Mommy Wars and instead create rewarding career paths even for parents — fathers, too — who take months or years off. We’ll have to get more creative about part-time and flexible work, too."

Thanks Alexandra!

Philosophy Listens

2010-08-04T11:31:00.003-04:00

The radio program Philosophy Talks has podcasts (to stream for free and to purchase for downloads) to help pass the time and keep sharp during the summer. I've taken them on long runs...but that's just me--I don't run fast enough to need a strong beat to keep me going!

This week's prize is John Searle on Social Reality. The upcoming schedule contains repeats well worth hearing if you missed them the first time. (Unlike the world of politics, philosophy definitely doesn't age quickly!) The week of August 8 we get a program on William James and the following week is feminist ethicist Debra Satz on commodifying body parts. These aren't just monologues--they have all the elements of Car Talk but with arguments instead of gears.

Covering Laws and Background Assumptions

2010-08-02T13:00:00.004-04:00

In the debate over burka bans, there is a background assumption which makes all the difference.

Either burkas and full-face veils are essentially (and only) expressions of religious piety, or they essentially differ from other religious head coverings by symbolically (or actually) removing women from public life.

Martha Nussbaum adopts the first assumption; in a response to her piece, Feisal Mohamed defends the latter.

The adoption of burka bans in European cities and countries is a new development, but the essentials of this debate are not. Susan Moller Okin's excellent "Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?," though 10 years old, is still relevant. Her title essay is followed by a number of responses, including one by Nussbaum broadly defending expression of religious freedom.

As Mohamed points out in his commentary, the key issue is not whether to support religious freedom (there is broad agreement--outside of the French public schools anyway--that religious dress is not in itself at odds with multicultural, liberal society). The key issue is how to assess conflicts between religious demands and individual and group rights to autonomy.

This reduces a theoretical question to a practical one: for women who are covered to a point that participation in civic life as individuals becomes difficult or impossible (or as a symbol of their non-participation in public life), what policy is most likely to reduce oppression? As a matter of practical results, it's not clear to me that a burka ban would actually result in those women being fully engaged in public, educational, and civic life. Instead, they might become even more cloistered than before.

This has been a fruitful topic for discussion in my feminist theory course, and now that it's prominent in the news, I would consider integrating it into a topically oriented intro to philosophy course. Comments welcome on how you think this topic would be received by a lower-level audience.

Philosophy and Practice: Eating Meat

2010-07-28T12:03:00.005-04:00

I'm late getting to an examination of Eric Schwitzgebel's most recent study of how philosophers and non-philosophers think and act on various moral issues. He has many blog posts discussing preliminary findings (links to all listed here). It's not a big surprise that when it comes to questions of right behavior, how people think and how they act might not align. It's fascinating, though, to learn a little about whether philosophers, with all their training and practice in logical consistency, might manage to act in ways more consistent with their beliefs than someone not so trained.

My judgment preliminary to reading/discussing Schwitzgebel's preliminary findings is to think that philosophers may well not manage such consistency. My suspicion is that logical consistency is one thing, and consistent action another. What works against our profession's emphasis on logical consistency is an equally strong ethos of thought mattering more than deed.

Knowing that anecdotal evidence is not worth its weight in gold (but maybe in something less valuable, say, corn), I would throw out an observation. Some environmental philosophers of my acquaintance have immaculate lawns, obtainable only by the application of quantities of poison. No environmental scientists of my acquaintance have immaculate lawns, and when nudged just the slightest amount will speak at length about how the height of your lawn mower blade affects competition between weeds and grass for access to sunlight and the relative rates of pesticide application on lawns compared to farms, and so on and so on.

Schwitzgebel:

The biggest divergences in moral opinion concerned our question about "regularly eating the meat of mammals such as beef and pork". 60% of ethics professor respondents rated mammal-meat consumption as morally bad, compared to 45% of non-ethicist philosophers and just 19% of non-philosophers. Opinion also divided by gender and age. Women were about 1.5 times as likely to condemn mammal-meat consumption (55% of women rated it bad vs. 37% of men). There was a similar shift of opinion with age: 55% of respondents born in 1960 or later condemned mammal-meat consumption, compared to 35% born before 1960. One might expect a compound effect for young female philosophers, and indeed it was so: Fully 81% of female philosophers born in 1960 or later said it was morally bad to regularly eat the meat of mammals. To put this degree of consensus in perspective: In last year's PhilPapers survey of philosophical opinion, only 82% of philosophers endorsed non-skeptical realism about the existence of an external world. (No word, so far, on how philosophers who deny the existence of an external world feel about seeming to consume meat.)

