Objects and Arrows

There are some excellent podcasts at U.Sydney’s website including some good philosophical talks. Jenann Ismael talks about death and Huw Price on truth, for example. But also this excellent lecture from Geert Lovnik reflecting on the nature of blogging here.

Ramon Alvarado has some good fronterizo-style discussion of all this god business over on his radio show.

Alas, my gringo friends, you’ll need some Spanish.

I haven’t been keeping up with the slew of anti-religion books over the past few years, there are only so many hours in the day and there are more interesting middle-brow fun topics for this busy atheist to read about. But once in a while the sheer entertainment value wins and YouTube steals a few hours, so in this spirit I offer you some excellent middle-brow fun from C-Span.

While the Liberty University clowns are an easy target, Dawkins shows admirable grace and good humor in his responses. One important point that he touched on very briefly involved the relevance of children’s moral standing. There is something very odd, he notes, about describing children as Christian or Muslim. At best, as he says, these are the children of Christians or Muslims.

Judging from the eagerness with which so many folk want to defend corporal punishment of children, the pernicious effects of religion on children or what to do about these effects are unlikely to get much sophisticated discussion. Maybe in Sweden… Dennett’s suggestion that we ought to institute mandatory education in world religions for children is a very modest beginning. Actually, I don’t really know what philosophical work is being done on our obligations to children, but I imagine there must be a decent literature out there and am curious to learn more about it.

I recently worked with Peter Hutcheson on posting the tables of contents for the journal Southwest Philosophical Studies on the  New Mexico West Texas website.   With some modest resources we could hire someone to scan the articles and post PDFs on the same site.  The goal should be to make it accessible via electronic search.  Obviously most of the material will be uninteresting to most philosophers, but it is a bit depressing to think of all the published material in smaller regional journals that goes unread simply because it is inaccessible.   When he found out that I worked on Synthese a crotchety (but very distinguished) philosopher scolded me, saying that it’s morally objectionable to publish less than substandard material, because it wastes the time of potential readers.  My strategy as editor is to worry about missing the good papers rather than letting some bad papers in now and again.  Well, of course there is a flood of material being published in philosophy (and I actually think that this is a good thing) but it strikes me that younger scholars at least, have good filters and practices for organizing material in terms of relevance.  Also, while there is a huge quantity of material being published, there is a far greater increase in the numbers of papers submitted to journals in philosophy.  The growth in the numbers of philosophers working and writing and the high quality of their work is an important phenomenon and should be welcomed.

Vincent tells me that Formal Philosophy will be translated into Chinese this coming year. Visiting the Peking University philosophy department (or more precisely, “the institute for foreign philosophy”) in 05 it was clear to me that there is a wave of superb young Chinese philosophers about to break.

In ‘The Emperor’s New Intuitions’ Jaakko Hintikka describes how the current penchant for intuition in philosophy has at least some of its roots in an influential reading of Noam Chomsky’s early methodology. (Hintikka 1999) Philosophers and some linguists understood the goal of generative linguistics to be the construction of grammars that produce intuitively acceptable sentences as judged by competent native speakers. As Hintikka points out, this interpretation can be traced to Robert B. Lees influential review of Syntactic Structures. (1957) There, Lees describes the linguist’s own “Sprachgefühl, this intuitive notion about linguistic structure, which together with the sentences of a language, forms the empirical basis of grammatical analysis.” (1957, 379) According to Hintikka, philosophers began to use intuitive acceptability as a standard for the evaluation of their own endeavors by analogy with what they saw as a successful methodology in linguistics.

Hintikka’s reading of the history captures some important aspects of the rise of intuition-talk in philosophy and sheds light on the work of many important philosophers. By 1971, for example, Jerrold Katz made extensive use of intuition in his approach to language. Specifically, Katz lets his Sprachgefühl guide the characterization of the semantic relationships between concepts in the following passage:

Our linguistic intuitions that “unmarried bachelor” is semantically redundant and that “He is a bachelor again” is not semantically anomalous tells us that one component of this sense of “bachelor” is the concept of being in an unmarried state. Our linguistic intuition that “aunt,” “sister,” “mother,” “spinster,” etc., differ semantically from “uncle,” “brother,” “father,” bachelor,” etc., only with respect to the conceptual distinction between femaleness and maleness tells us that another component of the sense of “bachelor” is the concept of maleness. (Katz 1971, 102)

The role of linguistic intuition here seems to confirm Hintikka’s reading. Intuition provides the content for philosophical analysis. Katz’s assumption is that the job of conceptual analysis is to make our semantic intuitions as explicit and rigorous as possible. By the late 1960s worries about synonymy, so central to Quine’s critique of analyticity were no longer a serious concern for analytic philosophers. Instead, intuitions allow the mind to grasp synonymy relations. In place of Quine’s naturalistic scruples and extensionalist approach to semantics, intuitions had become familiar tools of the philosopher’s trade.

