The Philosophers' Cocoon

Sara Protasi on ESL Philosophers

As I reported on the Cocoon before, Gabriele Contessa has been trying to raise awareness about the underrepresentation of non-native English speakers in Philosophy (or ESL philosophers). In an attempt to raise awareness about this issue, Contessa proposed what he calls the “Languaged Conference Campaign,” which is modeled on the Gendered Conference Campaign. To his surprise, his proposal met with resistance. Responding to Contessa’s LCC, Sara Protasi claims that the underrepresentation of ESL philosophers is "unfortunate" but not "unjust."

As far as I can tell, her reasons in support of this claim are the following:

1. "Being able to speak good English is essential to do good philosophy."
2. Discrimination against ESL philosophers “is not as widespread or harmful as other forms of discrimination."
3. Other "forms of discrimination are in more need of attention than" the discrimination against ESL philosophers.

Before I address (1), (2), and (3), I would like to emphasize that the issue is underrepresentation and discrimination, not a call to help non-native English speakers become fluent in English. Judging by the following quotation, I think this point is lost in Protasi’s piece:

This, as the fact that analytic philosophy journals and conferences and even Facebook discussions take place in English, is very unfortunate. But it doesn’t seem to me to be unjust. That it is not unjust doesn’t mean that we should not try to alleviate the difficulties of people like me, or people who fare much worse than me. We should help non-native speakers to achieve the level of fluency required to succeed at philosophy in the context in which they want to do philosophy (I am partially repeating points made by commenters at Feminist Philosophers, such as “louisechanary”). But it’s not an injustice in the same way that racial and sexist and ableist and homo/transphobic discrimination is.

Again, to make this about helping non-native English speakers become fluent in English is to miss the point. The complaint is about the fact that ESL philosophers are underrepresented in tenure-track jobs, in journal publications, in citations, and so on. In other words, the "goods" of philosophy are distributed unfairly and ESL philosophers are not getting their fair share. That's unjust!

 

 

Now, (1) is simply false. If (1), then many of the great philosophers (e.g., Spinoza) did not do "good philosophy" since they did not speak and write English. I take it we all want to deny the consequent of this conditional.

As for (2), if all forms of discrimination are unjust, then (2) is inconsistent with the claim that the underrepresentation of ESL philosophers is "unfortunate" but not "unjust." For to admit that there is such discrimination, and to accept that discrimination is unjust, is to be committed to the claim that discrimination against ESL philosophers is unjust.

Like (2), (3) is also inconsistent with the claim that the underrepresentation of ESL philosophers is "unfortunate" but not "unjust." Another problem with (3) is that it is difficult to evaluate for the following reasons. First, (3) assumes that forms of discrimination can somehow be ranked from bad to worse. I have no idea how to do that. Second, (3) assumes that forms of discrimination can be clearly separated from one another. But that is also very difficult (perhaps even impossible) to do. For example, a non-native English speaker with a foreign accent may be perceived as a foreigner, and then all sorts of racial/ethnic biases and prejudices kick in. Likewise, a non-native English speaker with a "foreign look" may be perceived as belonging to a lower socio-economic class, and then all sorts of biases and prejudices about class kick in.

In general, if the underrepresentation of members of group G is taken to be evidence for discrimination against members of G, then this inference applies to ESL philosophers just as much as it applies to members of other disadvantaged groups.

Philosophers and intuitions: they go way back

Over at New APPS, Catarina Dutilh Novaes has an interesting post about a project she is working on with her graduate students. The project is about the origins of analytic philosophy in general and the history of the use of intuitions as evidence in philosophy in particular.

One question Catarina and her students are trying to answer is the following: "when and how did the term ‘intuitions’ begin to be used in the philosophical literature in its current sense(s)?"

In comments, Catarina reports a suggestion "that philosophers adopted the intuitions-terminology under the influence of Chomsky and other linguists." In line with Catarina’s report, Daniel Garber writes in the comments section:

My own suspicion is that intuitions entered analytic philosophy in the late 1950s or early 1960s from Chomsky's transformational grammar program. There the idea is that intuitions about grammaticality are the data, and we build theories to capture and systematize those intuitions. It is a short distance from there to what philosophers now do with intuition. But this is just a guess. One would have to poke about and see if the dates are right, and the influences seem plausible. But it seems significant that Rawls refers to this idea in Chomsky in A THEORY OF JUSTICE, a book that was in progress in the 1960s.

In this post, I would like to suggest that intuition-talk is much older than we might think. Since I don’t have graduate students (but I do have a lot of undergraduates this semester :), I will merely suggest that, and present some preliminary evidence to that effect. (One more paper to write.)

Using this Google Books tool, we can find out how far back intuition-talk goes.

 

 

We can see that intuition-talk goes back to the eighteenth century. We can also zoom in on search results to see how the terms are used. Here are three examples:

1. Truth is an amiable and delightful object to the eye of the mind, but is not easily apprehended by the bulk of mankind; especially if it be remote from common observation, or abstracted from sensible experience. It requires strict attention as well as an acute perception to take it up in its pure and intellectual appearance, and the memory must be tenacious to retain it long in that simple form (Fordyce 1768, p. 329).
2. Upon the validity of this intellectual intuition (a direct application of Descartes’ appeal to the authority of consciousness), the very axioms of Spinoza’s system must wholly rest (Morell 1847 p. 184).
3. The more clearly we see any thing to be moral, the more sensibly we feel ourselves under a moral obligation to perform it. This being a matter of common intuition, and universal experience, all that is necessary to convince us of its truth, is to bring it directly before our minds (Alexander 1852 p. 49).

Funding your research projects: some data

(This post is a continuation of my post of last week and gives some better grounded data.)

As already hinted at, if you are a scholar active in Europe, you will most probably depend on funding for your projects in order to survive, given that surviving out of teaching alone is infrequent and a tenure is not foreseeable. Thus, it becomes essential to know what one's chances are.
A short comparison shows that among European countries,

• Switzerland is the one in which more money for research is granted (total amount/number of inhabitants): 88,5 E pro inhabitant each year
• Finnland is the next one: 61,1 E
• UK (Research Council UK): 48,0 E
• Neatherlands (NWO): 37,2 E
• Germany (DFG): 33,5 E
• Austria (FWF): 23,8 E

This is however still not enough, since a lot depends on how many funding agencies there are in each country, so that, e.g., the situation may look different in Germany if one takes into account also the Humboldt scholarships, the Max Planck foundation, etc.

Moreover, the amount of money available per inhabitant still does not say much, since it is not said how many inhabitants apply for that money. In this sense, it seems that the acceptance rate of the German DFG is much lower than expected, whereas the Swiss acceptance rate is high, as expected:

• Swiss acceptance rate: around 50%


• Austrian acceptance rate: 25,8%


• German (DFG only) acceptance rate: around 17%

Still more interesting, especially for prospective peer reviewers are the following data:

• acceptance rate in 2008 (Austria, FWF): 43,0% (2008 was the highest peak attained, before that the rate was around 41,5%)
• acceptance rate in 2013 (Austria, FWF): 25,8%

Why this huge difference in a few years? Because the number of application has been incredibly growing (from 1,000 in 2001 to 2,386 in 2013). This means that the lower acceptance rate is not due to the lower quality of post-2008 projects. Rather, after 2008 the FWF Jury (and I imagine that a similar situation applies to the DFG and similar fundings) just had to look for weak points in each project in order "not to go bankrupt" (precise quotation of what I heard at a recent FWF roadshow). Given that the decision about a project is taken in Austria, Germany and Italy (I guess that the same applies to the other EU countries, but I cannot be sure) by a jury or committee on the basis of peer-reviews, much burden lies on the peer reviewers themselves. Again, as I heard at the same roadshow:

We are forced to look for anything which looks like a critique, if we want not to go bankrupt. We know we are turning down projects we would be funding in better financial conditions.

