AOS: Early Modern AOC: Criminal Justice

File this one under "history of the profession." (Click the image for a larger version.)

My fellow philosopher of science Jack Sanders tells this story:

I saved this ad from Jobs in Philosophy, sometime in 1976. It was posted by the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department (ad #24). I later heard that the deal was that the Sheriff of Jefferson County had studied Nietzsche as an undergraduate (or something), and wanted someone to talk to. The fact that one had to provide one's own weapon and boots was one of the highlights of the ad among us grad students looking for work... none of the other ads in JiP required that.

I also suspect that this ad may have been one of the motivating factors behind Jobs in Philosophy later changing its name to Jobs for Philosophers, but I guess you never know...

Wade Robison corrects him on one point:

Spinoza! He did his dissertation on Spinoza and wanted a colleague with a specialty in Spinoza. Gerry McCallum at Wisconsin was in charge of the JIP committee then and went up to the room in the hotel to check because it sounded bogus.

The Great Global Climate Change Debate

Reminders for a Good Year

At the Feminist Philosophers blog, Jenny Saul reminds us of ten easy things to keep in mind to support inclusive, vibrant philosophical communities. Here's the summary but these make the most sense with Jenny's explanations and the insightful follow-up of the many commenters--so do click through.

1. inclusivity in speaker invitations

2. calling out gender exclusion at conferences or where you see it

3. inclusivity in edited volumes and other invitations

4. include women on your syllabus.

(Oh dear, this seems like it should be the easiest of all but has given me headaches in the past. Now I have a decent collection of article pdf's I can use, even for classes like Modern, where I include women by adding contemporary commentaries to the more typical course.)

5. include women in other curricular matters (prelims, discussion groups, etc.)

6. educate about the psychology of implicit bias, particularly for job searches

7. urge anonymous refereeing

8. acknowledge women's contributions and help

9. acknowledge women. I.e., make eye contact, listen, include in conversations.

10. and again, and again, and again, educate about implicit bias, where it happens, how it happens, and what its effects are.

How to Study Our Inner Selves

Eric Schwitzgebel has co-authored a thought-provoking paper on inner thoughts (that is, consciousness) which is examined in this NYTimes article. The methodology of introspective interviews is innovative, and the analysis is surprising. One thing that it doesn't do is settle the question of whether we have accurate, memorable access to the passing stream of our own consciousness. And whether there is a unified, transpersonal experience of consciousness.

After hundreds of introspective interviews, Dr. Hurlburt still hesitates to generalize from his findings. But he has observed that the basic makeup of inner life varies substantially from person to person.

“My research says that there are a lot of people who don’t ever naturally form images, and then there are other people who form very florid, high-fidelity, Technicolor, moving images,” he said. Some people have inner lives dominated by speech, body sensations or emotions, he said, and yet others by “unsymbolized thinking” that can take the form of wordless questions like, “Should I have the ham sandwich or the roast beef?”

Under pressure to take the experiments farther and to make them more objective,

Dr. Hurlburt replied: “Maybe it’s a defensive maneuver on my part, but my rationale is that I don’t want to infect myself with some theory about how the world is. I would like to see the way the world is without having a theory about it.”

Naturalism? And Disciplinary Essentialism?

Nick sent Ryan Lake's response to the XKCD comic. Yeah, it's hilarious, but 37% of the humor is in the comments, so click here.

Hubris

Sent to me by a student:

PhilPapers Survey: Preliminary Results

I'm looking over the PhilPapers survey results. My first reaction is of only mild curiosity. I certainly understand the common reaction that this is silly. I mean, though it's interesting, it's not as interesting as this historical article about Mendel's legacy that I have sitting on my desk.

What surprises me is how far I am from knowing what and how my colleagues think. We're talking to each other all the time but also playing games, putting forward our adversaries' arguments and saying that someone argues this position, but surely not you. On a side note, I visited a colleague's (and collaborator's) Modern classroom last week for a discussion on the Meditations. What I discovered is that my colleague (an epistemologist) teaches the Meditations as having proposed the undermining form of global skepticism that has plagued Western culture for centuries whereas I teach the Meditations as having prepared the ground for the development of the methods of modern science. So which are they: an epistemological hazard or a stepping stone of the Enlightenment? And how can it be that they two of us, so close in so many ways, can have such divergent views of a canonical text?

