The Philosophers' Cocoon

Working Paper Discussion: "Is Conceivability a Reliable Guide to Metaphysical Possibility?"

I am pleased to announce that David Morrow and Moti Mizrahi have agreed to kick off the Cocoon's Working Paper Group with their paper, "Is Conceivability a Reliable Guide to Metaphysical Possibility?" Here's a brief abstract:

In this paper, we develop a reductio against the view that conceivability is prima facie evidence for metaphysical possibility. If sound, our argument shows that we should suspend judgment about the conclusions of conceivability arguments.

Here's how things will work -- the details and ground-rules.   

• The paper is posted over at Dropbox.com. 
• In order to access it, you must email me at [email protected] for the login and password.  Once you have these, just login into dropbox and download the paper.
• Barring unforseen and unfortunate circumstances, our dropbox login and password will be the same for all future working papers.
• The login, password, and working papers themselves are in no circumstance to be distributed to anyone. In order to maintain the integrity of our forum, I alone am authorized to distribute them.
• In order to maintain the safe and supportive integrity of the paper discussion, I will only distribute the login and password to registered members of The Philosophers' Cocoon. 
• As always, any professional philosopher who wants to become a member of the Cocoon is welcome to email me to join. However, you must become a member to participate in the working paper group.
• Finally, here are some ground-rules for the paper discussion (which should simply proceed in the comments section below): 

1. You must have access to -- and presumably have read! -- the paper in order to comment.
2. Comments should aim to be helpful in nature. If you raise an objection, try to suggest potential way(s) of resolving it.  The purpose of this group is to help our friends here at the Cocoon improve their papers, not to show off one's awesome refutation skills.
3. Be a good dude/dude-ette.  Do everything you can to make this a positive experience for the paper presenters.

With all that said, let's get this shin-dig started. I'd like to encourage as many of our members as possible to read the paper and get in on the discussion. Let's all help David and Moti out, and make this inaugural edition of our Working Paper Group a success to build upon!

Philosophical Books as Presents

What to give as a present for a philosopher? That must be one of the more difficult questions in life. Since it's the season for presents, I thought I'd give some tips to those of you who have a philosopher for a parent, child, sibling, significant other, or a friend. Or, since many of the readers are no doubt philosophers, you could give a hint to one of the previously mentioned people about this list. Now, since you can't very easily wrap philosophical ideas into a package, the obvious choice is to go for a book. Many of my recommendations stem from my own interests of course (primarily metaphysics), but I've tried to branch out a little. Without further ado, here is a list of some recent philosophical books that I think would make for a nice present (links to Amazon):

• David M. Armstrong, Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics (2010, OUP)
• Helen Beebee & Nigel Sabbarton-Leary (Eds.), The Semantics and Metaphysics of Natural Kinds (2010, Routledge)
• Alexander Bird, Brian Ellis & Howard Sankey (Eds.) Properties, Powers and Structures: Issues in the Metaphysics of Realism (2012, Routledge)
• Herman Cappelen, Philosophy without Intuitions (2012, OUP)
• David J. Chalmers, Constructing the World (2012, OUP)
• Fabrice Correia & Benjamin Schnieder (Eds.), Metaphysical Grounding: Understanding the Structure of Reality (2012, CUP)
• Leila Haaparanta & Heikki Koskinen, Categories of Being: Essays on Metaphysics and Logic (2012, OUP)
• John Heil, The Universe As We Find It (2012, OUP)
• Saul A. Kripke, Philosophical Troubles: Collected Papers, Volume 1 (2012, OUP)
• D. H. Mellor, Mind, Meaning, and Reality: Essays in Philosophy
• John T. Roberts, The Law-Governed Universe (2012, OUP)
• Tuomas E. Tahko, Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics (2012, CUP)

With the rather obvious exception of the last one, I don't have any of these yet (hint, hint!), but about half of these are books that I will buy myself sooner or later, and the other half are books that I certainly wouldn't mind having and will probably buy if I find a good deal.

Feel free to add your own recommendations as comments!

Working Paper Group?

So I know it's a terribly busy time of the semester, not to mention a crazy stressful time for those of us on the job market -- but I'd like to put forth a proposal. One of the things I had in mind when I started this blog was that it could be a uniquely safe and supportive place to share working papers -- particularly papers that one might be nervous sharing in other contexts (as in: you don't know if the paper is a total blind-alley, etc). Anyway, I was just now thinking that it could be really cool to get a weekly or maybe bi-weekly informal Cocoon Working Paper Group together -- with all of us really -- to discuss a paper-in-progress. Basically, the process would be:

1. Someone volunteers to share a paper.

2. We share it here on the blog, perhaps through a password protected site (so that the paper is *only* available to fellow Cocooners).

