A collection of tidbits

Links from this week and last:

Via GonePublic, "Who is a public intellectual?" ponders whether the public intellectual is in decline in these anti-intellectual times. Answer: no, but don't count specialized New York Intellectuals. Do count generalists who make thoughtful problems interesting in history, politics, literature, and science. Barbara Ehrenreich, Garry Wills. I would add Bill McKibben--I don't think it's the academic or journalistic affiliation that makes someone a public intellectual but the type of problem and the level of interest they get for it.

History, science, literature: astronomers have used events in Homer's Odyssey to identify the date that Odysseus returned from the Trojan War--April 16, 1178 B.C. Their crucial assumption is that Homer knew what he was talking about when he mentioned celestial events--when Venus was on the rise, when constellations were setting. And surely he did--no "security" floodlights to block the view back then.

An article on neigborhoods, from my neighborhood. I taught Robert Putnam's article on social capital in my critical thinking class this year. Most people got the message that close communities raise quality of life. But a few students claimed that because they were "naturally" loners, they would not benefit from making social ties, in spite of Putnam's research findings that, for instance, people who get together with friends are less likely to die in the next year. These few students were also the ones who were struggling in the class, struggled to even get to class, weren't washing, and just plain weren't having fun. The story they were telling themselves about their exceptional natural inclination was not doing them any favors!

When males do it, it's biology...when females do it, it's "promiscuity."

I used to read books, but now I read reviews. I used to read novels, but now I read magazines. I used to read journal articles, but now I can get most of what I need to fill that buzzing need for intellectual stimulation online. And I'm not the only one (fair warning: a Nietzsche reference in this one).

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year...His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Sexy Girls and the Big Picture

Khadimir sends along this WaPo review of The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It. Here's a commercial showing a sexy sexy girl (looks to be all of 8 years old) who knows how to play the guys.

Really, I'm not sure why the Bratz/Barbie big-haired, lipstick-wearing, perfumed and ditzy girls are today's sexual ideal. In my circles, the sexy girls are the ones with tattoos, and the ones who ride Waterford road bikes, and the ones who can't get enough of counterpossibles and modal truths.

My problem is more about raising a non-sexist boy than it is holding off the sexualization of grade school girls. But the two are certainly related. And, according to another book I've been reading, Taking Back Childhood, both are related to the 1984 de-regulation of media that gave a pass to corporations to market any old thing to preschoolers. Really, is there any reason for The Lolita Effect other than it being a way to make a buck?

Ecology and History

Here's a New York Times article about new ideas in stream restoration. It does a great job of making presettlement environmental history seem at least a teensy-weensy bit sexy!

In the embedded video, Dorothy Merritts says that when we are considering the reasons for environmental problems, such as heavy silt loads deposited into the Cheasapeake Bay, "we can't just look around at modern land use and say 'We see agriculture—that's the problem. We see new suburbs—that's the problem.' Instead, go in and look at the history of that location."

Two good points here:
1. Land use history is not just interesting--it's an essential piece of knowledge to have in order to understand causes.
2. Over a billion dollars of private and public money is being spent on environmental restoration, but many projects are not based on evidence. The practice is advancing faster than the academic study of failures and successes.

How Well Does the APA Serve Our Needs?

Yikes. Spiros just about hits the nail on the head. I didn't think that the APA website could be any more poorly designed, difficult to navigate, or just plain ugly. I was wrong--here's a proposed new version.

The design is bad enough. The content makes me hang my head. How useful is it to anyone to post "data on the profession" that covers
— job placement from 1982-2002 (why does the data stop 5 years ago?),
— gender and race data just for 1991-1996 (over a decade ago!), and
— information on degrees awarded from 1949-1994 ??!!

Most of this data comes from free, public government sources and is available up through 2006. Heck, I've even posted some of it here and here.

Equal Pay for Equal Work

My Congressional Rep. again stands up for women and families. Louise Slaughter is a lead sponsor of the Paycheck Fairness Act which responds to last year's awful Ledbetter v. Goodyear decision with legislation that would help protect women against workplace discrimination.