This surprise at discovering the diversity among my colleagues' views follows me through the PhilPaper survey results. Let's look at the phil-sci questions.

I understand that realism has been on an upswing over the last decade or two. Indeed, the Stanford Encyclopedia says "the majority of contemporary philosophers are realists about laws [of nature]." Still, my view is that, first, the dichotomy conveys little about how science is done because there are concepts toward which scientists take a non-realist view and others towards which they take a realist view, depending on subtleties of the concept and the work it does in a theory. To take a simple example, biologists refer unproblematically to ecosystems but none of them would insist that there are identifiable ecosystem boundaries. Rather, what counts as an ecosystem is contextual or, as we philosophers might say, constructed for a specific purpose. I would therefore hold that the appropriate attitude toward some central concepts and the laws that make use of those concepts is anti-realist. Assuming that realism is thorough-going and doesn't permit this pick-and-choose attitude, I suppose that I (and lots of ecologists) are anti-realists, though I'd be more comfortable saying "other" and even arguing that this is a distinction that matters for little to anyone outside of philosophical circles.

75% of my colleagues are realists. Only 12% are anti-realists.

The question about Humeanism and laws of nature is one I'd have to opt out of, but now I know that 57% of my colleagues are non-Humean. Only 25% are Humean.

However, taking a closer look at some of the results, it seems that the answers of specialists diverge from these results. Indeed, among philosophers of science, more tend to be anti-realist and more tend to be Humean than among philosophers more generally.

There's another interesting way of looking at this that is left in the gaps--that is, in the Other category. Among all philosophers, 87% were willing to classify themselves as realist or anti-realist, but among philosophers of science, this dichotomy appears more treacherous, and only 76% were willing to take a stand.

The opposite is true on the question regarding laws of nature: philosophers of science were more likely than other philosophers to place themselves in one camp or the other but were close to evenly split between them. That is, 49% of philosophers of science are non-Humean and 41% are Humean, but the general split was 57/25.

I'm curious whether some of these views come as packages. E.g. are the few anti-realists also contextualists and deflationists and naturalists?

Feminist philosophers suggest the question of whether gender and race are social constructs.

I'd also like to see a question about the source/existence of human rights and one on the environmental philosopher's question of the source of the value of nature: anthropocentric or not?

Berit Brogaard has a searching analysis on the logic questions.

There is a running list of blog posts here.

Reasons to Study Philosophy: Be a Detective

The Times Higher Education supplement reports that "Being philosophical may be limited to the leisure classes."

I'm truly worried that there may be something to the connection between philosophy degree programs being closed down and university education becoming more vocationally directed. I don't think that there is any inevitability, though, for philosophy being at odds with economic usefulness.

The Times quotes Stephen Mumford as saying

"I have no doubt that if I were young now, from a working-class background, having to take a big student loan would prevent me from studying philosophy because of the sense that it's non-vocational."

In philosophical circles, too, there is a sense that the students who do well in their philosophy courses aren't really successes unless they complete graduate school in philosophy.

But of course philosophy is every bit as relevant as an English degree (still one of the most popular majors in the US). No, it's more relevant. In English courses, students read literature. In philosophy classes, they learn about public policy and logic and Western history and all sorts of complex argumentation. And they learn how to write.

When I was in college (early 1990's), there was a rumor going around (how did rumors spread then? We didn't have the internet!) that the largest employer of American students with bachelor's degrees in philosophy was the LAPD!

Surely that can't have been true? If philosophy students really do make great detectives, shouldn't the largest employer have been the FBI?