3. We discuss the paper with the author in the comments section, with an emphasis on *helping* the person make it a better paper.

I suspect that if we got this sort of thing going, it could be really awesome (I know many of us struggle to get feedback). Any volunteers to go first? If you have a paper you'd like to share, just let me know and I'll set things up as described above. First come, first serve!

Journals you'd like to publish in

Whether because of how often you enjoy reading it, the respect it has within your subfield, the prominence it has in the discipline as a whole, or whatever other reasons...

Some of mine:

* Critical Philosophy of Race

Brand new journal, the first issue of which will be out early next year. Its birth is a great sign of the vibrancy of philosophy of race and I would not be surprised if it comes to gain the kind of prominence in the field that Hypatia has. I did a review for the journal already but look forward to publishing a full-length article in it.

* Philosophy & Public Affairs

Great place for anyone working in social & political philosophy, of course.

* The Philosophical Review

Known as the top journal and, to my knowledge, has never featured a piece in philosophy of race. I would love to change that.

What are you thankful for?

(Oops -- comments now open!)

I know it's sappy, but I'd like to invite everyone to share what they're thankful for this Thanksgiving. In the hectic bustle of life, we rarely stop to overtly thank the people and things that make our lives better. I guess I'll go first.

• I am thankful for my wife, Maryana, for loving me despite my many imperfections and many tough times, for never ceasing to have faith in me, for always reminding me of what really matters in this life, for challenging me to be a better person, and for editing my papers line by line -- the perfectionist she is, the perfectionist I am not -- even when she's worn out and has no time.
• I am thankful for my parents and my brother, for everything they are, good and bad, better and worse.
• I am thankful for having the privilege of doing philosophy for a living -- of doing what I truly love to do -- and for having the same enthusiasm for it, and seeing the same magic in it, as they first day I started doing it as a 17 year-old.
• I am thankful for my evening jogs with my dog Tex by the bay in Tampa, which revive my soul and calm me even when I'm feeling down.
• I'm thankful for all the great people I've met through this blog: David Morrow, for the all-around awesome, charitable, caring dude he is, who I'm always glad to run into at conferences and share work with; Kate Manne, an all-around awesome woman who I've never met but who's been awesome to trade work with and email chat about philosophy; Moti Mizrahi, who I've also never met, but who always posts really interesting *&(# and challenges the rest of us to question entrenched philosophical methods and practices; David Killoren, another all-around awesome dude who I'm always happy to run into at conferences; Kit Wellman and Andy Altman, who threw an awesome summer seminar this summer, and who were so incredibly supportive and gave such great advice; Bas van der Vossen, for being a great colleague and friend to talk philosophy and watch basketball with; Thomas Christiano, for showing faith in me several years ago in graduate school, without which I might never have finished; Sara Bernstein, for being such a cool and funky individual; Mark Alfano, for sharing his knowledge and experience; Doug Lackey at The Philosophical Forum for taking a chance on a paper that was so long that no other journal would probably ever even consider it; my colleague Steve Geisz at the University of Tampa, for being a good friend and even better colleague who is always in my corner; and for everyone else I might have forgotten to thank here, but who make the world and our profession a better place.
• I am thankful for everyone in this world who is good and kind and forgiving -- for everyone who tries to do the right thing even when it isn't easy or popular.

I could go on forever, but I guess I'll stop there. One last thing: of course, I'm thankful to all of you, the Cocoon community, for helping to make this blog what it is!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!

Two Interesting Papers

I came across the following two papers the other day through this post over at the Brains blog:

• "The Cartesian Argument Against Physicalism" by Philip Goff
• "Non-Reductive Physicalism and the Mind-Body Problem" by Susan Schneider (forthcoming in Nous)

I'd like to encourage everyone to check them out: (1) Goff essentially argues in his paper that Descartes' arguments for dualism -- which we typically use as target-practice in introductory classes -- actually give us resources for a sound argument against physicalism; and (2) Schneider argues that non-reductive physicalism (a dominant position these days) is incoherent and collapses into substance dualism.  Anyway, just thought I'd give their papers a shout-out!

Intuition? What Intuition?