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 paid lip service to discrimination against women. It was passed because at the time women earned just 59¢ for every dollar that men earned. Now, 45 years later--hooray--women earn 77¢ for every dollar earned by men for the same work. An improvement of 18 cents!

And this figure just compares equal work. It doesn't begin to reflect how women are systematically kept out of high-paying, high-status jobs.

This is what Louise Slaughter said in a recent interview:

The Ledbetter case really shook us up. It was startling. None of us really thought that that would happen in this day and age. But Lilly Ledbetter's not alone. The Wage Project, a nonprofit group, estimates that women lose between $200,000 and $2 million in their lifetimes because of the wage gap.

Read the whole interview here.

W.V.O. Quine Video

Here is part of a 1977 video of W.V.O. Quine being interviewed by Brian Magee on BBC TV.



Magee introduces Quine as "a philosopher at the very summit of world reputation."

In this clip, Quine talks about how philosophy is on a continuum with science but is also different from it. He gives the examples of history and engineering as being at the most applied end of the sciences and philosophy and mathematics being at the most abstract end.

Magee asks Quine about the sorts of questions that philosophy takes up. Quine says that the question of how the world began is for physicists to deal with. The question of how life began is a question for biologists. And the question of why the world or life began is not a question at all, not even one for philosophers. It's merely a pseudo-question, because it doesn't have an answer.

Finally, Quine divides philosophy into two categories--ontology and epistemology. Philosophy deals with questions about what there is and questions about what we can know. On the subject of what there is, Quine says that objects are either material or mathematical.

Well, I'm an undisputed fan of Quine (see this website)--but doesn't this seem like a narrow view of philosophy?

Philosophical Partitions

I've been talking to a friend about the great divide in philosophy--between analytic and continental approaches. Although there are genuine differences in style, I'm convinced that the divide is politically maintained. Of course it is. Analytic philosophers of language (some of them) show more animosity toward continental philosophy of language than they do toward, say, analytic aesthetics, even though the difference between them is clearly greater in the latter case.

My friend pointed out that at the extremes (and perhaps that is the area of metaphysics in both cases?) they rival each other when it comes to elitism.

And how relevant to contemporary problems is the purest of either? The degree of triviality that is the apparent goal of the analytics is perfectly balanced by the degree of obscurity on the other side.

New Environmental Studies and Sciences organization

Who wants to strengthen research, teaching and service in the many Environmental Studies programs of North America?

Sure, we all do, but to help that effort along, consider checking out the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS). From their website:

The purpose of the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS) is to serve the faculty, students and staff of the 1000+ interdisciplinary "environmental" programs in North America and around the world. We seek to strengthen teaching, research and service in environmental studies and sciences, and to improve communication across boundaries that too often divide the traditional academic disciplines -- the physical, biological, and social sciences, and the humanities -- that need to be brought to bear in understanding and dealing with environmental problems and solutions. The association works to support the professional development of Association members not just as individuals but also to advance Environmental Studies and Sciences as a whole.

Since I got this email the same day that I read what a sad joke it is to attempt capping greenhouse gases, I joined the AESS immediately, in the hopes that the future might not resemble the past or, for that matter, the present.

Thanks to Dale Jamieson for forwarding this information to the International Society for Environmental Ethics.

Sexism Sells

Via Feministing: the Women's Media Center has launched a campaign to publicize the absolutely unacceptable blatant sexism in mainstream media. I don't take a stand for one Democratic candidate or the other--but regardless of which you support, this attitude is beyond the pale.

You can sign a petition here.

Skepticism about Climate Change

Yesterday I posted a quote from a book review by Freeman Dyson. Dyson thinks that climate change skeptics have been misunderstood and are too quickly dismissed:

Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice.

Now, I think Dyson is right to consider whether the hype about global warming distracts from other important environmental and social issues. In fact, environmental problems are not all of a piece: a solution to one problem can exacerbate others.

Still there's a problem here with Dyson's assessment. He says "Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists." But is this true?

