Sense Experience and Scientific Knowledge

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

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:

1. 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?
2. Does this mean that the 1st Critique was referring, all along, to rat minds?
3. Does an a priori concept become stronger with experimental support?

What are teaching evaluations good for? Part II

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.

In case you missed them:

OPINION | June 21, 2010
Stanley Fish: Deep in the Heart of Texas
By STANLEY FISH
Assessing teaching performance through student evaluations is still a terrible idea, and Texas is leading the way.

OPINION | June 28, 2010
Stanley Fish: Student Evaluations, Part Two
By STANLEY FISH
Further discussion, with readers taking part, on the pros and (mostly) cons of students' evaluations of teachers.

Here's my favorite passage:

[One] proposal is to shift funding to the student-customers by giving them vouchers. “Instead of direct appropriations, every Texas high school graduate would get a set amount of state funds usable at any state university” (William Lutz, Lone Star Report, May 23, 2008). Once this gets going (and Texas A&M is already pushing it), you can expect professors to advertise: “Come to my college, sign up for my class, and I can guarantee you a fun-filled time and you won’t have to break a sweat.” If there ever was a recipe for non-risk-taking, entirely formulaic, dumbed-down teaching, this is it. One respondent to the June 13 story in The Eagle got it exactly right: “In the recent past, A&M announced that it wanted to be a top ten public university. Now it appears to be announcing it wants to be an investment firm, a pharmaceutical manufacturer, and a car dealership.”

Freudian slip?

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Mark Goetz.

Firing on PowerPoint Bullets

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

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

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)
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How Is This Not Hypocrisy?

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...)