Inspired by Herman Cappelen's Philosophy Without Intuitions, champions of orthodoxy are trying to pull an unlikely move; that is, they are denying that intuitions actually play an important evidential role in philosophy.

I wonder what readers make of this move. I find it rather strange for the following reasons. First, this move flies in the face of these characterizations of the evidential role that intuitions play in philosophy. It is rather unlikely that all these philosophers are misled or have no idea what they're talking about.

Second, if making immediate judgments in response to hypothetical cases is not to appeal to intuition, then what is it? What role, if not evidential, are these judgments supposed to play in philosophical arguments? And what is the source of these judgments? Consider, for example, Searle's Chinese Room Argument:

Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese. [...] The point of the argument is this: if the man in the room does not understand Chinese on the basis of implementing the appropriate program for understanding Chinese then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis because no computer, qua computer, has anything the man does not have.

What role (if not evidential) is the judgment "the person in the room does not understand Chinese" supposed to play in this argument? And what is the source of this judgment (if not what philosophers usually call "intuition")?

Finally, those who wish to deny that intuitions play an evidential role will have a hard time explaining the fact that others react differently to the Chinese room scenario. For instance, Hauser criticizes Searle's inference from “it seems to me quite obvious that I understand nothing” to "I really understand nothing." Hauser thinks that, if one understands English or Chinese, then one usually knows that one does, but not necessarily. If Searle and Hauser are not making incompatible immediate judgments in response to the Chinese Room scenario, then what could explain their disagreement?

Great recent ethics papers?

What are some of your favorite ethics papers published in the last year-or-so?

Marcus recently asked a similar question about must-read articles or books, and there are some excellent ideas in that thread. But I'm thinking that the Cocoon might also benefit from an additional thread specifically focused on recent papers in ethics.

(I do have an egoistic reason for this request: In the Spring, I'll be organizing a faculty reading group devoted to recently published ethics papers. The group is diverse in terms of interests, so I'd like to have a diverse list of readings for semester.)

Update: Sorry, comments were hidden! They're open now.

Amusing

I came across this unpublished manuscript posted by Tamler Sommers the other day at Philpapers. It's entitled, "Free Will and Experimental Philosophy: An Intervention", and it's a real hoot.  Yet another biting (though potentially productive, and at any rate very funny) critique in what seems to be a rapidly escalating conflict between "experimentalists" and "traditionalists."  I'm curious to see what others think. Is Sommers' critique fair? I don't know the literature surrounding stuff very well, but what I do know is that both sides of the debate tend to accuse the other side of setting up and demolishing straw men. Is more of that going on here? Anyway, I encourage everyone to check it out. It's a fun read!

Too Many Conferences?

John Protevi over at NewApps has presented this comment from the Feminist Philosophers for discussion:

Why not kill a bunch of birds with one stone and just have fewer conferences? They’re terrible for the environment and a completely decadent use of money that should be going towards financial aid for students or helping lower-income people heat their homes. Even at prestigious conferences, I find the papers are often lackluster, and at any rate, I consistently find that I could have learned just as much by staying at home, reading papers from authors’ websites, and Skyping or e-mailing them.

As to the present point — a gajillion conferences all across the globe, on hyper-specialized topics, often by invitation, with sketchy review procedures when not, and the prospect of being the only woman at quasi-party full of dudes in a faraway land — of COURSE you’re going to get gender disparities. So yay to the GCC, but I’d like to see an Anti-Conference Campaign (ACC) as well!

I think the discussion in Protevi's thread is illuminating and productive. However, I'd like to weigh in here on something that hasn't been dicussed over there.  The discussion over there seems to divide broadly into three perspectives: (1) mostly senior members of the profession who think (along with the original commenter) that conferences tend to be lackluster and not very useful, (2) graduate students, who find the pressure of attending conferences financially burdensome, and (3) those who think that conferences are good because they are ways to share one's work with others. 

My experience as an untenured (and indeed, non-tenure-track) member of the profession is that conferences are good (for me, at any rate) for another reason entirely: they've help me keep a positive attitude, even when times are tough.  Since I received my PhD, I-- like many people in my position -- have struggled to find my feet both as a researcher and as a teacher.  There have been times (fortunately now mostly in the rear-view mirror) when I felt I would never publish, and that I wasn't a very good teacher.  "Keeping on keeping on" in these situations was tough, and conferences helped. Getting away from the day-to-day struggle to just talk philosophy with other members of the profession was refreshing, and energizing. So too was the feeling that someone thought that my papers were worth discussing for an hour or so. I think that, beyond the work and such, a good profession should also exist in part for the good and well-being of its members. Going to conferences might be tough for grad students, and for that reason maybe they should face less pressure to go. And going to conferences might not be that fun or interesting for many senior members of the profession -- so perhaps they shouldn't go as much. But this is not everyone. Going to conferences can be a valuable resource for early-career faculty to not only share their work and get much-needed feedback (this is especially true for people like me in tiny departments); they can also be valuable in terms of social support. Being an early-career academic is tough, and conferences do -- at least in my experience -- serve an important role in this important latter regard.