I have yet to meet someone who is both skeptical of the climate science that supports anthropogenic global warming and is a passionate environmentalist. The position that Dyson describes--a person who thinks that the climate change hype is overblown--is not necessarily skeptical. This person just has their values ordered so that addressing climate change is not the primary value. The skeptics that I've met take one of these positions:

1.) They are ignorant of and threatened by science, sometimes as an extension of a general anti-intellectualism or anti-secularism.

2.) They think that there is a more subtle political motivation for the climate change hypothesis. For instance, that liberals are really anti-corporate, anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist, etc. and this scientific hypothesis is an excuse to get political support for their views or their candidates. Often the skeptics in this camp don't doubt the climate change evidence but do doubt that the cause is anthropogenic. The argument goes that if it's not anthropogenic then we need not change any of our practices.

Climate change: Ethics, politics, economics

Next year I'm teaching an "Introduction to Ethics" course with an emphasis on sustainability issues.

One inevitable pitfall will be the temptation to be distracted from the discourse of ethics by the details of policy. My students, most of whom prefer technical problems to theoretical questions, will be tempted by this distraction. And since I'm usually so concerned to show that theory matters to practice, I will be too. But it's a lower-level course, not a place for settling what policy should be for specific cases.

Another pitfall will be overcoming both apathy and skepticism. In just about every class or lecture where the question of global warming comes up, there is one (and usually only one) skeptic. I hope that I can pull the ever-present skeptic into a debate on the ethics of the issue instead of the facts. I personally believe the facts are settled, but there is no time in a philosophy course to teach all the science--both basic and complex--that is needed to place trust in the consensus of climate scientists. (For example, one student this year insisted that since Mars is warmer than the earth, and Mars has no humans on it, climate change on earth can't possibly be caused by humans.)

Freeman Dyson has a piece in the New York Review of Books discussing an economic evaluation of climate change policies in the book A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies. The author, William Nordhaus, holds that the more ambitious plans, such as Al Gore's call for a drastic reduction in emissions, will not be cost-effective in the long run. That is, they will cost more to implement than the economy will benefit from climate stabilization. (This evaluation seems to ignore the ethical question of whether the costs of failure to act are disproportionately paid by the vulnerable.) On the other hand, doing nothing could be disastrous. Nordhaus says that any policy proposal which tries to avoid raising the price of carbon (and doesn't that translate into allowing gas prices to rise?) is simply not serious.

Dyson also takes on the question of the global warming skeptics, as I'm sure I'll have to do. The main argument in their favor is the problem of induction that attacks any scientific generalization, plus the philosopher of science's skeptical metainduction: any scientific inference could be wrong, and in the history of science many have been wrong. So maybe the climate scientists, with all their evidence for anthropogenic causes of global warming and the even greater consensus that, human-caused or not, the current warming trend will be fueled by positive feedback mechanisms, are just wrong. Maybe. But the idea of inductive risk does hold that skepticism in check: if we're wrong, we'll be in really bad shape.

Dyson's concern is that the global warming issue distracts from other environmental issues. He writes:

Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice.

Classifying the Sciences

In the last week I've encountered two expressions that bug me. Both have to do with classifying the sciences.

"The hard sciences."
In an e-mail, a philosopher pointed to the necessity of a curricular requirement for courses in "the hard sciences." No one younger than a certain age talks this way. No social scientist talks this way. And I've never heard a natural scientist talk this way, either. From the context, it seemed as though the philosopher was indicating math and physics. These are taken to be the sciences that aren't "soft." But why are those other areas of study called soft? Because they're easier? (They're not.) Because the object of study is less concrete? (But consider fluid dynamics.) Or because they aren't as male dominated? Plenty of people have made a case for the latter.
So the term "hard sciences" is at least disrespectful of the social sciences and possibly also disrespectful of women.
A more accurate division is into the "life" and "physical" sciences. Is that so hard?

"The human sciences."
I've seen this used twice in the philosophy of science book I've been reading. I think it's used to indicate the social sciences but I can't tell if it's also meant to capture some or all of the humanities and some or all of the biological sciences. Certainly, it's used in a context where the social sciences are more problematic than the natural sciences because they supposedly lack objectivity. But I've never heard anyone refer to their own work as being in "the human sciences," and I have no colleagues who identify themselves as "human scientists."
I can't explain why this term is used. I can only think that its purpose is to appear neutral while being subtly disparaging. Or maybe it's an old-fashioned term. I can imagine that some would use it so as to make an implicit reference to the Geisteswissenschaften--but in the philosophy of science I'm reading, that would be beside the point.

