Local Event: Lecture on Science and Religion

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

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

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

Feminist Theory and Analytic Sentences

I just came across a discussion of the analytic/synthetic distinction in a philosophy of science textbook (one that's still in print and available through Wadsworth).

As the only example of an analytic sentence, the (male) author gives

"All women are female"

with the further explanation that it's analytic because the "meaning of the words determines its truth and because nothing that has happened in the world, can happen, or will happen, can change its truth status."

This seems like a good time to bring up the sex/gender distinction, something that is taught in introductory women's studies classes. We may go on to question and trouble the distinction itself, but a good place to start is to note:

1. sex (female) is biological and gender (woman) is social

2. the male-female sex dichotomy does not hold perfectly in humans. Indeed, for about 1% of the human population one or more sexual features are out of step with the others--chromosomal abnormalities, hormonal abnormalities, anatomical abnormalities. Some argue that to call these "abnormalities" is itself ignorant of how common they are. Moreover, in the US, about .25% of the population has changed gender.

And yes, the beautiful woman in that image is not female.

Philosophy of Science? Get Over It!

Jon Butterworth of high-energy physics addresses philosopher of science Nick Maxwell in the pages of the Guardian:

"Come on philosophers of science: you must do better than this!"

The play:

Act I--Writer and political activist George Monbiot, in his Guardian column, contemplates why so many people are so slow to believe in and act on climate change, despite the massive amounts of data that have been available for years.

"The trouble with trusting complex science: There is no simple way to battle public hostility to climate change research. As the psychologists show, facts barely sway us anyway."

Act II--Philosopher of science Nick Maxwell interprets the problem that Monbiot is getting at as being that we can't trust scientists about climate change data because they deceive us even about the nature of what they're up to.

"Scientists should stop deceiving us: In holding that the aim of science is truth alone, they misrepresent its real aims."

Act III--Particle physicist Jon Butterworth calls Maxwell out with "Come on, philosophers of science, you must do better than this."

I have to say, I really do like Butterworth's piece, from its start:

I strive to retain respect for philosophy and philosophers, really I do. Some of my best friends are philosophers. I would hate to dismiss a whole area of intellectual endeavour as a sterile playground for clever people creating and demolishing pointless academic fashions.

To its finish:

Science often falls short of its ideals, and the climate debate has exposed some shortcomings. Science is done by people, who need grants, who have professional rivalries, limited time, and passionately held beliefs. All these things can prevent us from finding out what works. This is why the empiricism and pragmatism of science are vital, and why when scientific results affect us all, and speak against powerful political and financial interests, the openness and rigour of the process become ever more important.

All three of these have something right--and righteous--to say.

1. Monbiot is here repeating a thought that gets passed around from scientist to philosopher to political activist like a lucky coin. Namely, the science of climate change has been certain enough for a decade to justify strong political action. What has been needed is not more science (not that more science hasn't been worth doing!), but rather, more insight into motivating people and politicians and economic systems to do the compassionate and rational thing. If the problem is that anxiety causes selective disbelief, then only treating the anxiety will lead to rational action.
2. So I'm not sure why Nick Maxwell takes this as an opening to point out that there is a distinct difference between how science actually operates and the popular mythology of scientific method. Perhaps his idea is that if folks saw science as being driven by values but nonetheless a rational and trustworthy enterprise, then seeing a relation between scientists' results and their values wouldn't lead to distrust. Surely Maxwell is right that values do play a role in science--and thank goodness for that, because it is the guidance of social values that leads scientists to investigate questions like whether climate conditions could make life hard on many people rather than questions like how many grains of sand there are on the beach at Cape Cod.
3. At any rate, it's clear that there are times to do philosophy of science and other times to fight the fight. Butterworth is right: "Science is a form of systemized pragmatism." The irony here is that one need not disagree with the general thrust of Maxwell's argument to agree with Butterworth that the point misses the point. This is certainly not the only time I've seen philosophers of science think that scientists have failed to examine their own assumptions and methodologies.