One final thought: I always find myself puzzled when people say they hate going to APA meetings and such because the papers "aren't that great."  For my part, I tend to find myself in session after session that I consider interesting as hell! Am I alone? (Maybe!)

Book or articles?

Recently Marcus brought up the issue of how to proceed with a book proposal. In the comments, a few people discussed whether having a book out (a version of the PhD etc.) is valuable, and it was pointed out that things might be different in the US as compared to Europe. These remarks lead me to a question that I have asked myself for quite a while now.

Here is the story: In Europe (at least in Germany) you ought to write a book for earning your PhD. And it must be published for you having the full right to be a Doctor of Philosophy (otherwise you are just a designated doctor). Now in the sciences the process of graduating seems to have changed over the last decades: you can publish a series of articles in order to make your PhD. As I see it, a small number of philosophy departments in Germany now also allow this kind of graduation. For instance, the University of Hamburg requires of you to submit a book for the dissertation or submit an adequate amount of published work (which, I guess, means papers). Now I think writing papers in philosophy is as valuable as it is in science, but a lot of people told me that in view of a career in academia, a book still represents the (only) thing to do. So in case I want to start a career in academia, I need to write a book. However, I think philosophy could profit from seeing papers as a highly valuable instrument for developing arguments, sketching theories, etc., and I also think that this should be reflected in an appreciation of publishing articles as a legitimate form of earning one's PhD. However, this should also be reflected in an appreciation of the person doing his or her PhD, so that philosophers should stop saying that a book is the (only) form of promoting oneself. Because I think that papers are a valuable instrument, I want to show this in my dissertation. But then this may be in opposition to the career-promoting value of a book.

Now here are my questions:

• Does the sitation I described (philosophers only valuing papers) only exist in Europe/Germany, so that the dichotomy between writing papers or publishing a book only holds in Europe/Germany? 
• Is there a bias towards books in philosophy in general, or only in graduationg issues/building one's reputation, and if so, is this bias legitimate? In other words, would philosophy profit from an emphasis on papers? And is this question also relevant only for Europe/Germany, or does it also apply to the US?
• Do you also see the opposition between book and articles? What would you do in this case? Maybe one could plan a book as writing different articles that will then be put together as a book? But isn't there more coherence needed in writing a book than in writing a series of papers?

I am very much looking forward to reading your thoughts!

Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl

I am excited to report that our team from the University of Tampa finished in third-place today at the Southeast Regional Ethics Bowl debate competition, and will be heading to compete in the Nationals in March! For those of you who don't know about it, the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl is an annual series of debate competitions where groups of undergraduate students face off on "hot topic" public ethical issues. It's a really great opportunity for students to learn about ethics and develop philosophical skills. This is our fourth year competing, and it's been really rewarding seeing my students grow. Seeing them in action today -- and seeing how far they've come since they began -- reminds me that we can make a difference as teachers. I encourage you all to look into participating with your students!

Must-Read Articles or Books?

Being on the job-market this Fall and teaching a full course load, it's been a tough semester for me in terms of staying on top of what's been coming out in journals, etc. Anyone read anything good lately? I'm sure there are many people who read this blog who might benefit from article/book suggestions -- so, please, fire away!

Questions About Book Proposals

Hi everyone -- I just have a quick (but rather broad) set of questions that I was hoping some of you might (nudge to Mark Alfano;) have some insight on.

• When exactly in one's career is it a good idea to pursue publishing a book?
• What's the process of putting a book proposal together like? 

I know these are rather broad questions, but I was just wondering. I've often been told that some of my papers are so ambitious that they would work better as chapters of a book, and I'm apt to agree (note: I've tried -- and am still trying -- to publish less ambitious versions of some of these papers as journal articles, but it's been very hard to strike the right balance! Less ambitious versions of the papers are often rejected for "not doing enough", and more ambitious versions rejected for "attempting too much"). Anyway, I'm not at all sure that I'm at the stage where it would make sense to pursue a book, but then again, I'm not at all sure that it wouldn't make sense, either.  Any thoughts? I expect there are many readers of this blog who might benefit from any insights people might have!