There is nothing blamable in that, but I am convinced that peer reviewers should be informed about the weight of their decisions. Anything less than "enthusiastic approval" amounts to good news for the committee, who can turn down the project. It is fine, if you think the project not to be worthy, but I, for one, will send my further suggestions directly to the applicant and not include them in my peer review the next time I am asked to review a project.

Source: FWF

This post has been published, with minor variations, also on my personal blog.

On What Reasoning Might Be, Part I

As explained in my earlier posts, the unifying thread in my work has been a concern with agency, and especially cognitive agency. In my first post I sketched some ideas about the sense in which judgment, even if it is not the outcome of explicit reasoning, can count as an exercise of agency on our part. But, of course, explicit reasoning is probably the most easily recognizable example of cognitive agency. In my final two posts as FA for the cocoon I want to say a few things on this topic, which is also one that I am actively working on right now.

Now, the terms “reasoning” and “inference” are often applied quite liberally. For example, humans are quite good at judging each other’s emotions on the basis of subtle facial and behavioural cues. In general, however, we have no special first-personal insight into how we do this; we can just tell that so-and-so is angry, for example, without being able to point to the evidence that makes us think so. Some people would happily call the information processing leading up to such judgments a case of unconscious reasoning or inference.

I think, however, that such usage obscures an important distinction. The processing leading up to the judgment in a case like this is, properly, sub-personal. So far as you are concerned, you just see the other person as angry (or happy or whatever). You don’t have to do anything other than endorse (or decline to endorse) this appearance. This sharply contrasts with cases of personal-level reasoning — cases in which you actively work out what to think about a given topic. (For example, having judged that your friend Mary is angry, you might engage in a bit of active reasoning to figure out why she is angry.) My focus is exclusively on reasoning of this latter, active sort.

So what is involved in the claim that reasoning is an exercise of cognitive agency? A central part of what is involved is this: necessarily, if you infer p from a set of premisses R you  take it that R supports p (in some relevant sense), and come to believe that p in part because you take R to support p. Following Boghossian (2014), call this the “Taking Condition”. My work on reasoning has focused on showing how this condition could possibly be met. As it turns out, giving an account of reasoning that can meet this condition leads to some rather surprising results. (Boghossian [2014] comes to this conclusion as well; unfortunately, as I will explain in the next post, he remains too committed to certain assumptions about the nature of reasoning that make the Taking Condition impossible to satisfy.)

The goal of my recent paper “Reasoning and Regress” (Mind, 2014) was to respond to a very familiar style of regress argument against conditions of this sort (the argument is usually traced back to Lewis Carroll’s story of Achilles and the Tortoise). I still think that the main argument of this paper is sound. As I will explain, however, I now think that there is more that needs to be done.

The argument begins with a challenge: if the Taking Condition is true, then it must be possible to give an account of what reasoning is that explains why it is true — i.e., that shows what role such “takings” play in reasoning.

Now, on standard approaches to reasoning, reasoning is a causal process in which some of your beliefs (the premiss beliefs) combine to cause you to acquire a new belief (the conclusion belief). So the question becomes where, in this causal chain, we can find room for the relevant “takings”.

For present purposes I will just try to give a quick sense of why this question seems very hard to answer. If we were to say that they are among the causes of the conclusion belief, then we would effectively be assimilating their role to that of the premisses. Familiarly, however, this way lies an infinite regress. Suppose we claim that in order to reason from the premises A and “If A then B” to B you need a further premiss, perhaps as follows: “If you believe A and ‘If A then B’, then you may infer B”. Then, as Lewis Carroll famously observed, consistency would require that, in order for you to reason from these three premisses to B, you would also need a fourth premiss, to the effect that your existing three beliefs license the conclusion that B. And so on. The result is that reasoning could never get started.

How to respond to such regress arguments? My own response is to reject the idea that the “takings” required by the Taking Condition must feature as causal factors in a causal process of reasoning. Reasoning is not, in the relevant sense, a causal process. If you believe R and come to recognize that p follows from R (in the relevant sense), then your reasoning is done: you thereby believe p. Barring conditions like inattention or irrationality, believing R and that p follows from R just is a way of believing p.[1]

In the paper I defend this claim by pointing to a version of Moore’s paradox. Claims of the form “R, and p follows from R, but I do not believe p” appear to be unassertable in just the same way that claims of the form “p, but I do not believe p”.

Standard explanations of Moore’s paradox focus on the idea that asserting the first conjunct of the Moore sentencenormally conveys that the subject believes p — i.e., the very same mental state disavowed in the second conjunct. This is why it would be difficult to understand what state of mind someone who asserted a Moore sentence might be expressing.

It is important to note that a mere regular causal connection between two mental states does not make for Moore-paradoxicality. For example, there is nothing paradoxical with an assertion of “this cake looks delicious, but I have no desire to eat any”. Since “R, and p follows from R, but I do not believe p” is Moore paradoxical, this is strong evidence that the mental state expressed by “R, and p follows from R” is not merely causally related to believing p. As I already mentioned, my own view is that, barring conditions such as inattention and irrationality, believing R and that p follows from R simply is a way of believing p.

How does this help with the regress argument? Recall that the regress argument begins with a challenge: the challenge of explaining what role beliefs about support might play in reasoning. On the traditional causal picture of reasoning, this challenge has bite, because it looks as if the only role such beliefs could play in reasoning would be as extra premisses: they would have to figure among the contributing causes of the conclusion belief. This is exactly the assumption that I reject: beliefs about what follows from what play an essential role in reasoning, but that role is not a causal one.

I still think that this move works against this Lewis Carroll-inspired argument against the Taking Condition. Nevertheless, loose ends remain.

Perhaps the most obvious of these is that I have given no account of where the relevant beliefs about what follows from what might be coming from. This is a challenge that I tried to address in the paper, but — as I now think — not terribly convincingly.

Going a little deeper, in the paper I gave no positive account of what the mental state of belief must be like if it is to function in reasoning in the way I am suggesting. What is it for beliefs to stand in the sorts of relations to each other I am suggesting they do stand? In the paper I argued that standard accounts of belief should be compatible with this claim, but I did not elaborate. But I now think that in order to make progress in the theory of reasoning — and especially the challenge suggested in my previous paragraph — a more explicit account of belief is required.

In my next (and final) post I will sketch my current thinking about these issues.

[1] What type of mental state do the “takings” required by the Taking Condition exemplify? I am going to speak of them as beliefs, for one very important reason: they are open to epistemic assessment. To see this, notice that the following type of case is possible: a subject can fail to be justified in believing p, even though she infers p from R in a situation where R really is good evidence for p. Intuitively, this will happen in a situation in which the subject is not justified in taking it that R is good evidence for p. Suppose that, steeped in superstition, I take certain spots on Bob’s face to be evidence that he has been cursed, and conclude that his life is in grave danger. As it happens, the spots on Bob’s face are the result of advanced disease, and so they really do constitute evidence that Bob’s life is in grave danger. Nevertheless, it seems intuitively clear that I, in my ignorance, am not justified in taking them to constitute evidence that Bob’s life is in grave danger; accordingly, my conclusion that Bob’s life is in grave danger is not justified.

Notice that this sort of case tells against views (such as John Broome's [2013] and Chris Tucker's [2012]) which construe the “takings” required by the Taking Condition as intellectual seemings, and hence as not open to epistemic assessment.

 

 

Another Small Milestone

I'm happy to report that the Philosophers' Cocoon surpassed 500,000 visitors today, and would like to thank everyone--contributors and readers alike--for helping to make the Cocoon such a great community. We are now averaging between 800-1,500 visits per day, and, with an ever-expanding list of contributors and our new Featured Author series, I for one am very encouraged by the way the Cocoon is developing! 

