Female Filosophers

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

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:

1. Commercialism. This more than anything else. To take an example.
2. 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?
3. 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.
4. 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

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

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

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

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

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.