In a recent New Yorker article on Jules Kroll, founder of a corporate intelligence firm, William Finnegan writes

Detective firms, on the whole, hire mostly retired cops. In 1981, Kroll hired Tommy Helsby, a failed [???] philosopher--he had abandoned a dissertation at Cambridge University on "the metaphysical basis for formal logic."... He is still at Kroll, serving as regional chariman for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, out of the company's London office. I asked Helsby if his training in metaphysics had helped him as an investigator. He thought it had.

Eh? The metaphysics had helped with the detective work, not the logic?

Climate Change and Population Growth

A student from my ethics course sent along this link to a Yahoo News article on the relationship between climate change and population growth.

The news article starts with a strong, clear statement:

The battle against global warming could be helped if the world slowed population growth by making free condoms and family planning advice more widely available, the U.N. Population Fund said Wednesday.

But then the majority of the article goes into criticisms of this policy and, indeed, casts doubt on any need to control population growth at all:

On Wednesday, one analyst criticized the U.N. Population Fund's pronouncements as alarmist and unhelpful. "It requires a major leap of imagination to believe that free condoms will cool down the climate," said Caroline Boin, a policy analyst at International Policy Network, a London-based think tank.

She also questioned earlier efforts by the agency to control the world's population.

I've been teaching this topic in my ethics class, and the best work I've seen on the issue

supports a position like the UN's while acknowledging caveats such as the higher priority on reducing energy consumption in developed countries as well as the priority that must be put on preserving women's reproductive choices. But since providing access to family planning is generally agreed to increase rather than reduce women's control over their reproductive lives, I was surprised at the negative tone of the article. I retrieved the originals here.

Indeed, this seems to be a clear case of a news article that is slanted to favor an ultra-conservative political angle. The quoted expert is a writer for Britain's Conservative Party, and the other experts were simply misquoted as being cautious about the UN policy when in fact their editorial is strongly supportive of it.

The paper by Bryant et al., however, is the first to provide strong support for the third point – showing that the majority of the least-developed countries cite population pressure as an important determinant of their vulnerability to climate change. The fact that the affected countries themselves identify this as a local priority avoids the conflict that comes from framing population regulation as a way of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.

This is how business is done?

After hearing about Sally's paper scheduled for the APA next month (see below) and strategizing my holiday plans, I was thinking that I might swing by the conference for a day or two, even though I'm not presenting (and not--hooray!--interviewing or being interviewed). New York can be fun, even if expensive.

BUT, not having the print program to hand (it's at home--I do pay my dues!), I thought I'd do it the 21st century way and pull up the website.

No doing. The undated message on the website says:

The APA National Office is in the midst of transitioning our website and its services to a new hosting facility. Due to the transition, some features of the APA website may be temporarily down for a few days.

Wasn't this supposed to be accomplished in October? Is there another site that Google isn't finding?

Publishing Philosophy

All professional philosophers are invited to participate in a survey on publishing in philosophy. It should take about 10 minutes. It will be useful to have your CV handy as you fill it out. Please go here to find it:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=TXA9uBYCaq4MtU_2bwLhLADQ_3d_3d
If all goes well, Sally Haslanger will report on the results at the December APA in the symposium on philosophy publishing (Wednesday December 30th, 11:15-1:15).

Thanks for your help. Please spread the word.

The Thoughtful Missing, Again

Leiter posts again on women in the profession. Sure, his posts are helpful. And as always we philosophers use our reasoning skills to hash it all out in the comments, so that now we can move toward putting thoughts into action. Ahem.

One thing that's so very nice is that this conversation gets more sophisticated nearly every time we practice it. Sadly, though, the key points remain the same. Which to rehearse this time? That the constant stream of anecdotes about hostility toward women is sufficient to explain quite a lot? That philosophical exceptionalism can't stand up to counterexamples from law, from linguistics, from life sciences? That the success of other disciplines in moving toward gender parity has been the result of a lot of hard work and concerted programs at national, regional, and local levels?

Sure, that last one always deserves a good run and I haven't said much about the APA in a good long while.