Michael Rea on the philosophy profession and personal integrity

I can't remember when it was, this Lent or last Lent, when philosopher of religion that I am facebook friends with (whose identity I will not reveal, as the post wasn't public) wrote (paraphrasing): "I'd like us to pray for our profession during this period, especially with all the ugly things that have come to light." I found this striking (and a beautiful intention too) and it sheds some light how, for this person, philosophy and personal beliefs interrelate.

I am currently in the process of writing up a paper on a qualitative survey I conducted with philosophers of religion, which indicates how one's metaphysical outlook can affect one's philosophical work. Discussions on how faith or lack of faith might influence one's philosophical work aren't new. The PhilPaper survey revealed strong correlations between theism and philosophy of religion as an area of specialization, and theism and a number of other views, such as libertarian free will. However, there is another way in which religion and philosophy interact. Not only does one's religious belief - or lack thereof - influence one's work in philosophy of religion and other areas of philosophy. One's work as a philosopher also has an influence on how we like to conduct and present ourselves as persons in the world. This is not only the case for Christian philosophers, but for philosophers more generally. 

Michael Rea, in a forthcoming paper, provides the following sobering observations: 

One of the most important job skills of an analytic philosopher is strongly correlated with whatever skill is involved in successfully rationalizing bad behavior, deceiving oneself, putting a positive spin on bad circumstances, and so on. Also, there are certain modes of behavior—ways of being ambitious, or arrogant, or disrespectful to others, for example—that seem much easier to fall into in professions (like philosophy) where reputation, and having oneʼs own reputation elevated over the reputations of people with whom one works, is often correlated with promotions, job security, pay raises, and the like.

A non-funded project on deontic logic ---And some general notes on peer-reviewing projects

I have already written about the importance of writing project applications for European scholars. For people who do not have a tenure (i.e., the very vast majority of scholars and the almost-totality of scholars under 40), projects are the only way to get their research financed, since it is very difficult or almost impossible to survive out of teaching alone. Recently, a personal experience made me reflect on the ethics of peer-reviewing research projects. At least in part, my reflections harmonise with the ones Marcus, Moti and others have spelt out, on this and other platforms, concerning peer-reviewing articles on journals. Nonetheless, I would be glad to read your opinion on this specific issue (if you think that it lies far away from you, consider the fact that you might be asked to be a peer-reviewer earlier than you think).

Some months ago, departing from Decemeber 2013, I started working on a fascinating project, the formalisation of the deontic logic of some Mīmāṃsā authors (Kumārila, Prabhākara and Maṇḍana). Given that I am not an expert on formal logic, the project has been conceived together with some colleagues working on formal logic and on the IT tools for automating it. After some preliminary work, we submitted a project within the "Mathematics and…" call of the WWTF. The other principal investigator was Agata Ciabattoni and the other collaborators were Björn Lellmann and Ekaterina Lebedeva. Agata and Björn would have been working with me on selecting the logical rules from the relevant Sanskrit texts, translating them in formal logical language and developing automated deduction methods to reason about them.
Ekaterina, as a linguist and an expert of the intersection of language and logic, would have taken care of the fact that our translations of Sanskrit passages into logical rules did not entail logical ambiguities.

Unfortunately, however, the project has not been funded. I read the four reports, and they all sound positive, so that it is difficult to imagine what we could do better in order to improve our chances by the time of a resubmission. This is a pity and made me consider various other failed projects of colleagues and friends. It seems that there are two types of failures:

1. justified failure: The peer-reviewers give pertinent reasons for which the project is not worthy of being funded.


2. unjustified failure: The reports are entirely positive, or at most contain suggestions for further improvement. Nonetheless, the jury of the funds decides not to fund it.

Strangely enough, it seems that 2) is much more common than 1). In my case, I received a motivated refusal only once, and even then, the refusal was not motivated through scientific reasons, but rather through the fact that I was asking for more money than the university could have wanted to invest (it was a FIRB project in Italy, about the critical edition and study of Nyāyamañjarī 5). In another case (again a FIRB in Italy), the project has not been funded and this was the general comment:

By investigating the work of Jayanta Bhatta from a linguistic point of view, the research project aims to make Indian philosophy available to Western scholars. Topic and methodology are very well thought through. The scientific profile of the research group is outstanding.

The following is an extract of the comments received by a friend on a project which has also not been funded. I have omitted names and titles and further identification marks, but nothing else:

The stand-alone project entitled [om.] submitted by Dr. [om.] appears sound and promising. The applicant proposes to prepare a critical edition with an English translation of the Commentary [om.]. Dr. [om.]'s critical edition of [om.] together with an English transaltion will definitely fill up a long-standing gap in the Indological studies and in philosophy of language, It will be a powerful resource for future research. [om.] The applicant has spelt out the goals and subgoals of his research very clearly. The time line that he has given is pragmatic and the project executable within the proposed time-frame. He has chosen a very competent researcher as his project assistant [om.]. National and international collaborators in the project are all very eminent scholars, in fact stalwarts in the area. I am very hopeful that the project as outlined will make significant contributions to the field. The proposed project lies in the interface area of Indology, Sanskrit Grammar, Philosophy of Language and Metaphysics and has an inter-disciplinary flavour to it.

However, on the last page, under the heading "Suggestions" ---suggested by the jury and not added by the peer-reviewer---, the same peer-reviewer writes:

As the applicant needs to collect material from libraries in India too, he should also try and interact with the established [om.] scholars in India.

This sounds like a genuine suggestion, but has become the reason for rejecting the project.

In the case of deontic logic, the motivation for the refusal was that the project was "very appealing but also very ambitious". The four reports, as I said, are in fact positive or vey positive, although one of them contains indeed the adjective "ambitious" as an answer to the heading "What are the strenghts and weaknesses of the project?" ---the heading is part of the jury's document and had not added by the peer-reviewer:

Strenghts: Even if partly succesful, the project will make a strong contribution to mathematical logic, computational logic and Indology. Truly interdisciplinary, strong feedback between mathematical technology and the application.
Weaknesses: Perhaps a bit too ambitious.

I do not want this to be a rant, but a general reflection. It seems that, given the general economic difficulties, juries are only looking for excuses for letting down projects. Thus, I wonder:
It seems to me that if you care about the project you are peer-reviewing to be funded, then you should just avoid all suggestions. This sounds paradoxical and sad, since one indeed wants to help a project by adding insightful comments. I, as one, cannot remain silent on anything and surely not on something I care for. Nonetheless, it seems that adding comments or suggestions is easily read as a reservation and this is consequently used as the best excuse to let down at least one further project ---given that there are anyway too many good projects to fund them all.

What are your experiences? Which judgements did you receive or write?
Cross-posted, with some changes, on my personal blog

Job market questions?

Now that the job market is upon us, and deadlines rapidly approaching, I thought it might be good to have a post soliciting job-market questions from readers. Questions may be about anything: dossier materials, which jobs to apply for, etc. 

Here are a few questions I have right offhand:

1. What is one to make of jobs that only allow three reference-letters to be uploaded? It seems a bit strange to me to limit the evidence that a candidate might submit on their own behalf in favor of their candidacy. Anyway, if you're a candidate who has multiple letters, and you can't read your own letters to determine which are best, how are you supposed to select which three letters to send? 
2. Is there any sort of advantage/disadvantage to applying early? On the one hand, I can imagine that if committee members might want to look at materials submitted early because it would make their job easier later--in which case submitting early might get your dossier a better look (since it won't be with the hundreds of others submitted at the deadline). On the other hand, submitting early could just be a waste of time...
3. [UPDATE] If you have an AOS in two areas (say, Ethics & Political Philosophy) and you're applying to a job in one of those areas (e.g. an Ethics job), are you at at a disadvantage if your writing sample is a piece of work from your other AOS (your best piece of published work so far is in political)?