One thing I've noticed at philosophy department functions is that when there is food and the catering is ordered by someone outside the department, there are never enough vegetarian options. (This is also true, and consistently annoying, at lunches where sustainability is the topic.) Our philosophy department is about half "vegetarian" (that is, some degree of restraint on eating some meat), and that is higher than in the economics department (where being vegetarian is coextensive with being Hindu)--or in just about any other department. Likewise, at the meeting of the International Association of Women Philosophers last month, there were more special-ordered (vegetarian) sandwiches than regular fare. So it is not all that surprising to learn from this study that philosophers--many of them--have thought about the ethics of eating meat.

However, Schwitzgebel goes on to show data on who is actually eating meat, and it is a lot of us. Still, knowing that many other philosophers condemn meat-eating may have the effect of lowering how much meat is eaten at philosophical get-togethers.

Buying Out Research

2010-07-27T14:35:00.002-04:00

It doesn't take an ethicist to sniff out something wrong with BP's consulting contracts with marine and geo- scientists--or a philosopher of science to show why this way of funding scientists will silence rather than drive knowledge production. But it's worth talking about any way:

From the Telegraph:
BP has been accused of “buying” the silence of some of the world’s leading scientists and academics to help build its legal defence against litigation after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Green Trees

2010-07-23T13:49:00.003-04:00

Nalini Nadkarni, a celebrity among forest ecologists, has a moving piece in Poetry:

Green I Love You Green
Poetry and the endless, elegant cycle of nature.

An excerpt:

"[T]he fragility of trees must also be acknowledged. Scientific studies document that the tiny mandibles of a bark beetle can bring quick death to a jungle giant. A tropical fig tree species c

an go extinct if humans pump enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to raise the global temperature a single degree. Gail Mazur evokes this fragility in “Young Apple Tree, December”:

What you want for it you’d want
for a child: that she take hold;
that her roots find home in stony

winter soil; that she take seasons
in stride, seasons that shape and
reshape her; that like a dancer’s,

her limbs grow pliant, graceful
and surprising; that she know,
in her branchings, to seek balance;

that she know when to flower, when
to wait for the returns; that she turn
to a giving sun; that she know

fruit as it ripens; that what’s lost
to her will be replaced; that early
summer afternoons, a full blossoming

tree, she cast lacy shadows; that change
not frighten her.

Perhaps the deepest value of poetry for scientists is its articulation of the feelings that scientists themselves harbor for what they study—passion, deep curiosity, and a sense of stewardship."

More Feminist Parenting

2010-07-23T11:16:00.003-04:00

A great idea for a game from Jender at Feminist Philosophers:

Reveal the stereotype--for the 3- to 6- year-old set.

Female Filosophers

2010-07-21T15:00:00.005-04:00

I've had a long-time quest to include women authors among the readings for each of the classes I teach. (As have others: here's Brian Weatherson's.)

And I've said how it drives me bonkers to find textbooks that include only token women--especially when represented as speaking for women rather than just being a philosopher doing good philosophy.

Yes, we women write feminist theory, and it's good that we do. But it's not ALL that we do!

So it's with strong hopes for the future that I point you to a work in progress:

Women's Works, hosted by the Australasian Association of Philosophy and collected by philosophers at Macquarrie University. The site makes recommendations for articles written by women which would be appropriate for undergraduate classes, containing citation info and an abstract.

The AAP has done incredible work collecting data on women's participation in the profession, and, knowing this commitment, I suspect the Women's Work site will improve with time.

As it stands....oh, I hate to criticize...it's such a great idea...every project starts somewhere...but only three recommendations for women writing epistemology? Really? I have more than that in a 10-week course! And only one in philosophy of science? And only 20 authors total? (OK, I'll admit that there may appear to be 21, but I refuse to count an anti-feminist work by Janet Radcliffe Richards.) At first I thought that maybe the list was limited to Australians...but no...

In addition to a realistic expansion, the other thing that would improve the site would be some specific information about how these articles work for undergrads. I can easily go through a database and pick out female authors, but it's more difficult to sift through them for a writing style that doesn't require a lot of background. I raised this particular problem last spring when I was looking for articles in philosophy of physics by women and found that so many of the eligible articles by Laura Ruetsche, Doreen Fraser, Alisa Bokulich and others are models of rigorous, technical, scientific writing that would not be appropriate for my non-science undergraduate students. Given what it can take to establish that even though you're a woman, you do have chops, perhaps it's not surprising to find dense, technical theorizing among the best papers.

I'm wondering if book chapters can be listed, too, since some good writing for the undergraduate level appears in that format rather than as journal articles.