Margaret Atherton says it so well:

Philosophy now stands out as having a peculiarly low percentage of women. What hasn't happened, of course, is any large-scale disciplinary wide effort to change matters. Periodically people notice the low level of women, speculate that women find aggression distasteful, and go about their business. I think if we want to actually alter the situation we have to stop speculating and do something that is specifically directed toward raising the number of women, perhaps by finding out first what steps successful disciplines have taken.

By having taken our sweet time talking rather than acting, we are in the good position of having a lot of practical research literature to draw on. Maybe our discipline hasn't been eligible for all those STEM funds from NSF (we're not so essential to economic growth as computer science and engineering), but we can benefit from the research in those fields nonetheless.

We have some good ideas about what supports women and what doesn't:

1. The most important finding across disciplines has been that offering early support to students who express a desire in a subject and breaking down unnecessarily competitive mores reduces the % of students changing their mind about majoring and supports students who are socially marginal, whether because of gender expectations, class, race, family educational history, or whatever.

2. All-female learning communities don't work so great. In general, interventions that call attention to gender in gender-divisive social situations get mixed results because they can undermine and differentiate as well as support.

3. The presence of role models is supportive but can't be expected to overcome other barriers.

4. Personal relationships with teachers are valuable, for reasons that stem from #1 above. For this reason, some departments write letters to their most promising intro students inviting them to consider a philosophy major.

5. Programs that focus on eliminating social obstacles benefit women without violating norms of fairness.

6. When someone is a problem to their colleagues, they are often a problem for students also. Informal interactions are the source of many of the career-breaking anecdotes that we see on blogs and around.

7. Achieving a threshold (around 30% participation by women) has been important in many disciplines.

8. Articulating clear career goals for majors increases interest in the major. Women in particular have responded well to increased information about careers and about the educational and professional tracks for getting into careers. They are also more often concerned about job security and flexibility than status and salary.

9. There is weak support (i.e., it's there but is still an area of some debate) for the idea that women (in general, on average, for the most part...) are attracted to career tracks where they "make a difference." "Making a difference" means different things to different people: having a hand in social change, so-called 'helping' careers, teaching careers, careers that reward creative expression.

I think these last two are important challenges for us.

My office is (anomalously) in the MicroElectronics Building. As a result, I see a lot of signs referring to "Technology for the 21st century" and announcing talks on "Restructuring Engineering to Build Careers in the 21st Century." I think this is not just banal navel-gazing rhetoric. There is some merit to thinking about what good a career will do for people in changing times.

How have philosophers changed what they do and how they do it for the 21st century? (Here are some hints: experimental philosophy, public philosophy.)

What careers do we prepare students for other than teaching philosophy? I would say there are a lot of careers, and that many of those careers "make a difference."

There's no good reason not to couple discussions of improving the gender ratio in philosophy with improving the profile of philosophy and growing the size of the discipline. Increasing the # of women in philosophy need not mean decreasing the # of men; it could mean growth overall.

Mathematical Ability and Environment

There's not much empirical evidence identifying systematic biologically-based intellectual differences between girls and boys, women and men, and what evidence there is doesn't reliably rule out the possibility of environmental rather than biological differences. One of the few points that hasn't been disproved is the observation that at the highest levels of mathematical ability (I'll wager, that means better at math than you are!), men and boys outnumber women and girls.

This new paper looks at the geography of the distribution of female math whizzes and finds that they come out of a surprisingly small number of high schools. And that suggests that there is something about the pedagogy or the social environment that helps the female math whizzes discover their talent.

Link here.

"MIT economists find a new reason to think that environment, not innate ability, determines how well girls do in math class"

Ellison made this basic observation the heart of a recently finished paper showing not only that girls are a small minority of elite high school math students, but also that the prevalence of high-achieving girls in math varies from school to school. Indeed, in research conducted along with Ashley Swanson, a PhD student in the Department of Economics, Ellison found that the best female math students across the United States come from a tiny number of institutions. The majority of the girls who have been chosen to represent the United States in international mathematics competitions come from a set of about 20 high schools with elite math teams.