Anyway, do you have any job market questions you'd like to get answers to? If so, ask away!

Some things never change: an amusing Frege/Wittgenstein anecdote

I was re-reading Ray Monk's Wittgenstein this weekend, and couldn't help but find the following chain of events amusing:

After rejecting [an] offer to publish [the Tractatus] if he would pay for the printing, [Wittgenstein] asked Frege to investigate the possibility of having it published in the same journal that had published Frege's article.

Frege's reply was not greatly encouraging. He could, he told Wittgenstein, write to the editor of the journal and tell him: 'that I have learnt to know you as a thinker to be taken thoroughly seriously'. But: 'Of the treatise itself I can offer no judgment, not because I am not in agreement with its contents, but rather because the content is too unclear to me.' He could ask the editor if he wished to see Wittgenstein's book, but: 'I hardly think that this would lead to anything.' The book would take up about fifty printed pages, nearly the whole journal, and: 'There seems to me not a chance that the editor would give up a whole edition to a single, still unknown writer.

On Action

This post is about action, of both the mental and the physical sorts.

I mentioned earlier my hunch that the “standard story” (in sense of, e.g., Smith 2010) of action won’t work in the case of cognitive agency, e.g. explaining the sense in which judging is an action. But I will begin by giving some reasons to doubt the standard story of action even in its original domain of application: I do not think it does a good job of handling ordinary physical action either. This is the argument of my paper “The Instrumental Structure of Actions”.

What do I mean by the standard story of action? Consider Wittgenstein’s famous question: “What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?” (1958, sec. 621). Wittgenstein’s question suggests that a mere bodily movement is turned into an intentional action by the addition of something extra. According to the standard story of action, this extra ingredient is an appropriate set of causal relations to some independently specified mental states — perhaps, beliefs, desires, intentions and the like.

Moti Mizrahi on the Survival of the Jews as an evidence of God's existence

The survival of the Jews, notwithstanding persecutions and notwithstanding the sheer fact that millennia have passed since their first historical records, could be surprising. Some have even contended that this is an evidence that God protects the Jews (I will refer to this argument in the following as GpJ).

Against this background, "our" Moti Mizrahi wrote an interesting article that discusses the above hypothesis as a philosophical theory. What follows is a "Honest Review" of this article, i.e., a review which aims at stimulating a discussion.

More precisely Moti construes the argument about the existence of God out of the survival of the Jews as an Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE). In fact, he maintains that it is impossible to say that the above is an Inference to the Only Explanation (IOE). IOE and IBE share the fact that they do not lead from a single premiss to a single conclusion, but rather have to deal with many possible conclusions and choose one among them. The difference between IOE and IBE is that in the former case one excludes all answers but one (as in the Indian instrument of knowledge called arthāpatti), whereas in IBE one can only say that a certain hypothesis is more likely than the others, not that it is certain.

In this sense, even the authors who discuss the IBE about the Existence of God out of the Jewish Survival, namely Rebecca Goldstein (2010) and Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen (1991) do not claim to prove that God exists, but merely suggest that God's existence is the most likely explanation for the unlikely phenomenon of the Jewish survival.
Arguing for God's existence through an IBE may look at first sight promising, since it avoids the oddities of trying to establish inferentially God's existence (but I will suggest at the end that it underlies the same kind of problems) and Moti argues that also Descartes's Third Meditation does something similar when it claims that God's existence is the best explanation for the presence of the idea of God in our minds (this reconstruction is due to Bonjour 2002).

Against this IBE Moti argues in various ways:

1. The survival of the Jews is not more surprising than the survival of the Zoroastrians. Moti does not spell out the point, but I am quite confident that he means that also Zoroastrians are an ancient population and that they have also underwent persecutions and had to migrate away from their original country (most Zoroastrians moved in the Middle Age in Gujarat, India).


2. Even if the survival of the Jews were something extraordinary, it is not clear how God's protection of the Jews should take place. Thus the GpJ argument raises more questions than it can answer and it is no longer the most economical explanation of the phenomenon.


3. Even if one could somehow explain how God protects the Jews, it would still remain unclear who counts as a Jew. If it means a person who practices Judaism, what about converted Jews? And what about people who were born as Jews but do not practive Judaism any more?

Thus, Moti concludes that for the time being GpJ cannot lead to the existence of God as the best explanation of the Jewish survival. The situation might change, thoguh, if one can find out through which mechanism God's protection occurs.

After this short summary of the article I hope that readers will be curious enough to go to the article itself, which is relatively short and very much well-written, so that it makes a very pleasant read.

Next come my small doubts about Mozi's argumentation:
Concerning No. 2), Moti contends that there is no way we can construct GpJ as an IBE, since it is neither economical, nor does it have any other requisite of a best explanation. For instance, Moti says, it is either not testable, or the tests will be negative. In fact,

[W]e would expect humans to be created fairly soon after the creation of the universe […] [W]e would not expect humans to be created very long after the first plants and animals. For, then, what would be the point of having plants and animals for human pleasurem wihtout any humans aound to actually make use of them? Furthermore, if the Jews are indeed the chosen people, then we would expect them to arrive on the scene early in the history of the world. For what would be the point of creation without God's chosen people? (p. 9)

Moti does not say it explicitly, but I understand this argument as leading to the obvious consequence that, since the Jews are not more ancient than, say, the Neanderthalians, God's existence does not stand tests.

Although I am not a theologian nor a historian of Judaism, I am not sure that the tests imagined by Moti are valid. On the one hand, even according to the Biblical account, the human beings come at the end of creation and even the creation of the first five days is said by God to be "good", although there were no humans yet who could have taken advantage of it. As for the need of the Jews to be "arrive on the scene early in the history of the world", since they are the chosen people, I am also not sure. From my (surely too superficial) reading of the Bible I had imagined that the Jews had become God's chosen people due to the fact that they were the only ones who were faithful to His commands. I did not understand that same Biblical passages as meaning that God had chosen a priori only the Jews.

The next problem is more general, namely I wonder whether Rabbi Kelemen really meant the GpJ as an IBE. To me, it looks much more like an argument meant for Jews to enhance their ability to feel reverence for God. For a believer, the presence of God's protection in her life is probably something self-perceived, so that the argument becomes immediately, but subjectively persuasive.

Now, for a general conclusion: Personally, I wonder whether arguments about the existence of God have anything more than an intellectual significance. It might be fun to find a seemingly flawless argument for or against God's existence, but I doubt they will ever convince anyone. This is because —I am inclined to think— God's existence is not an ontological datum like, say, the existence of Pangea some 300 millions ago (the comparison in found in Moti's article).

Cognitive Agency, Judgment and Phenomenology

First of all, I want to thank the Philosophers’ Cocoon for giving me this great opportunity to present and discuss my work. I especially want to thank Marcus Arvan, whose idea it was to run this Featured Author series.

Here is what I would like to do in my posts in the Cocoon. Over the last few years, I've written papers on a variety of topics in the philosophy of mind, action and epistemology. Although these papers seem to be a bit all over the map, I feel that there is a common cluster of concerns that animates them all. I want to take this opportunity to try to bring them together into a more or less coherent story. Some of these posts will be more speculative than others, as I will be going beyond what’s actually in my published papers.

As I see things now, the thread that runs through all of my work is a concern with cognitive agency.

This phrase can mean different things. On the one hand, it can mean the sort of agency or control that you have over your own mental states (and is paradigmatically exercised in reasoning). I have written a bit on reasoning, and I am currently working on a related project as well. I will return to this in a later post. In this post, I want to highlight a different aspect of cognitive agency.

I start from the idea that judging that p is, in some sense, an exercise of agency on your part, regardless of the origins of that judgment — specifically, regardless of whether it is the conclusion of an explicit bit of reasoning.