Anyway, here are some articles that I included in my courses in the last couple of years and which worked extremely well. I'll pass these on to the Women's Works site, and if you leave any in comments, I'll pass those on, too. Or you can do it yourself. Let's support this project so that it can be useful--and maybe be a source of ideas for textbook editors, too.

In a course on philosophy of biology and its social implications:

Lisa Gannett, “The biological reiﬁcation of race,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55 (2004): 323 – 345.

Inma de Melo Martin, “Genetic research and reduction of health disparities,” New Genetics and Society 27 (March 2008): 57 – 68.

In a course called "Physics and Metaphysics":

Helen Beebee, “The Non-Governing Conception of Laws of Nature, " Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (2000): 571-594.

Susan Schneider, "What Is the Significance of the Intuition that Laws Govern?" Australasian Journal of Philosophy 85 (2007): 307-324. (This is a response to Beebee.)

In a course on philosophy of science, with an emphasis on the issue of pluralism:

Nancy Cartwright, “Fundamentalism vs. the Patchwork of Laws,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 94 (1994): 279-292.

Lorraine Daston, “Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective,” Social Studies of Science22 (1992): 597-618.

Susan Haack, “Trial and error: The Supreme Court’s Philosophy of Science,” American Journal of Public Health 95 (2005): S66-S73.

http://www.defendingscience.org/upload/HaackSCPHILOSOPHY.pdf

Elisabeth A. Lloyd, “Feyerabend, Mill, and Pluralism,” Philosophy of Science 64 (1997): S396-S407.

Wendy S. Parker, "Understanding Pluralism in Climate Modeling," Foundations of Science 11 (2006): 349-368.

Feminist Parenting

2010-07-20T15:53:00.004-04:00

Until this week, I did not know that there is a lively blog carnival for Feminist Parenting.

Thoughts about how my feminist commitments--with their particular theoretical, liberal, academic, and sometimes bourgeois bent--guide parenting a young son do rise to the surface frequently.

I've blogged on pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding before, and the links in the most recent carnival are a good index of those issues. Just guess: the issues have a lot to do with autonomy, trust in women's judgment, and the inflexibility of social (and workplace) contexts.

The feminist challenges of raising a toddler or kid are different than those in babyhood. They have more to do with his autonomy than my own, and with his mental and emotional development than his physical development. Recurring themes have to do with:

Commercialism. This more than anything else. To take an example.
Violence. I take the "no weapons" rule at the daycare for granted--so why is it that other same-age friends can't seem to do imaginative play without guns and swords?
Gender. There was a proposal that one of the weekly themes at my child's preschool be "Kings and Queens." I asked a teacher what, exactly, the educational content of that would be, other than how boys dress and how girls dress. But aside from such obvious gendering, I have constant questions about raising a gender-happy and feminist boy that I don't know the answers to. Here's a promise to post some when they come up.
Discipline. When is it OK to let a child run wild, to allow a scene to happen, to just indulge, etc? My feminist response is that this should depend on the needs of the moment, but in reality how I discipline has a lot to do with who I think will observe it and what their expectations are.

It's not hard to identify where I can't manage to be as feminist as I would like: connecting with and supporting other mothers and feminist-raised kids. Is there an irony that this reflects the frequent failure of academic feminists to join with each other to create maternity-friendly workplaces?

Monadic Communication

2010-07-15T11:50:00.004-04:00

How can it be that I've never pointed out that fellow philosophy blogger Carrie Jenkins makes great music with Syracuse metaphysicians under the name The 21st Century Monads?

Take a break from your summer research program to have a listen to "The G. E. Moore Shift" and then click through to the band's page for free album downloads and to listen to the soon-to-be-classic "Don't Get Smoked at the Smoker."

Covering Laws

2010-07-14T10:16:00.004-04:00

Not that kind. This kind.

In April, Belgium became the first European country to ban wearing full-face veils in public. This week, one house of the French Parliament voted to ban face-covering veils in public. Headscarves are already banned for teachers and students in public schools. Some Spanish cities have a similar ban, and in June the Spanish Senate recommended that face-covering veils be banned in public nationwide.

While some Muslim countries, such as Iran, require a head covering in public, others, such as Turkey and Tunisia, ban veils for civil servants and public school students. In Turkey, the president's wife covers her head, and unless she removes it, she is banned from state institutions, including some hospitals. Whether or not to cover, and how, is a decision that can be based in religion, fashion, and politics.

The ban on face veils is portrayed as a defense of women's liberty and dignity, as a blow against religious oppression of women. With regard to the Spanish vote:

"Today, a very important step in favour of freedom and women's equality was taken," the deputy leader of the Popular Party, Maria Dolores de Cospedal, told reporters after the vote.