This extreme concentration of talent strongly indicates the crucial role that environmental factors, not just innate ability, play in shaping the accomplishments of students. “It’s significant that the top girls are coming from a very, very small subset of schools with strong math programs,” says Ellison. “That suggests most of the girls who could be doing well, aren’t doing well. The thousands and thousands of other schools in the United States must have a lot of talent, too, but it’s not coming out.”

Women Philosophers and Administrative Leadership

When thinking about the gender imbalance in philosophy, I tend to focus on direct support for undergradate students. But it's interesting to look at university leadership, too, as a place where women philosophers can wield influence.

I think the street tends to distrust administrators, and why not? While we deal with theory, they deal with nitty-gritty practices: budget decisions, personnel problems, deciding who gets the corner office. Ugh. Who would want a part of that?

But there are also certain kinds of (pro-woman, pro-family, pro-student, progressive) changes that can best be managed from a dean's, provost's, or president's office. Deans--and other administrators--do have a say on budget, personnel, and space decisions. The faculty may participate in self-governance, but it moves slowly and inefficiently by comparison.

Do the numbers:

• About 23% of college presidents are women, while about 45% of upper administration more generally is female (not all of those are academic offices).

• Fewer than 15% of doctorate-granting schools are headed by women.

The analysis could be encapsulated as "same old story," as in this article in Forbes:

Molly Broad, president of the American Council on Education, says the dearth of female college presidents comes down to the hiring process. Since a president is selected by an institution’s board of trustees--women, especially minority women, are virtually absent from most--tips on navigating the interview process and news about job openings tend to stay among the insiders: men.

Some of the reasons to get involved in administration converge with the interests of feminists and of people like us--theorists. This quote is from an article in the journal Women in Leadership:

Women presidents differ greatly in their approaches to leadership. In this report... [most women]...talked about their leadership in terms of their being trusted “to articulate the aspirations of my institution.” One reflected, “I’m almost entirely motivated by the desire to do meaningful and worthwhile work.” One said that she feels less pressure to be right than to “arrive at mutually satisfactory conclusions and decisions.”

Back to philosophy. Who are some current female philosophers in administrative positions? (Add more in comments!)

• Amy Gutmann, President, University of Pennsylvania
• Marjorie Hass, President, Austin College (my alma mater)
• Dorothy Leland, President, Georgia College and State University
  
• Cheryl Misak, Interim Vice-President and Provost, University of Toronto
• Michele Moody-Adams, Dean of Columbia College and Vice President for Undergraduate Education at Columbia University
• Onora O'Neill, President of the British Academy (OK, not a university post, but influential nonetheless)
• Lynn Pasquerella, President, Mount Holyoke College
  

I know of others who have done a rotation in adminstration—Naomi Scheman, Kathleen Okruhlik—and have had positive things to say about the experience. It's a role that we feminist philosophers could keep in mind as we plan our career goals.

Pile It On!

Cross-posted from my Intro to Ethics course blog:

In Chapter 3 of The Ethics of Climate Change, James Garvey looks at the difficulties with assigning responsibility for the current climate change crisis. He identifies it as a sort of sorites paradox, also called the paradox of the heap.

The general idea is that when something is made up of many, many little things, it's difficult (if not logically impossible) to say that just one of those little things is what makes the big thing itself or, in another context, if very many minor actions cause something, then each of the individual causes is too minor to bother with calling it the cause of the major effect.

For example, if you have a few grains of sand, then it's not a heap, but if you have millions of grains of sand, it's definitely a heap. Say I take a heap of sand and start removing one grain at a time, at what point is the heap no longer a heap?

In the context of climate change, Garvey points out that what seems to absolve us individually from responsibility is that none of our individual actions is really contributing very much at all to the climate problem. In fact, this reason is sometimes given as a reason for inaction because if just one person stops adding to cumulative greenhouse gas emissions, that individual restraint won't do much of anything to curb the problem. However, since the heap is made up of individuals, the only way to face up to the problem is to somehow address the collective.

Here's a somewhat weird comic about the sorites paradox. Or maybe it's really about something else...

Source: Dinosaur Comics