Suppose that the solution to a problem you’ve been thinking about all day suddenly just occurs to you as you are getting ready to go to bed. There is nothing that you did (at the time, at least) in order to arrive at the solution. And yet intuitively a judgment that just strikes you is as much an exercise of agency on your part as the conclusion of a long chain of reasoning. As Karl Jaspers (1963, 122) writes, thoughts “that strike us—and perhaps make us say not ‘I think’ but ‘it occurs to me’—are still at the same time our thoughts, executed by us”.

Developing an account of judgment as an exercise of agency is an interesting, and underexplored, topic. I doubt that traditional approaches in the philosophy of action are adequate to the task (see also Hieronymi 2009, Boyle 2011). I will return to this in a later post, and I certainly hope to write more on this topic in the future. (My paper ‘Spontaneity and Cognitive Agency” touches upon it, in the context of criticizing standard interpretations of Kant’s difficult notion of the spontaneity of the understanding.)

Setting aside the metaphysics for now, I think it is also worth thinking about the phenomenology that Jaspers gestures towards. As Jaspers suggests, there seems to be something experiential in common between considered thoughts — judgments which, in his terms, we report with  “I think that …” — and thoughts which we report with “it strikes me that …”. There is something that it is like to judge, regardless of where the judgment came from.

The idea that there is a distinctive phenomenology associated with judgment is at the core of my 2014 paper Self-Knowledge and the Phenomenological Transparency of Belief. In that paper, I use this idea to argue for a new(-ish) account of our knowledge of what we believe. The account I defend is a species of the so-called transparency approach, inspired by Gareth Evans’s (1982, 225) idea that “[I]n making a self-ascription of belief, one’s eyes are, so to speak, or occasionally literally, directed outward—upon the world.” However, unlike other proponents of transparency approaches (e.g., Gallois 1996, Byrne 2005 [pdf]) I emphasize the role of the phenomenology of belief in the epistemology of self-knowledge.[1] (Silins 2012 also develops an account that combines transparency and phenomenology, but for reasons discussed in the paper I find his account unsatisfying.)

As I see things, transparency is part of the phenomenology of occurrent belief (or judgment — I do not distinguish between the two). When you judge that p, you experience the thought that p as transparent. Taking the content of your belief to be a fact about the world is part of the phenomenal character of an episode of judging, or of occurrent belief.

What is the motivation for this view? One motivation is simply the observation that occurrent beliefs are phenomenologically distinct from occurrent desires, wishes, fears etc., even if they happen to have the same content. This suggests that there is something phenomenologically distinctive about the attitude that you bear to a content, over and above the content itself. But the attitudeyou bear to the content of a judgment is precisely this — you take it to be a fact about the world. So it seems perfectly natural to think of transparency as part of the phenomenology of judgment (or occurrent belief).

One point that deserves special emphasis here is that, on the view I propose, the phenomenology of judgment does not essentially consist in your being aware of any sort of mental representations (e.g., sentences, images etc). It may or it may not be the case that in  judging you usually (or even always) are aware of such things. On the view I am suggesting, the phenomenology of judgment is "transparent", in the sense that in judging that p you are aware of things outside yourself as being a certain way — namely, such that p. This point is essential to my account of self-knowledge, and also of the rational role of judgment more broadly.

So what does this tell us about self-knowledge? This part of the argument is pretty straightforward. If you possess the concept of belief, then you can be expected to know that the way you take things to be is, in principle at least, to be distinguished from the way things actually are. Subjects with the concept of belief can reasonably be expected to grasp the distinction between appearance and reality. Thus, in a case where a subject with the concept of belief judges that p — and thus takes p to be a fact about the world — she can reasonably be expected to be able to step back from her judgment, and self-ascribe the belief that p.

Notice that this “stepping back” move is not usefully classified as an inference.

In inferring q from p you are relying on the truth of p, as evidence for one or another of its consequences. By contrast, self-knowledge involves bracketing, or stepping back from, your commitment to p. (This is a further point of contrast with recent transparency-based views, such as those defended by Gallois and Byrne.)

Finally, the paper argues for the following bold claim: the phenomenological transparency of occurrent belief or judgment is essential to its reason-giving role. The thought is that unless you take it that p is a fact about the world — in the relevant, phenomenological sense — then p cannot be a reason for you to act intentionally. A state with the content that p might still, of course, influence your behavior even if it lacks the relevant phenomenology; but it won’t make it the case that you act for the reason that p.

Let’s sum up.

My claim is that Jaspers is right that there is a distinctive phenomenology of thinking — a sense, in thinking, that your thoughts are somehow manifestations of your own agency. In the particular case of judgment, I suggest, this ultimately comes down to this: your judgments are not just events in you; they constitute your outlook upon the world. Their distinctive phenomenology comes down to this: the content of your judgments figures in your consciousness as the way you take the world to be. This ultimately helps account for the phenomenon of transparency that Evans identified. More broadly, it helps explain the distinctive rational role of judgment in our cognitive lives.

 

[1] Why the emphasis on judgment, rather than other occurent attitudes? I don't actually have a deep reason for this. For an approach to our knowledge of desire that is in some ways similar to mine see Lauren Ashwell's (2013) paper in Philosophical Studies.

 

Should we have controversial philosophical beliefs?

I was at the annual Central States Philosophical Association conference this weekend (a really great conference, I have to say!), and attended a very interesting talk by Sandy Goldberg on whether we should hold controversial philosophical beliefs. I'm not going to summarize the talk, as I don't know whether Sandy would appreciate that. :) But I would like to discuss the issue in general terms, as it's something that's rattled around in my head for a number of years, and suspect it may have rattled around in many readers' heads as well!

Just the other day at Daily Nous, there was a discussion about telling students our philosophical beliefs. We've discussed this issue here before too! In short, some people think it's okay (viz. it's honest, it makes the classroom more exciting), whereas other people don't think it's so okay (viz. it corrupts the ideal of dispassionate, fair inquiry, and plays into faculty-student power relations). I don't want to rehearse these concerns here. But of there's another concern about why it might not be a good idea to share one's beliefs in the classroom: one shouldn't have beliefs about controversial philosophical issues at all. Allow me to give some reasons in favor of this idea.

Consider any controversial philosophical issue you like--say, the metaphysics of causation. On any such issue, there will be a number of mainstream philosophical views with strong arguments in their favor. Moreover, whatever view one has of the arguments, one has epistemic peers in the discipline--really, really smart people who have throught through the arguments just like you have--who hold very different views than you do. are certain moral worries to have about believing controversial things when the evidence isn't clear. Further, as our own Helen De Cruz notes here at NewAPPS, it's well-known that people's beliefs tend to bias them. In particular, people tend to be notoriously biased in favor of whatever beliefs they actually have at any given time. Because of these facts, one might think, none of us are epistemically entitled to hold controversial philosophical beliefs. We should remain agnostic about controversial philosophical issues because (a) the arguments on controversial issues are disputed among our epistemic peers, and (b) holding beliefs on uncertain grounds tends to bias one in epistemically problematic ways.

In addition to these epistemic worries--that none of us are justified in believing controversial philosophical hypotheses--there are some natural moral worries to have about believing in controversial things without clear evidence. When we believe things, after all, we tend to espouse them. When it comes to moral or political issues, for instance, a person who really believes controversial philosophical ideas (e.g. about libertarianism, egalitarianism, etc.) is likely to convey those beliefs to others, and not just other philosophers, but other people (e.g. at cocktail parties, public debates, etc.). The worry, in other words, is this: there's something wrong with believing controversial philosophical hypotheses because doing so is apt to cause one to lead others to believe the same things (on epistemically uncertain grounds!). To put it another way: how is okay to espouse beliefs that you're not epistemically entitled to believe, and that your audience wouldn't be epistemically entitled to believe either.