Feminist Fantasies

An XKCD comic that is too raunchy to embed here but worth a visit:

http://xkcd.com/714/

Conference Announcement: IAPh

The conference program for the International Association of Women Philosophers has been posted. The theme this year is Feminism, Science, and Values. Though saying that I'd like to go to London for a weekend in June can lead to misunderstandings--I've found that London, Ontario is a lovely, relaxed conference site.

International Association for Women Philosophers
XIV IAPh Symposium 2010

Feminism, Science and Values

June 25-28, 2010
The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada
co-hosted by the Dept. of Philosophy and the Rotman Institute of Science & Values

Featuring keynote addresses by Barbara Duden (Leibniz Universität Hannover),
Lisa Gannett (St. Mary's University), Sarah Richardson (University of Massachusetts, Amherst),
Vandana Shiva (Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology)
and Nancy Tuana (Penn State University)

Registration and full program information can be found at: http://www.uwo.ca/philosophy/events/iaph2010/index.html

Beyond the Gene

Although I finished teaching my seminar on philosophy and genetics (and am now teaching on physics and metaphysics), my attention continues to be drawn to examples of how medical outcomes and behavioral tendencies are reported as being determined by genetics even when environmental influences are obvious and even predominant.

Presumptions of singular causation are so deeply engrained in our habits of thought, that I found that even after several discussions and relevant readings, students would easily fall back on talking about nature vs. nurture. In response to a direct question, they would be able to describe that environment and genetics interact in such complex ways that it doesn't make sense to attribute some aspects of behavior to one and some aspects to another. And yet...just minutes later the same old, engrained, dichotomy would reappear.

Evelyn Fox Keller, in some of her recent work (book and video), has argued that we need new language to express interactions, and in particular, interactions between genes and the intracellular environment. Though this is true, I think we also just need practice. We need to hear more complex descriptions, and we need exposure to these ideas so that they can work their way into our culture.

To that end, I'm looking forward to reading David Shenk's new book, The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told about Genetics, Talent, and IQ is Wrong.

More here.

Motivating Concern for Natural Places

A post that I wrote a few weeks ago on a project to restore an urban old-growth forest in my neighborhood continues to receive some hits and comments, so I think I'll give an update.

Margaret just asked if I could say more about nature and vulnerability to decline.

My sense is that there are several ways of looking at nature--both here, in this Grove, and elsewhere. In one story, nature is a magnificent force who looks after herself. Although we humans can do things to harm natural settings, in time they eventually recover. Damage is not permanent. And at the same time, if we try to tame nature, she will reassert herself. In the case of this very old and very tall piece of forest, the forces of nature seem strong and our influence seems weak. The trees are tall and old. When they fall, that's just nature's development. The vegetation is at times dense and healthy. There are many chipmunks and squirrels and insects and birds. In this story, as long as there is no asphalt, there is nature, and she is looking after herself.

But another way of looking at this same forest pays attention to some details: the young trees are mostly escapees from garden plantings, as are many of the shrubs and herbs. Besides the mature trees, the plants that looks so vigorous and dense are Norway maples and black swallowwort and English ivy. The trillium are gone, the mayapples are mostly gone. In this story, there is greenery, and in one sense it is natural--and vigorous! But in another sense, it is the result of human culture, and these are the same plants that grow everywhere else--in my yard and in the drainage ditches. And we see that even things that seem permanent--the dirt we walk on--winds up in the storm sewers as erosion takes over when the roots of growing things are not holding it stable.

Margaret, I like your idea about focusing on wildflowers. I've seen that be a successful strategy both where I grew up, in Texas, and also where I now work in western New York. In the 1980's a campus group planted trillium and some other spring ephemerals and now they are naturalized.