Reader Question: Good and Bad Papers

A reader (who is an Assistant Professor at a large public university) sent me the following email this morning:

"I have an issue that I've been wondering about that might be helpful to discuss on your blog. 

The issue is this: what makes a philosophy paper good? What makes one bad? 

Here's the context: I often hear philosophers make statements like, "most philosophy papers are crap", or "the philosophy journals are clogged up with junk", or, of course, the famous "90% of everything [including philosophy papers] are crap" rule.

My impression, though, is different. I think I've only ever come across two papers that are crappy -- one that I reviewed for publication for a journal (I said "reject") and one that I read about six or seven years ago (which, if I read it again, I might conclude is good). My impression of every other paper I've ever read is either something like, "this is fantastic!" or "I would be very pleased if I had written this" or "this is good". I'm serious: I think just about every philosophy paper I read is good. 

So, I'm wondering, what makes a philosophy paper good? What makes one bad? 

Here are some considerations that I believe contribute to making a paper good:

(1) It shows a nice grasp of the literature, bringing articles to my attention that I hadn't noticed before;

(2) It puts familiar ideas in a new way that makes me see significance to them that I hadn't seen before;

(3) It puts forward a clever argument for a plausible or an implausible conclusion.

(4) It's written beautifully or very clearly.

(5) It draws heretofore-unnoticed-by-me connections between works (this is especially important for exegetical papers). 

(6) It persuades me of something I didn't believe before, or it at least moves me closer to adopting a position I hadn't adopted before. 

I think just about every paper I've ever read does at least one of (1)-(6), so I think just about every paper I've seen published in philosophy, or even heard presented, is good. 

By contrast, I've heard some philosophers say things like, "the ontological argument is a terrible argument", which I find to be a shocking and unbelievable statement. Even if you're not persuaded by the ontological argument to believe in the existence of a greatest conceivable being, I find it to be massively creative, provocative, and useful for advancing the field of philosophy. By contrast, other philosophers seem to think that, since they're not convinced by it, it's bad, or that, since it's (perhaps) invalid, it's bad. 

Anyway, I thought I would bring the above to your attention because your blog seemed like a good place to discuss this issue."

Any thoughts?

Is it time to rethink the discussion note?

As readers of The Philosophers' Cocoon may know, I like to keep it short. So I have written short papers (between 1,000 and 3,000 words). Such papers would be considered "discussion notes" by many journals that do publish short papers; journals such as Philosophia, The Philosophical Quarterly, and Dialectica, since by "discussion note" these journals seem to mean a short paper, usually no longer than 3,000 words.

However, although short, my papers are not simply commenting on another paper. Rather, they make arguments that could be appreciated independently rather than derivatively (or so I think).

So, my question to you, my fellow pupae, is this: Is it time to rethink the discussion note? What makes a paper a discussion note? Is it the fact that it is short? Or is it the fact that it makes derivative arguments? Or is it something else entirely?

Stereotype Threat and Intellectual Virtue (cross-posted at Philosophy and Other Thoughts)

I recently composed a paper on stereotype threat and intellectual virtue, which I've posted over on my personal blog.  It seemed apropos of recent discussion (or whatever you want to call what happened) on this blog, but is a more thorough engagement with the issues than can be had in the comments.

Proceedings?

I'd like to ask you all for your advice on something. I recent submitted a paper for the "Rawls Fest" conference at Yale. Although the CFP didn't say anything about a proceedings, I've been offered a place in their volume. Here's my question: is it a good or bad (or terrible) idea to accept the offer? I've heard very mixed things about publishing in conference proceedings, particularly from Thom Brooks' well-known paper on publishing advice. Brooks does, however, offer one caveat -- and that's if the proceedings are "somewhat reputable." Anyway, I'm a bit uncertain what to do. On the one hand, it's "just" a conference proceedings. On the other hand, it's through Yale, and Thomas Pogge's Global Justice Program. On the one hand, it's a paper that's very, very important to me -- one that I think makes an important contribution to political philosophy, and which I would very much like to publish somewhere good. On the other hand, I've been strugging to publish the piece for years. Etc. So, yeah, I could really use some advice. Thanks, in advance, to anyone and everyone who has any to offer!