I've put these worries abstractly, but I take it they are probably familiar enough to most of us, at least implicitly. I ask myself, "Should I really believe in dualism given that (A) I used to be a physicalist, (B) many really, super-intelligent philosophers see the arguments differently, etc.? Should I really believe my views about moral theory--the views I defend in the book I just finished--given that (A) the arguments surely aren't proofs (few philosophical proofs exist anywhere!), (B) readers will be apt to find flaws in the arguments, see things differently, etc." When I put things this way, it seems intuitive to me that I shouldn't believe. And yet...when I consider why I hold the views I do, I hold them because, in my best judgment, the best arguments support them. In which case it seems intuitively like I should believe my views (it would be epistemically and morally disingenuous not to!). What is a morally and epistemically responsible philosophers to do?

I've come across some philosophers who think we should be agnostic--that one should never truly have beliefs about controversial philosophical issues. I want to suggest, however, that there are moral and epistemic costs to philosophical agnosticism. First, it seems to me dishonest. If one defends something in print, one should believe what one defends. Indeed, I want to say, one should not only believe it. One should live one's beliefs. Anything less, again, seems to me to be dishonest. For example, I recently drafted a book defending a new moral theory. Suppose I wrote the book but was totally agnostic about what it defends. Then suppose a reader asked me, "Do you actually believe the theory you defend? Do you live it?" It seems to me I would be a monster if I answered either of these questions, "no." Of course I think it's good and right to admit some uncertainty. To say, "I know the theory is right" would be hubris. But, for all that, it seems to me, one should at least believe the views one defends. Second, I think there are epistemic hazards to agnosticism--especially in moral and political philosophy. For, in my experience, one way to test a view is to believe, and live, it. Socrates lived his views, and his example illustrates both the compelling points of his philosophy (he meets his death with stoicism), but also its weaker points (he is woefully obtuse to his wife's suffering). Similarly, I think Nietzsche's life is pretty telling vis-a-vis his philosophy. Etc. Philosophy should not be an agnostic shell-game. It should be something we test against lived experience...and one can only truly live a philosophy by believing it. Of course, this isn't to say that we should live every philosophy, or that every philosophy has to be lived to be tested (I certainly wouldn't want anyone to live Evola's philosophy, for instance). It is simply to say that some theories in some areas cannot be tested without someone living them. Finally, it seems to me that so much of value to individual lives is lost without philosophical belief. Philosophy for me, for instance, really has been a wonderful, wild journey. Many of my philosophical views have changed dramatically over the years, and many of the changes have profoundly affected my life. Again, this isn't to say that I'm sure of my beliefs on controversial issues. Far from it! But given the effects that our philosophical beliefs can have on our lives, aren't these good reasons to have them (at least provided we don't harm others on their basis)?

Featured Author: Markos Valaris

I'd like to thank Tomas Bogardus for doing such a great job as the Cocoon's first Featured Author! Tomas certainly challenged how I've always thought about the problem of the contingency of religious belief, and I hope everyone enjoyed the discussion.

I would now like to welcome our second Featured Author: Markos Valaris. Markos received his PhD from Pittsburgh in 2008 and is now Lecturer at UNSW Australia. Markos works in philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, epistemology, and Kant's theoretical philosophy, and has published articles in Mind, Philosophers' Imprint, and Philosophical Studies. His publications include:

Markos Valaris (2014). Reasoning and Regress. Mind 123 (489):101-127.

Markos Valaris (2014). Self-Knowledge and the Phenomenological Transparency of Belief. Philosophers' Imprint 14 (8).

Markos Valaris (2013). Spontaneity and Cognitive Agency. Kant Yearbook 5 (1).

Markos Valaris (2012). Instrumental Rationality. European Journal of Philosophy 20 (4):443-462.

Markos Valaris (2009). Two-Dimensionalism and the Epistemology of Recognition. Philosophical Studies 142 (3):427 - 445.

Markos Valaris (2008). Inner Sense, Self-Affection, and Temporal Consciousness in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Philosophers' Imprint 8 (4):1-18.

Let's all welcome Markos! Also, I'd like to remind readers that if you'd like to become a featured author, all you have to do is email me at [email protected]. The only requirements are that you are (1) an early-career philosopher, with (2) at least one peer-reviewed publication. 

UPDATED: Should our discipline reverse course on grad-student publishing?

UPDATE: After I published this earlier today, one of our Twitter followers, Rachel McKinnon, pointed out that grad-student publishing helps to counteract program-prestige bias, making for a fairer competition between graduates of differently-ranked programs (since publication-records are a more objective measure of a person's capacities). This  seems to me a very important and apt point, and it has led me to rethink the position I advocate in this post. Perhaps grad student publishing isn't so bad after all...

The original post:

Over at an interesting Daily Nous thread on how much grad students need to publish to get jobs, Anon Senior Philosopher writes:

I realize that this is not helpful to the student who inquired, but I agree with Ruth Millikan that requiring early publication in philosophy is a bad thing. See her 2012 Dewey Lecture here:
http://philosophy.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/365/2014/02/Accidents-APA-John-Dewey-Lecture.pdf

In addition to the arguments she gives there, I’ll add that, as someone who supervises Ph.D. students at a relatively prestigious program , I don’t see how graduate students have the time both to write a really strong thesis with well-worked out ideas which will serve as a basis for future publications down the road, and to do the kind of fine-tuning of one individual piece of work which will result in a publication in a good journal before they go on the job market. So I’m reluctant to encourage people to spend time trying to publish, since it is so often at the expense of their dissertations. I wish the discipline could collectively stand its ground against the increasing pressure to publish as a graduate student. Also, as someone who sits on hiring committees, I regard publications as irrelevant. To a large extent, getting published as opposed to just trying to get published is a matter of luck (who you got as your referee and whether your paper resonated with them). I’d much rather see someone with a really interesting and well-thought-out thesis project and some good chapters.

I'm inclined to agree. Not too long ago, publishing while in grad school was rare. The rationale for this was whereas publishing articles is important, (1) it is more important in grad school to develop philosophical breadth and depth, and (2) focusing on standalone articles does not do this. Standalone articles, after all, are just that: articles. To be published, they typically have to be on some small, single argument. This is why I have raised concerns in the past about the move away from traditional, book-type dissertations toward "dissertations" consisting of several loosely related papers, and it is Millikan's worry and the above Senior Philosopher's worry.

Now, I realize that not everyone may agree with these worries. Still, there are other, related worries about the ever-increasing race to publish while in grad school. First, it can make graduate school even more of a "rat race" than it already is. Second, it can clog up journals, as there have to be people to review all of these papers. Third, it can result in people publishing poor work before they are "ready." I could go on. By my lights, there are lots of problems with the increasing rush to publish in grad school, not just one.

But of course this begs the question: if this trend is a bad trend, what can be done about it? Anon Senior Philosopher suggests that our discipline should stand strong and reverse the trend. But how? There is a serious collective-action problem, given that every individual or program who defies the trend puts themselves at a competitive disadvantage. I'm inclined to think that the real cause, and solution, to the problem is the same thing: the job market itself. The rush to publish really began, it seems to me, with the 2008 market crash and subsequent crash in the academic job market. The market became so competitive that the only way to get jobs was to publish more. And so it began. Can trend be reversed? Should it? I leave it to you to discuss!

More on ESL philosophers

Since the issue of ESL philosophers has been "in the news" recently, thanks to Gabriele Contessa, I would like to draw your attention, dear Cocooners and readers, to a comment made by Vincenzo Politi, which I think is worth reading.

Some of the comments above seem to suggest the following argument:

Philosophers who are native English speakers have an undeniable advantage over philosophers who are not native English speakers,

THEREFORE

non-native English speaker philosophers are underrepresented in USA.