Martha Nussbaum examines, in detail, the arguments in favor of banning full-face veils. She finds them wanting, and her reasons are well worth reading.

An analysis of the dilemma on Feministe makes the more practical point that banning full-face veils may not so much have the effect of making women more present in public places as of forcing them to stay at home.

To me, it seems key to keep two distinction in mind: the cultural differences between wearing a headscarf and wearing a full-face veil, and the difference between such bans in countries where Muslims are a minority (like France) compared to where they are a majority (like Turkey).

The Reliability of Historical Data

2010-07-13T12:24:00.003-04:00

I've been writing up my research on presettlement forests in western New York, and one of the most frustrating things about this work is that there is a huge gap in the data and--obviously--no way to go back and correct it.

The land surveys I work with were done in 1811. Three out of four surveyors used the same sampling methods. But one of them--was he confused? too innovative?--did not collect one of two types of data. Specifically, what surveyors were expected to do was to find the corner of the property lots and then locate the closest tree to that corner. They would write down the species of that tree, its diameter, and where it stood in relation to the corner (distance and compass direction). Then they would also blaze the tree with the lot numbers (carve the numbers into the bark). This information was collected so that whoever bought the property could then go out and identify the boundaries of their land. Unless the tree was struck by lightning and went up in a blaze, this was a fairly reliable way of keeping track of property corners for at least a couple of decades. And it helps forest scientists 200 years later.

But in the surveys I'm using, one surveyor did not record this information at all. Instead he had his team cut posts and set them in the ground at the lot corners. This sounds like a LOT more work than blazing a tree and taking down some notes. Moreover, the posts that he set were of ironwood--a small tree that is hard to cut but rots quickly. Those posts probably didn't stand for even a decade.

This is a common type of problem with historical data. It's full of gaps. It's not entirely reliable. It can't be checked! Or, in the case of historical records, it may have been gathered in a way that is difficult to reconcile with contemporary measures.

I read of an interesting example of using historical records which was recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Woodworth (et al) made use of tidal gauge measurements in the Falkland Islands collected in the mid-19th century by the explorer James Clark Ross. They correlate these with other historical measurements of sea level and with contemporary measures based on satellite altimetry in order to construct a more long-term record of change in sea level.

What this historical data accomplishes is to show that the rate of sea level rise has been accelerating. In historical ecology, too, what the vegetation data show clearly is that there has been rapid change in the last 200 years but only slow changes in forest composition before that.

Historical data is gappy, but it's often good enough to demonstrate a key point.

It's Random

2010-07-09T15:47:00.003-04:00

Another quote from Pagels' The Cosmic Code:

The mathematician Marc Kac stated an amusing feature of random numbers: "A table of random numbers, once printed, requires no errata."

Sense Experience and Scientific Knowledge

2010-07-08T11:36:00.005-04:00

When I started the blog and picked a name, I was thinking about how it's the case that many of my metaphilosophical commitments come down to a particular conception of the relationship between knowledge and experience. These commitments define, from one perspective, why I think philosophy is an important guide to life. And from another perspective, they distinguish my philosophical style from that of some other philosophers.

Many of my Google hits come from folks searching, e.g., "philosophers suggest knowledge is based on experience." So I think I'll say a little more about the blog's title.

Looking to experience as the basis for knowledge distinguishes a scientific and skeptical worldview from a worldview based on hearsay and tradition. This is pragmatism with a small 'p'. It's the reason that I've written in support of evidence-based medicine (though I think clinical experience can also play an important role), the source of my depression about biology education that confuses religion with science, and why I poke fun at bookstores that specialize in "metaphysics." This modest empiricism (not logical empiricism!) encourages us to question assumptions and gives rise to a faith that data is worth gathering because facts can be the basis of a good argument. For instance, though the data on women in the philosophical profession do not by themselves motivate any changes in practice, they give us a good idea of what the problem is and a reason not to write it off as misperception.

In a philosophical sphere, looking to experience as a basis for knowledge counteracts taking empiricism to an extreme (logical empiricism!). I define experience broadly--it is embodied, it is social, it is personal, and it is physical. Solipsism? Individualism? Philosophical skepticism? How could mere thoughts have led philosophers to doubt the richness of their own experiences? Taking the richness of experience seriously is anti-reductionist, and it supports naturalism and Pragmatism. A view of experience that is too narrow and too exclusive is inadequate to support all that we call knowledge, including knowledge of other people. Sense experience must be interpreted, and we can't do without some conceptual and interpretive frameworks.