The use of terms like these by philosophers points, I think, to the distance between (some) philosophers and their colleagues elsewhere in the academy.

Logic Textbooks Cost Too Much

And Rob Helpychalk has a good idea about not buying into their hype with a quick review of some open source books.

I used Hurley this year for both logic and critical thinking courses, which was convenient. But just about all the texts out there are good enough for my purposes, so I doubt that I'll assign such an expensive text again anytime soon.

My local paper ran an article last month about the out-of-control prices on college textbooks and a New York Times editorial calls on Congress to intervene. Apparently the NYPIRG recently released a report about this problem.

Higher Education and honorary doctorates

I was going to refrain from spending too much time on Washington U's decision to award an honorary doctorate to Phyllis Schlafly, until a professor on facebook reminded us all of this, among many, particular gems by Schlafly, from just a few years ago:

How does it make you feel to know that 547,667 places in U.S. colleges were occupied by foreign students in the academic year just ended?

Seeing this quote prompted me to think several things. First, the answer: It makes me incredibly proud to be in service to higher education.

But then I pondered the decision of WashU to honor the author of that statement, not just with a platform, which I'd celebrate, but with a degree, before some of the very "foreign students" she would deny. And then, I felt very ashamed to be in service to higher education, if this is our practice.

Perhaps this is not an issue for a blog devoted to science, feminist philosophy, and environmental philosophy, but at such times, I feel compelled to reflect on the atmosphere in which we conduct our inquiry.

Creativity and Innovation

RIT, where I teach, is hosting a big festival this coming Saturday: the 1st Annual Innovation + Creativity Festival. It's expected to draw a crowd in the range of 30,000 people (okay, that seems pretty optimistic).

© Steve Miller

The Philosophy Department is providing support to a student project, and I'm the faculty coordinator. The project is a sculptural installation that's subtitled "A Philosophical Analysis of Creativity and Innovation." We solicited short reflections (poems, etc.) on the topic of creativity and have recorded them. They'll be played back through speakers on the sculpture. The project website is here, containing photos, video, the submitted creativity statements, and an artist's description of the intent of the project.

© Steve Miller

What's noteworthy about the pieces written by philosophers is how each person's "reflection on creativity" is as much a statement of their philosophical perspective: a poetic response to Dogen from the specialist in Asian philosophy, pragmatic guidance from the American philosopher, cryptic skepticism from the Pre-Socratic expert, wistful optimism from the retired philosopher of religion, and dark metaphysical speculation from the resident German Romantic. Does our training so shape our psyches, or are we drawn to a specialty that coincides with our personalities?

Here is my short piece on creativity:

The Life of Ideas

The evolution of new creatures is a magnificently creative process. Animals, plants, bacteria, fungi—we live in a world teeming with unique lifeforms.

The creation of new life has two stages. First is the creation of novelty. This happens through mutation, which creates untested changes to the genetic code and also through sexual reproduction, which puts genetic material together in new combinations. The second stage is the brutal process of selection, which puts to death nearly all of those experimental ways of living. The new life that does survive is a better fit with its surroundings, able to solve some problem that its forebears could not.

Likewise, our culture improves by the creative generation of newness. We can foster and accelerate creativity on the model of sexual reproduction by encouraging communication between diverse people with diverse interests, identities, abilities, and life experiences. Their exchange of ideas will lead to innovation.

But most innovations will not survive. Again, we can help the process along by nurturing fragile ideas, and by not pre-judging them until they have had a chance to prove themselves.

Together with open-mindedness to new ideas, giving them a chance to find their niche, it’s appropriate to practice critical evaluation. Communities of inquiry should judge ideas on their merit. Our standards should be fair and themselves subject to criticism and change. In this way, we innovate both new ideas and the process that nurtures them.