Such an argument, HOWEVER, does not explain another interesting factor: why do papers and books authored by native English speaker philosophers tend to be much more cited than papers and books published in the same international journals/publishers but authored by non-native English speaker philosophers?

The point is: if a paper or a book by a non-native English speaker is published by an international peer-reviewed journal or publisher, it means that it is indeed a good piece of philosophical work which meets all the standards of the (Anglophone-dominated) international publications. (It also means that the author is not *that* disadvantaged with respect to the native English speakers when it comes to linguistic skills.) So why do people with non-Anglophone names get cited less than their more obviously Anglophone colleagues?

If you are looking for data supporting my claim, read the paper "European Humanities in Times of Globalized Parochialism" by Gereon Wolters (who is a German philosopher, in case you wonder).

Speaking of biases, in his paper Wolters also offers ample evidence suggesting that NOT having non-native English speakers in philosophy conference organised in US and Canada is the norm rather than the exception.

It is unbelievable (and a bit funny) how some native English speaker philosophers speak about the native English speaker philosophers' bias against some under-represented groups of native English speaker philosophers, and yet all these native English philosophers together seem so blind toward the biases against non-native English speaker philosophers.

You can find a copy of Wolters’ paper, which is also well worth reading, here.

Only Naturalists Should Worry About Evolutionary Debunking Arguments

Thank you again, Cocoon, for hosting me as your first featured author. I’ve enjoyed—and profited from—the discussion in the comments section of my last post. In this final post, I’d like to cut a new path through some issues I’ve been thinking about lately. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the connection between the problem of contingency for religious belief and evolutionary debunking arguments.

These two types of arguments have a lot in common. They both start with observations about the contingency of our beliefs on a certain topics (religion or morality), observations about the method by which these beliefs were formed, about how the content of these beliefs was the result of historical accident. And then, by some steps that are under-described in the literature, we’re meant to get to a skeptical conclusion.

Another commonality: evolutionary debunking arguments seem to rely variously on a sensitivity principle, or a safety principle, or a non-accidentality principle. Here’s one example of each variety.

Justin Clarke-Doane (2012):

The claim that we were selected to have true moral beliefs has counterfactual force. It implies that had the moral truths been very different, our moral beliefs would have been correspondingly different—that it would have benefited our ancestors to have correspondingly different moral beliefs. Accordingly, the key implication of the claim that we were not selected to have true moral beliefs is the negation of this counterfactual.

For Clarke-Doane, the skeptical worry is that facts of evolution show that this counterfactual is false: had the moral truths been very different, our moral beliefs would have been correspondingly different. And that counterfactual is so crucial for knowledge—the skeptic says—that once we realize this, we can no longer sensibly claim to have any knowledge of mind-independent moral facts. Hence the epistemic challenge to moral realism from evolution: our moral faculties—the processes by which we arrive at our moral beliefs—lack an important virtue. And that virtue seems to be sensitivity.

And here are E.O. Wilson and Michael Ruse (1985) arguing for moral skepticism:

Suppose that, instead of evolving from savannah-dwelling primates, we had evolved in a very different way. If, like the termites, we needed to dwell in darkness, eat each other’s feces and cannibalise the dead, our epigenetic rules would be very different from what they are now. Our minds would be strongly prone to extol such acts as beautiful and moral. And we would find it morally disgusting to live in the open air, dispose of body waste and bury the dead. Termite ayatollahs would surely declare such things to be against the will of God… Ethics does not have the objective foundation our biology leads us to think it has.

The idea seems to be that, had things gone differently in our evolutionary history—and they easily might have—the method by which we arrived at our current moral beliefs would have produced radically different moral beliefs. And so, imagining that we “rewind the tape,” so to speak, and rely on the same method of moral belief formation that we actually used, we’ll see that we easily might have arrived at moral beliefs that, by our own lights, would have been false. And that, one might think, shows that our moral beliefs were not formed safely, and so do not count as genuine knowledge.

Finally, here’s Sharon Street (2006) putting the evolutionary challenge to moral realism in terms of luck and coincidence:

[T]he realist must hold that an astonishing coincidence took place—claiming that as a matter of sheer luck, evolutionary pressures affected our evaluative attitudes in such a way that they just happened to land on or near the true normative views among all the conceptually possible ones.

And Matthew Bedke (2009) has it that “cosmic coincidence” is a defeater for intuitive non-naturalism; like Street, he too seems to gesture toward this non-accidentality, anti-luck condition on knowledge. We have good textual reason, then, to suspect that accidentality is the “active ingredient” in evolutionary debunking arguments.

So these authors seem to think that a successful evolutionary debunking argument will have roughly this form:

1. [Insert facts of evolution here]

2. Therefore, my moral beliefs were not formed sensitively, or safely, or non-accidentally.

3. Therefore, my moral beliefs don’t count as genuine knowledge.

Of course, this argument’s success will depend on what we insert into that first premise! Exactly what are those facts of evolution that entail that our moral faculties are insensitive, unsafe, or accidentally true if true at all? That's been left unclear in the literature.

But we can still make progress in evaluating this argument. For reasons we considered vis-à-vis the problem of contingency for religious belief, we can say three things for sure. First, as I argued previously, that inference from 2 to 3 is dubious, so the moral skeptic will have to fashion another version of the evolutionary debunking argument. Second, If the facts of evolution that are meant to carry us to premise 2 are merely facts about the contingency of our evolutionary history, facts about how easily our moral sense might have delivered beliefs that would be false by our own lights had we evolved differently, etc., then the first inference will be vulnerable to the objections we discussed last time.

Third, it looks like the problem of self-defeat will be less pressing for the moral skeptic than it was for the religious skeptic. Everyone—except Phil H in the comments! ;-)—has beliefs on religious topics and therefore will have to answer to the problem of contingency for religious belief. But genuine moral skeptics might plausibly withhold judgment on any moral topic, and they might claim that their skepticism resulted not from the use of their moral faculties but by the use of their rational faculties, faculties that aren’t undermined by the facts of evolution.

And moral realists can’t avail themselves of that exemption. Unless of course they think their moral faculties just are (among) their rational faculties, or that our moral sense is analogous to our rational faculties in crucial respects.

And some philosophers do think that. We might call them “Rationalists,” and they think our moral judgments do not rely crucially on any mental intermediate, any sentiment, seeming, “gut feeling,” “affect-laden intuition,” etc. Rather, we just see the truth of certain moral propositions in an immediate, non-inferential way, as we just see that e.g. Gettier’s Smith had JTB but no knowledge. Philosophers we might call “Sentimentalists” think otherwise: our moral judgments do rely crucially on some mental intermediary.

I can see—if a bit dimly—how Sentimentalists might be threatened by evolutionary debunking arguments. For them, moral judgment relies crucially on a report or representation from our evolved moral sense. And this evolved moral sense was not aimed at the truth or anything necessarily connected to the truth. We can’t make moral judgments without this moral sense, and yet we have no reason to trust it, given those facts of evolution. We’ve got no dispute-independent reason to favor the deliverances of our moral faculties over conflicting deliverances from others’ moral faculties (or the conflicting deliverances our moral faculties easily might have given had we evolved differently). Sentimentalists, it seems, are in trouble from an evolutionary debunking argument that doesn’t rely on controversial claims about sensitivity, safety, or non-accidentality, but only rather more plausible conciliatory claims from the epistemology of disagreement.

But Rationalists are not threatened—at least not on pain of self-defeat for the skeptic. The skeptic’s rational faculties are not so tainted by the facts of evolution that he cannot run through and accept this evolutionary debunking argument. (Otherwise, self-defeat.) So, if Rationalism is right about moral psychology, why can’t we say the same about our moral faculties? That seems to be an acceptable way out of the evolutionary debunking argument. Either the skeptic self-defeats, or Rationalists are off the hook.