These two views of experience--that experience is of an independent world but that it is also personal--are sometimes seen as being at odds. Science at war with humanism. I don't have that view. We can (must!) find humanistic meaning within a scientific worldview.

Here is the physicist Heinz Pagels meditating on the problem, in his book The Cosmic Code (written in 1982, it's still the best book on quantum mechanics for popular audiences).

Goethe was interested in colors as an immediate human experience, and Newton was interested in color as an abstract physical phenomenon. On an experimental, material basis one must side with Newton's conclusions. But Goethe's view speaks to the immediacy of human experience. ...

Goethe was part of the romantic reaction to classical mechanics and modern science--a reaction that continues to this day. This confrontation between Goethe and Newton revealed a modern humanist critique of science that the abstract explanations of science deny the vital core of human experience. The quantum theory and the sciences that emerged from it are prime examples of such abstract explanations.

Science does not deny the reality of our immediate experience of the world; it begins there. But it does not remain there, because the basis for comprehending our experience is not given with sensual experience. Science shows us that supporting the world of sensual experience there is a conceptual order, a cosmic code which can be discovered by experiment and known by the human mind. The unity of our experience, like the unity of science, is conceptual, not sensual. That is the difference between Newton and Goethe--Newton sought universal concepts in the form of physical laws, while Goethe looked for the unity of nature in immediate experience.

Science is a response to the demand that our experience places upon us, and what we are given in return by science is a new human experience--seeing with our mind the internal logic of the cosmos.

A Priori, Empirically Confirmed

2010-07-07T08:10:00.003-04:00

From an abstract in the 18 June issue of Science:

Space, and events associated with places and spaces, are represented in the brain by a circuitry made of place cells, head directions cells, grid cells, and border cells. These cell types form a collective dynamic representation of our position as we move through the environment. How this representation is formed has remained a mystery. Is it acquired, or are we born with the ability to represent external space? [Articles by Langston et al. and Wills et al.] investigated the early development of spatial activity in the hippocampal formation and the entorhinal cortex of rat pups... A neural representation of external space at this early time points to strong innate components for perception of space. These findings provide experimental support for Kant's 200-year-old concept of space as an a priori faculty of the mind.

Three questions:

Would a developmental pathway that is triggered early in a child's experience of the external world, and which is followed in a similar or identical way in all normal people fail to confirm the concept of space as a necessary faculty of the mind?
Does this mean that the 1st Critique was referring, all along, to rat minds?
Does an a priori concept become stronger with experimental support?

What are teaching evaluations good for? Part II

2010-07-02T13:54:00.002-04:00

They aren't meant to be advertisements for the easiest class--the one that won't take up any of your valuable time or give you any sort of intellectual struggle, that's for sure! Though this clearly isn't how the users of Ratemyprofessors.com see the value of that site.

Check out my ratings or those of any of your friends--I'm betting they have some version of these comments:

1. This teacher is willing to help as long as you do the work.

2. This class was not so good because the professor expects attendance.

3. I liked this teacher because the grading was easy (or didn't--because it wasn't).

One of my more frequent comments on intro-level philosophy teaching evaluations: SHOW MORE MOVIES. Interestingly, showing more movies (at least up to my level of tolerance) does not reduce the frequency of the comment.

But I don't usually criticize the very idea of teaching evaluations. Though they are a limited tool, surely they can flag (for chairs and administrators) those professors who are committing terrible mistakes--disrespecting students or (at the other end of the scale) giving everyone an A just for breathing. They should be taken in context, and the context should be understood to reflect student's cultural preconceptions about courses and professors.

Stanley Fish does criticize their very idea on a NYTimes blog. I usually love to disagree with Fish, but on the state of Texas' proposals for teaching evaluations and higher ed, I'd give him a high-5.

Freudian slip?

2010-06-30T11:36:00.002-04:00

Freudian psychoanalysis may be passé in the early 21st century (especially among empiricists!), but who can resist a Freudian explanation for slips of the tongue?

In a conference presentation discussing the causes of environmental harms, the female (and feminist) speaker unwittingly referred to androgenic causes rather than anthropogenic causes. Need I mention that the social context of the conference was far from friendly to women (see post below)?

What are teaching evaluations good for?

2010-06-23T15:39:00.003-04:00

Over at Adventures in Ethics and Science, Dr. Freeride evaluates a recent study of how student academic performance is correlated with teaching evaluations.