The triumph of intuition-talk is not fully explained via the desire to imitate linguists. For example, Hintikka’s diagnosis is less applicable in the case of his paper’s principle opponent – Saul Kripke. While Chomskian considerations may have played some role in Kripke’s thinking, Hintikka’s reading underplays the influence of ordinary language philosophy and particularly the role of common sense in late 20^th century metaphysics.

I hope you’ll consider coming to down to El Paso for the New Mexico/West Texas meeting (April 4-6). These meetings are always quite interesting. In the old days, I’m told that the New Mex West Tex meetings were a regular destination for Carnap when he had his place in Taos.

The CFP is here.

Computational models fail to shed light on general metaphysical questions concerning to the nature of emergence. At the same time, they may provide plausible explanations of particular cases of emergence. This paper outlines the kinds of modest explanations to which computational models are suited.

This semester, I’ll be participating in a discussion group to introduce our MA students to the use of formal methods in philosophy.  We’ll be using Clark Glymour’s Thinking Things Through and will meet once every two weeks for a lunchtime discussion.   Clark’s book is a great starting point for getting reasonably familiar with the basics.  It might seem a little elementary for graduate level work, but it has some very challenging exercises and covers some great topics.  Our MA program proposal is still under review at the state level, but we’re hopeful that it’ll be officially up and running in Fall 08. In the meantime, our graduate students are in limbo (more like purgatory I suppose).

One of my undergrads sent me a link to an old entry in Brit’s Blog where she talks about discouraging people from going on to grad school in philosophy. What she says about the pitfalls of “the profession” is reasonably accurate from a certain point of view. But I think it overestimates the costs of spending time in graduate school and the risks involved with respect to one’s future prospects and happiness.

A short anecdote:

Michael Martin was assigned to me as an advisor when I first started in the grad program at BU. He gave me the standard grim warning about the hopeless prospects for employment in philosophy and what he saw as the dismal state of “the profession.” It was a bit of a shock. Not because he’d disabused me of my fantasies of having a job at Princeton, but that he had assumed that such things were motivating me! Did he really think that the long-haired freak sitting in his office cared about the APA, the JFP or acceptance rates at Philosophical Review? Like most of the philosophy students I knew, I was deeply into philosophy but I would not have thought of myself as having an interest in ‘professional philosophy’ (or professional anything for that matter) I didn’t know what a 403b was and I certainly didn’t care about a six figure salary. I was very happy to be in a city filled with like-minded freaks being paid to do philosophy for a few years in my 20s. As the job market loomed larger, the dark side of the business was unavoidable, but the longer I could defer having to work for a boss, the better.

We jaded pro-philosophers forget that from the perspective of a 20-something who is seriously interested in philosophy, grad student life beats the hell out of working for an insurance company or God forbid, going to law school. For most of us, failure to find a job in philosophy means having to find a regular job. This might be a disappointment to some, but it is not really a big hardship relative to our regular-job-having peers.

A little sociology:

My sense is that the warnings about the unhappy state of philosophy are really evidence of the unhappy state of assistant/associate level professors of philosophy. American academics tend to identify strongly with the ethos of professionalism (white-collar lifestyles etc.) and tend to associate with those they see as their kind. This means that by the time we’re in our late 30s we tend to have (relatively) wealthy friends: lawyers, doctors and the like. Our salaries are modest by these standards.  According to Glenn Firebaugh and Laura Tach, one’s reported level of happiness correlates strongly with one’s relative place within one’s age/peer group. They have a nice paper on this effect (here).

They write, for instance that “Families whose income earners are in jobs with flat income trajectories are likely to become less happy over time. Thus the relative income effect observed here implies adverse effects for some individuals over the working years of their life cycles.” Given our salary trajectory, the future looks pretty grim. But there is hope. Given that we enjoy being philosophers, the secret to avoiding the crankiness of American academic life lies in not having rich friends and not reading our undergraduate alumni magazines. At least that’s what I’m counting on.