And there’s a third option for moral psychology. Maybe our moral judgments do rely on some intermediary (some report, some representation), as the Sentimentalists say. Yet maybe the source of this intermediary was not the product of unguided evolution, showing no concern for truth. Maybe, as “Divine Revelationists” hold, the source of the reports on which we base our moral judgments is some supernaturally-endowed conscience, divine testimony, or the like. In that case, it’s hard to see how the facts of evolution could undermine those moral beliefs.

So that’s what I’m thinking these days: Sentimentalists should worry about evolutionary debunking arguments, but Rationalists and Divine Revelationists need not worry.

One more upshot: For obvious reasons, Divine Revelation is incompatible with philosophical naturalism. For less obvious reasons, naturalism doesn’t play nice with Rationalism. (Accepting Rationalism about moral psychology would be, for many, to just give up on the anti-a-priori, demystifying project of naturalizing moral psychology.) So naturalists are pushed in the direction of Sentimentalism. And non-naturalists are not; non-naturalists can embrace Rationalism or Divine Revelationism with smiles, open arms, and back-pats.

But recall that Sentimentalists should worry about evolutionary debunking arguments. So I’m inclined to conclude that only naturalists should worry about evolutionary debunking arguments.

This is very much a work in progress for me, so I'd greatly appreciate any feedback or comments that come to your minds. Thanks in advance! :-)

There are good rankings and bad rankings

There has been a lot of discussion on the philosophy blogosphere of late on whether the PGR should continue, and whether philosophy departments should be ranked at all. John Protevi, for example, has produced an "October Statement" soliciting signatories to endorse the idea of "No Rankings, Not Now, Not Ever."

I am actually very sympathetic with the idea that our discipline should do away with "reputational" rankings forever, and for a couple of reasons. First, I do not think there is any methodologically sound way to do reputational rankings. Reputation rankings must be based on either (1) the qualitative judgments of a select few (as the PGR does, in selecting its board/voting members), or (2) the qualitative judgments of the many (i.e. the philosophical community as a whole). Neither methodology seems to me sound in principle. (1) is  methodologically problematic because any selection of a select few will have to be peformed by other individuals with their own biases and philosophical preferences, and (2) is problematic because there is little reason to think that the many are good judges of the philosophical quality of departments across the discipline as a whole (as most of us are quite unfamiliar with the work of most other people). Second, I tend to think reputational rankings set up morally perverse incentive structures, ultimately concentrating power in the discipline in a relatively small number of individuals and departments.

So I, for one, am right with those who would like to do away with reputational rankings. But, for all that, I think it would be a mistake to do away with all rankings, particularly rankings on things like (i) job placement, (ii) attrition rates, and (perhaps) (iii) department climate. I believe rankings on these things are of great importance. Anyone who enters a PhD program should have access to sound information about whether the next 5-10 years of their life are likely to be a positive experience with good prospects for career success. Collecting and ranking graduate programs in these areas would not only provide prospective students with much-needed information; it would put much-needed outside pressure on programs to improve their performance--something I believe our profession has every right to expect of them. Too many graduate students over the years have suffered, and continue to suffer, from finding themselves in departments with poor placement rates, attrition rates, and climates. Quantitative rankings would hold departments accountable for their performance, and such accountability can be expected to systematically lead, in time, to better treatment of graduate students throughout the profession.

Or so say I. What say you, my fellow Cocooners?

Call for applications: Seminar on Intellectual Humility

I've been asked to post the following call for applications. Looks like something that could be great for early-career people to attend!

Intellectual Humility: Its Nature, Value, and Implications. May 8-11, 2015. A three-day seminar at the Fuller Guest Center (Pasadena, California) for 15 advanced graduate students or junior faculty (no more than 10 years past the PhD).

Faculty speakers include:

Joshua Alexander
Jason Baehr
Nathan Ballantyne
Heather Battalay
Jessica Brown
Adam Green
Peter Hill
Thomas Hofweber
Daniel Howard-Snyder
Thomas Kelly
Mark Leary
Sarah McGrath
J.L. Schellenberg
Dennis Whitcomb

Themes include:

The nature of intellectual humility
Empirical study of intellectual humility
Philosophical intuition
Metaphysical and religious modesty
Peer disagreement
Moral deference
Situationism
Fallibilism
Mind-reading, empathy, and intersubjectivity

$500 honorarium plus all expenses paid. Successful applicants will commit to studying items on the seminar syllabus prior to the seminar, and to attending the Capstone Conference on Catalina Island, May 10-14, immediately following the seminar, all expenses paid.

For more information and instructions on how to apply, see http://humility.slu.edu/portfolio/mayseminar/

Direct all questions to [email protected]. Application deadline: December 31, 2014. Winners will be announced January 15, 2015.

Supported by the Philosophy and Theology of Intellectual Humility Project at Saint Louis University. Funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

Refereeing practices for better journal publication experiences

I was recently talking to a philosopher who had to wait 17 months for an initial decision on her paper at a top journal. Another had to wait over 12 months and has now retracted her paper after the editor remained unresponsive to her inquiries on the status of her paper. In both cases, the slow journals were in the top 5. I have had many discussion with people about how awful reviewers are, how they systematically misunderstand the points we make, or try to get citations to their own work into our papers.

Here's a puzzle: Why do so many people (me included) think they are conscientious, timely referees with constructive feedback, yet do we end up having our papers reviewed by tardy, careless, uncharitable referees? Since we have no reason to assume we're special, something is going on. It might be that we overestimate our own quickness and constructiveness. Also, we might underestimate the value of reviewer comments we receive. This seems likely given that me-side bias (the bias whereby we systematically underestimate the strength of views not in favor of our prior beliefs) is not attenuated in highly educated people. 

Looking over my CV in the section "services to the profession" (which is pretty useless for career purposes), I see that I have reviewed for at least 24 journals (not all of them in philosophy), and 3 academic book publishers. Most of these requests have come in over the past few years. I have adopted a set of practices that I find useful in keeping reviewing manageable and that hopefully maximizes the benefit my reviewees get (see also here, Thom Brooks's guidelines, some of which converge with the practices outlined here)

Recent Work by Cocooners (September 2014)

The following papers were either published or posted to philpapers by Cocoon contributors during the month of September (authors are listed in alphabetical order):

Mark Alfano (forthcoming). Michael W. Austin, Ed. Virtues in Action: New Essays in Applied Virtue Ethics. Journal of Value Inquiry:1-6.

Marcus Arvan (forthcoming). How to Rationally Approach Life's Transformative Experiences. Philosophical Psychology.

Marcus Arvan (2014). First Steps Toward a Nonideal Theory of Justice. Ethics and Global Politics 7 (3):95-117.

Marcus Arvan (2014). Why Hobbes Cannot Limit the Leviathan: A Critical Commentary on Larry May's Limiting Leviathan. Hobbes Studies 27 (2).

Eric Kerr & Axel Gelfert (2014). The 'Extendedness' of Scientific Evidence. Philosophical Issues 24 (1):253-281.

Moti Mizrahi (forthcoming). Phenomenal Conservatism and Self-Defeat Arguments: A Reply to Huemer. Logos and Episteme.

Moti Mizrahi (2014). Are Seemings Trustworthy? A Reply to Piazza. The Reasoner 8 (9):100-101.

Justin Snedegar, Ethics and Contrastivism. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Tuomas E. Tahko (forthcoming). Empirically-Informed Modal Rationalism. In Robert William Fischer & Felipe Leon (eds.), Modal Epistemology After Rationalism. Synthese Library.

Meg Wallace (2014). The Argument From Vagueness for Modal Parts. Dialectica 68 (3):355-373.

Have I missed anything? If so, just let me know and I'll update the list!