The study is Carrell, S., & West, J. (2010). Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors Journal of Political Economy, 118 (3), 409-432

Like other studies of the effectiveness of teaching evaluations, it shows that high evaluations of teachers are correlated with grades (good grades match with good evaluations). But it also yields some surprises, such as that the students of more experienced instructors in the first of several calculus courses had lower performance in that first course but better performance in subsequent courses (no matter who taught the later courses). One possibility is that inexperienced teachers are more focused on getting students through the course at hand but less skilled at (or less focused on) teaching higher-level, critical skills.

Here is part of Dr. Freeride's analysis:

To my mind, this is a more complicated situation than students picking up inadequate study skills or teachers just teaching to the tests. Students are often surprised that learning a subject requires learning a sequence of increasingly more sophisticated models, or increasingly more sophisticated analytical techniques or methods of approximation, or what have you. Learning the next chunk of knowledge in the line is not just a matter of adding more on, but also of recognizing the problems with the chunk of knowledge you learned before. This is a surprise to many students...

One conclusion of this study, that student evaluations of faculty performance don't indicate that the students have learned all that we want them to, is no surprise at all. This is part of why institutions that care about teaching hardly ever rely on student evaluations of teaching as the only source of data to evaluate faculty teaching. (At my university, for example, there is regular peer reviewing of teaching, and these peer reviews are important in retention, tenure, and promotion decisions.)

But can even peer review yield insight into how to teach in a way that sticks? At first, I was skeptical that a study of calculus teaching can show much about evaluations and philosophy teaching. But in one respect, we do have this same issue of continuity. Many of my students think that what they are supposed to learn is the course content. Well, sometimes it is... But for the most part, I hope they're noticing the moves I make, and the moves that the various authors make, the writing skills and the argument analysis skills. Our courses aren't sequenced because learning in one class about what Theodor Adorno had to say about pseudo-individualization will not be helpful in another class on internalism about justification in contemporary epistemology. Nonetheless, a student can learn to do things in the first course that will help her excel in the second course. I'm just not sure that those things (and how well they are taught) are what wind up getting evaluated.

Life of a Female Philosopher

2010-06-10T11:59:00.000-04:00

Most of the time, the life of a female philosopher at a philosophy conference is the same as a male philosopher’s. Schmoozing, rehashing the last talk over coffee, last-minute work on your paper.

So, how can you tell that you’re a female philosopher at a conference?

1. At the Eastern APA, do you get on the elevator and realize the other philosophers are silently staring at your chest?

2. When discussing your talk with the commentator before your presentation, does a friend of the commentator walk up ask you “Who are you here with?”, meaning “Which male participant are you an appendage of?”

Interdisciplinary Science

2010-05-30T09:30:00.003-04:00

I've been thinking about interdisciplinarity lately. What it is, what sorts of problems of inquiry it's good for, what the obstacles to interdisciplinary research are, and how interdisciplinarity differs from other options such as multi-disciplinarity. This seems like a job for: social epistemologists!

The NSF has released a study on US doctoral dissertations that can be identified as conducting interdisciplinary (science?) research. (NSF results here.) On the survey of earned doctorates, doctoral candidates were asked to identify their primary and secondary field of research. In 2008, 27% of respondents indicated that their research was interdisciplinary.

From Science magazine's report on the study:

It's an article of faith among science policymakers that interdisciplinary research is essential to address society's most pressing technological challenges, from energy independence to improved health care. But don't ask them to measure it. The National Academies' upcoming assessment of doctoral research programs, for example, asked departments what percentage of their faculty members were associated with other programs. But the data "aren't very satisfactory," says Charlotte Kuh, study director. Part of the problem is the fuzzy definition of an interdisciplinary program, she adds.

The standard for what counts as interdisciplinary is not set very high, since the fields are cut fairly finely and research that straddles closely related fields is counted as interdisciplinary. Thus, a research project in ecology and plant pathology counts as interdisciplinary. So does endocrinology and environmental toxicology. Thus, 81% of respondents in the biological sciences who considered their research to be interdisciplinary listed a secondary discipline in the same broad field as their primary discipline.

In other words, how much does the survey depend on students' perception of what counts as interdisciplinary? And what sort of meaning does it give to interdisciplinarity to count closely related fields as meeting a standard of interdisciplinarity. It seems to me that if there are obstacles to interdisciplinary research (and I think there are), these are less likely to make a difference when the fields in question are agricultural science and plant pathology than when they are atmospheric science and sociology. Yet, when we hear proclamations of the tough problems that interdisciplinarity will solve, they are more often like the latter than the former.

Again, from the Science News report:

NSF officials say the survey doesn't address the larger question of how difficult or easy it is for students to pursue interdisciplinary degrees, nor the extent to which senior faculty engage in interdisciplinary research themselves. An ongoing NSF survey of academic research piloted a question about how much is being spent on such activities, and where on campus the research takes place. But that proved to be a tough question for research administrators to answer, says one program manager, and the results may not be usable.