In the last few weeks the city foresters have proposed a plan to run a trial of removing the invasive Norway maple saplings in some constrained areas. This sounds like a good plan to me. It proceeds decisively but also slowly enough to find out if the intervention will have the desired effect in terms of achieving some control but also not impacting the aesthetics of the grove. My concern is just that the saplings are ID'd properly since there is a mix of the native sugar maples and the invasive Norway maples. These two kinds of trees can be hard to distinguish even though they aren't closely related--especially in early spring.

Women in Science and Society

I've read oodles of articles on women in science and women in academia, but this latest one in the International Herald Tribune stands out as one of the best in terms of being realistic but positive.

Risk and Opportunity for Women in 21st Century

By KATRIN BENNHOLD

PARIS — Daniel Louvard does not believe in affirmative action. Time and again, the scientists in his Left Bank cancer laboratory have urged him to recruit with gender diversity in mind. But Mr. Louvard, research director at the Institut Curie and one of France’s top biochemists, just keeps hiring more women.

“I take the best candidates, period,” Mr. Louvard said. There are 21 women and 4 men on his team.

The quiet revolution that has seen women across the developed world catch up with men in the work force and in education has also touched science, that most stubbornly male bastion.

Well, perhaps not as stubborn as philosophy, sometimes called the mother of all disciplines.

One of the points in the article is that institutional structures are not constructed to recognize women's roles in their families:

Ms. Rosser noted that at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she served as dean until a year ago, women had to take sick leave to give birth, like all state employees.

True at my university still: childbirth is considered a "disability," but since the academic year is split into large chunks, it's inevitable that having a baby means having to take unpaid leave.

Trees and More Trees

An oasis I like to visit: Festival of the Trees.

45th version now up at The Voltage Gate.

Something I learned: the word 'book' comes from 'beech.'

Something Funny?

OK, ok, so I accuse others of being dry and having "the little professor" syndrome and then a time comes when I look back at my posts and they're just so tedious. We get 6 months into the academic year and at odd moments I find myself thinking "Is this a teaching moment?" or "A rubric/argument analysis/epoché is called for here" or some other inexcusable cliché.

And that, my friends, is why God made sarcasm. Let's take a break for some feminist humor:

Yet Another Lady Determined To Be Secretly A Dude, Based on Job

A Different Spin on Stolen Ideas

Today I'm grading final exams. They take the form of a take-home essay, and I'm hoping that there won't be any cases of plagiarism. But here's a case of theft that is much more dramatic:

Descartes Letter Found, Therefore It Is

By PATRICIA COHEN

Published: February 25, 2010

A letter by René Descartes stolen from the Institut de France in the mid-1800s has turned up at Haverford College in eastern Pennsylvania.

Ecofeminism and Treating Women Seriously

I just received another anthology of readings prepared for use in an environmental philosophy class--this one is Environmental Ethics: The Big Questions, David R. Keller, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

I'm going to pick on it. But don't get me wrong: the same points could apply to just about any environmental ethics text on the market. (And similar points go for philosophy of science. Just substitute "feminist approaches" for "ecofeminism.")

The first part of the book consists of short, approximately 1-page answers to the question "Why study environmental ethics?" by prominent writers in the field. This group includes journal editors, authors of important books in environmental ethics, and some of the people who shaped the field in its early days. In this group of 20 authors, 6 are women--and of those 6 women only one writes predominantly about ecofeminism.

The rest of the book consists of 72 selections. 72! Some are historical but the vast majority are contemporary. Out of those 72 selections, only four (4!) are written by women. Oh, but it's worse than it looks.

Of those four selections, three are filed under the heading "Ecofeminism." Ecofeminism is worth studying, and it's certainly worth including in such a collection, but there is a troublesome problem here.

First, there is the inexplicable erasure of what women have written in this field. In the first section of the book, the one that includes short commentaries written specifically for the book, a significant number of prominent women are included. But when it comes to examining the work that brought them to their position--they are not there.

Second, the inclusion of 75% of the women under the heading "ecofeminism" runs the risk of bringing a stereotype effect to bear. When a social group is perceived to be a minority and in a given setting they are vastly underrepresented, then they tend to be judged harsher and more in keeping with established stereotypes than when they are well-represented in the group.