Mountain Gorillas in the Congo

2010-05-24T13:18:00.002-04:00

Posted with a CSMonitor article titled "Want to save Congo's endangered mountain gorillas? There an app for that" and an earlier article "Standing up for Congo's rare mountain gorillas."

In Virunga National Park,

More than 120 rangers have been killed in recent years for trying to stop the trade in exotic animals, gold, and charcoal from the park.

Philosophy Careers, Autonomy, and Self-direction

2010-05-04T13:16:00.003-04:00

My university now offers a bachelor's degree in philosophy, and the degree program has been more successful in its first couple of years than anyone initially expected. Students are transferring in from other programs within the university, students are double-majoring (even with their other degree being in engineering!), and we've recruited students who are willing to enter from Day 1 as philosophy majors. (This is the only university I know of which makes it all but impossible to enter as an undecided major.)

But I have to admit that I have concerns when it comes to recruiting students to the philosophy major in the context of a career-oriented university. I do believe that philosophy prepares people to excel in law, law enforcement, criminal investigation, business, journalism, the clergy, politics, civil service and international development, education, market and policy research, and so many other fields. Yet, in a university where majors are seen as preparatory for disciplinary careers, the philosophy majors I know all expect to become professional philosophers.

I make no judgments about who would be a "good" future professional--there's far, far too much diversity in our profession to play that game. The problem, instead, is my suspicion that the chances of successfully navigating the route to professional philosopher are rather less probable than that of successfully becoming a lawyer, businessperson, journalist, editor, or whatever, while being more vested with mythology and no more dependent on merit. I worry about their future happiness.

So as I say farewell to students on their way to graduate school, I'll be sure to plant the idea in their heads that there are many good and fulfilling careers. And I hope that all our philosophical discussions of virtuosity, of autonomy, and of authenticity will head them down interesting and unexpected paths.

Should the path of professional philosophers seem too flat and narrow, I have two excellent examples of people who trekked off it to find their own:

Martin Noval, who was a visiting professor in my department in the 1980's (before my time here) leads treks in the Himalayas and trips through India.

Jack Turner, formerly a professor at Univ. of Illinois, Chicago is now the president of Exum Mountain Guides.

Scientific Realism

2010-04-29T11:54:00.003-04:00

In my philosophy of science course, we've been discussing Bas van Fraassen's constructive empiricism and critiquing the observable/non-observable distinction. This movie is an artistic representation of magnetic fields, a useful supplement to our conversation.

The filmmakers describe their work:

Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers' produced by fleeting electrons. Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

A slide to support my previous post

2010-04-27T11:15:00.003-04:00

By Mark Goetz.

Firing on PowerPoint Bullets

2010-04-27T10:56:00.003-04:00

PowerPoint: yes, it's ubiquitous. Yes, much depends on the presenter's abilities. Yes, there are other poor presentation methods. BUT...

From the NYTimes:

WORLD
We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of U.S. military commanders and reached the level of near obsession.

This article doesn't pull its punches!

Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making.

......

No one is suggesting that PowerPoint is to blame for mistakes in the current wars, but the program did become notorious during the prelude to the invasion of Iraq. As recounted in the book “Fiasco” by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin Press, 2006), Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, who led the allied ground forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, grew frustrated when he could not get Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander at the time of American forces in the Persian Gulf region, to issue orders that stated explicitly how he wanted the invasion conducted, and why. Instead, General Franks just passed on to General McKiernan the vague PowerPoint slides that he had already shown to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time.
Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.
The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”

And this news article links to two short opinion pieces in journals, here and here, which I'll consider putting in my next critical thinking syllabus. From the second of these, by T. X. Hammes:

Every year, the services spend millions of dollars teaching our people how to think. We invest in everything from war colleges to noncommissioned officer schools. Our senior schools in particular expose our leaders to broad issues and historical insights in an attempt to expose the complex and interactive nature of many of the decisions they will make.
Unfortunately, as soon as they graduate, our people return to a world driven by a tool that is the antithesis of thinking: PowerPoint. Make no mistake, PowerPoint is not a neutral tool — it is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making. It has fundamentally changed our culture by altering the expectations of who makes decisions, what decisions they make and how they make them.

Philosophical Minds are Everywhere

2010-04-18T10:50:00.001-04:00

EDUCATION | April 18, 2010
The Examined Life, Age 8
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
Philosophical reasoning taught in the second grade. From the New York Times:

“A lot of people try to make philosophy into an elitist discipline,” says Professor Wartenberg, who has been visiting the school, the Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School of Excellence, since 2007. “But everyone is interested in basic philosophical ideas; they’re the most basic questions we have about the world.”