Thus, the inclusion of women as authors of ecofeminism but not as authors in other areas of environmental philosophy makes it more likely that ecofeminism will be perceived as...well, as having all the harsh qualities that are (mis)understood to be part and parcel of feminism. Radical, shrill, marginal... It also indicates that women have no part in environmental philosophy except to speak about feminist issues, which is simply not the case. Thus, it characterizes women as working only in a tiny subfield, and a subfield that is easily read as marginal through stereotype effect.

So, if the goal of including ecofeminism is to be more gender inclusive, then this goal is probably ill-conceived. Within a broader context which is so extremely exclusive, the inclusion of ecofeminism may be more harmful to women and produce more unfair criticism of ecofeminism than should be the case. It tends to exacerbate and reproduce exclusionary gendered practices rather than remedy them.

Finally, I can't help but wonder how such an exclusionary edited text is produced. Even by chance, could I construct a list of 69 readings (not counting those that are ecofeminist) and come up with only one female author (Mary Midgley, in case you were wondering)?

Although the men that I meet in the field of environmental ethics (like the men in pragmatism) tend to have solid liberal values, and profess support for women and minorities, what's sinister about implicit bias is that it need not be intentional. It can be built out of habits and mental shortcuts that give preference to people most "like us." And in areas where "like us" means "white and male," it can take careful attention to counter these tendencies. Thus, I conclude that it is not coincidental that the male editor thanks the following people for their help (by first name):

Michael, James, Holmes, Andrew, Mark, Chip, Clark, Bryan, and Jeff. Plus editorial assistants: Tiffany and Sarah.

Thoughts on Happiness

Happiness, per se, is not one of my research interests, though who would deny a personal interest in its pursuit? Discussions of the scientific (social scientific? pseudo-scientific?) investigations of happiness researchers seem to come up in all manner of places: my ethics classrooms, my philosophy of science classroom, with my colleagues in psychology and international relations, and in the magazines I read. Most recently, in a Science article on "Measuring Subjective Well-Being."

Subjective Well-Being: that's the technical term for happiness.

You might think that philosophers, and particularly ethicists, would be heavily invested in the project of evaluating what is emerging out of this research field at the intersection of psychology, cognitive science, and economics. After all, ethics is the study of the good life, yes? And if happiness or "subjective well-being" is not one of the central components of the good life, then the good life must be a pretty lousy life to lead.

Environmental ethicists, as I've pointed out, should be following what's going on in the world of happiness research since the environmental challenge of global warming and the technological challenge of decreasing (clean) oil reserves will increasingly force economically developed countries to decide whether happiness can be found without cheap energy.

A quick search of Philosopher's Index found oodles of results for the search term "happiness" ("oodles" being the technical term for more than you'd ever want to search through manually). But only 11 results for the scientific (?) term "subjective well-being" and most of those were not recent (within the last 10 years). The recent ones had been published in journals of business ethics, nursing ethics, and political theory. About the same number of hits came up with the search term "positive psychology," and a notable percentage of those by pragmatists.

Could it be that Philosopher's Index or my search terms are not capturing all that philosophers have said about subjective well-being? It certainly is a subject of interest on the blogs from time to time. (Here's one. And here's one on happiness and raising children. Here's one on using happiness/social capital measurements to supplement measures of GDP.)

One of the central questions in happiness research is whether and how subjective well-being can be measured. (Are we philosophers really leaving this up to the economists to decide?) In order to decide that, it's necessary to identify whether happiness is a unified phenomenon or whether there are various elements that make up an overall assessment of happiness-and whether happiness is culturally defined or a universal attribute of human psychology.

For instance, economists tend to find that money can buy happiness. But psychologists have found that individuals tend to have a personal "set point" which they return to, even after major trauma (limb amputations) or good fortune (winning the lottery).

There is some evidence that various measures of happiness do correlate with one another, which may (but should not) lead to the conclusion that any of these measures can be substituted for another. The simplest measure is, of course, asking people: "Taking all things together, how happy are you on a scale of 0 to 10?" This apparently correlates with:

• asking a person's friends whether that person is happy
• plausible causes of well-being (have they had good fortune?, etc.)
• plausible effects of well-being (have they quit their job, left their spouse? etc.)
• physical functioning, including immune-system responses and stress hormone levels
• measures of brain activity.

One of the underlying assumptions of the subjective test ("How happy are you?") is that the answer that is most true is the one that is based on affect, not judgment.

I still have some skepticism about whether there is one thing which all of these reports capture rather than several things which tend to correlate with each other. For instance, enjoying oneself from moment to moment (as measured by time diaries) correlates with an overall subjective judgment ("How happy would you say you have been in the last year?") as does the converse. But I can imagine many exceptions. Undertaking a difficult and tedious but highly meaningful project, in my own experience, can make me feel lousy and unhappy at times. Academic writing and raising children are plausible examples. But achieving eventual success at those very same projects can be the source of meaning that brings one form of happiness to a well-lived life.

My political inclinations applaud the efforts of policy analysts to contrast measures of GDP with measures of happiness levels because doing so seems to expand the definition of "the good life" to include what money can't buy. But my philosopher's instincts warn that this science is too new to be a basis for public policy.

The Future of Philosophy of Science

"The Future of Philosophy of Science," as an area of inquiry and the future of philosophers of science, as a group of philosophical professionals, is certainly something that draws my interest. As described in the conference announcement, the future of philosophy of science should be well-integrated with scientific practice and should influence science policy.

Sydney-Tilburg conference on

The Future of Philosophy of Science

Wednesday 14 - Friday 16 April 2010

Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science (TiLPS)

http://www.uvt.nl/tilps/FPS2010/

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

Philosophy of science deals with the foundations and the methods of science. While the scope of philosophy of science is rather uncontroversial, there is considerable disagreement about its methodology. A look into the relevant journals reveals that there is a plurality of approaches. Some researchers use the traditional method of conceptual analysis, others engage in formal modeling, conduct case studies and – more recently – experiments, or consult the history of science in considerable detail. Despite the differences in these approaches, there also seem to be undeniable trends in our discipline, such as the increasing specialization, and the increasing co-operation with empirical scientists and policy makers. This conference will explore the future of philosophy of science. In particular, we are interested in how the different methods philosophers of science use relate to each other, whether they can fruitfully complement each other, and whether current trends allow predictions about the development of our field.

One group/conference series that has been addressing these same questions is The Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice. SPSP is relatively well-balanced along the lines of gender.

However, the Sydney-Tilburg speaker list leads me to believe one thing: the professional future of Philosophy of Science will be as exclusively a venue for men as ever:

The invited speakers are Michael Friedman, Chris Hitchcock, Hannes Leitgeb and Samir Okasha. Contributed speakers include William Bechtel, Ronald Giere, Alfred Nordmann, Michael Stoeltzner, and Paul Teller.

Although the full conference program does include women (a shout-out to Carla Fehr!), apparently they are not the ones that merit mention in the conference announcement.

For a deeper look at the role of conferences in maintaining the gender imbalance in our discipline, see The Feminist Philosophers' Gendered Conference Campaign.

Conservation Priorities: Mountain Gorillas

Conservation biologists groan when charismatic megafauna are the face of conservation. Everyone wants to save the panda and the polar bear, but from a biological point of view, endangered grasses and fungi can be just as important.

Still, there can be no doubt that humans share something special with other primates.

In this wonderful story in support of wildlife conservation in Congo, Jeremy Bernstein tells of a magical experience seeing mountain gorillas in the wild:

We moved on and found ourselves in a small cluster of gorillas. The young ones rushed around and brushed up against us. Their mothers watched cautiously. And then something happened that continues to haunt me. There was a mother with a baby. We stopped to look and she held it up for us to see.

How can there be any doubt that these other primates are worth any cost to save them, as individuals and as a species?