Gareth Matthews, a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, concluded that their curiosity and sense of wonder make children ripe for philosophic inquiry.
“The world is new to them and they want to figure things out,” says Professor Matthews, who has written extensively about children and philosophy. “Young children very often engage in reasoning that professional philosophers can recognize as philosophical, but typically their parents or teachers don’t react in a way that encourages them. They might say, ‘That’s cute,’ but they don’t engage the children in thinking further about whatever the issue is.”

Friedrich is a Macho Man

2010-04-08T13:28:00.006-04:00

OK, time for a confession.

I've tried to take Nietzsche seriously. Really, I have. I even have a gorgeous 4-volume hardbound set I inherited from my father, a Sonderausgabe. I don't give it prime bookcase real estate, but I do hold onto it--you know, just in case I'm ever overcome with a desire to read Human, All Too Human in German.

Basically, the problem is that Nietzsche makes me cringe or giggle--or both.

It's true that the rejection of metaphysics should make his thought attractive to me. And, OK, I get it that he wrote some sensible things, like "All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses" (Beyond Good and Evil).

But what do we do about the misogyny?

"Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent."

Or the misanthropy?

"A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation."

My first exposure to Nietzsche was in an undergraduate existentialism class in which the reading assignment included excerpts from a number of his works. I came into class with the thought that just about everything I had read was a fancy-schmancy way of saying "Let's get high." I didn't detect a great deal of seriousness in it, much less mental stability or even genius. How shocked I was to see the reverence with which these passages were treated! Somehow ironic, given that I had interpreted parts of the assignment as a send-up of hero-worship and a goad to independent thinking and critique.

And then, there is Ecce Homo. Wikipedia:

According to one of Nietzsche's most prominent English translators, Walter Kaufmann, the book offers "Nietzsche's own interpretation of his development, his works, and his significance" (Kaufmann 1967: 201). The book contains several chapters with self-laudatory titles, such as "Why I Am So Wise", "Why I Am So Clever", "Why I Write Such Good Books" and "Why I Am a Destiny".

I've decided that when it comes to Nietzschean scholarship, one can do no better than to turn to the Village People:

Every man wants to be a macho macho man
to have the kind of body, always in demand
You can best believe that, he's a macho man
ready to get down with, anyone he can

Funky with his body, he's a king
call him Mister Eagle, dig his chains
You can best believe that, he's a macho man
likes to be the leader, he never dresses grand

Every man ought to be a macho macho man,
To live a life of freedom, machos make a stand,
Have their own life style and ideals,
Possess the strength and confidence, life's a steal,
You can best believe that he's a macho man
He's a special person in anybody's land.

Dig my big thick mustache!
Macho, macho man
I've got to be a macho! HEY!

Village People - Macho Man (version longue)
Uploaded by scorpiomusic. - Explore more music videos.

How Is This Not Hypocrisy?

2010-04-08T12:46:00.005-04:00

I think it's creepy that some percentage of my e-mail spam comes from paper mills.

How can it not be disturbing, then, to read about teachers rationalizing the propriety of farming out their work to grading mills?

U.S. | April 07, 2010
The Choice: That Term Paper Might be Graded in Bangalore
By JACQUES STEINBERG
If a question about your credit card statement can be handled in India, why can't the scoring of your college term paper?

The argument goes like this: freed from the tedium of grading, professors (as well as teaching assistants) can spend their time on things that really matter. Presumably that doesn't include giving useful feedback to their students. Perhaps this could be taken a step further: the grading mills could write the assignments, too, to increase their efficiency. Oooh, and perhaps they could work together with the paper mills for some overall economic efficiency--a set list of comments could be associated with the various papers it would be possible for students to buy.

This is a sure-fire recipe for squelching creativity. It treats not just students but also teachers and TA's as elements in an assembly line. I would hate to think of my teaching that way! (And in fact, don't get me started on the topic of rubrics...)

Local Event: Lecture on Science and Religion

2010-03-29T21:03:00.003-04:00

Are some readers of this blog local to western New York?

PZ Meyers of the liberal, godless, and hilarious Pharyngula blog is speaking on the RIT campus this Thursday, April 1 at 8:30 pm in the Webb Auditorium. The topic is "The Irreconcilability of Science and Religion."

And the very next day at 3pm the philosophy department is sponsoring a philosophy of science lecture on quantum mechanics by Steve Weinstein of the University of Waterloo--should be a thought-provoking accompaniment to the seminar I'm teaching on "Physics and Metaphysics."