The Philosophers' Cocoon

Reader query on APA interviews

In response to our most recent, 'How can we help you?' post, an anonymous job-candidate writes:

It would be really helpful to get some advice on interviewing at the APA Eastern for those of us who are being interviewed there for the first time very soon! What should job candidates bring? I am not sure what to show up with. Should I bring a folder with my complete dossier (CV, writing sample, research statement, teaching statement and evaluations, sample syllabi, diversity statement, etc.)? How many copies should one have on hand? How does this interview differ from Skype interviews? I have now had some practice with first-round Skype/teleconference interviews, but I'm very nervous about the APA.

Good questions! What do you all think? Helen and I co-wrote a post last year on APA interviews as part of our Job-Market Boot Camp--and I hope readers found it helpful. Aside from what I wrote there, here are a few of my thoughts.

Pre-Christmas chillout

Continued below the fold...

Morality, the Problem of Possible Future Selves, and Christmas Parables

In my 2016 book, Rightness as Fairness: A Moral and Political Theory, I argue that morality is a solution to a problem of diachronic rationality called 'the problem of possible future selves.'

To simplify (very) greatly, the problem--which is partially inspired by L.A. Paul's groundbreaking work on transformative experience--is that (A) our present selves have to make decisions on behalf of our future selves, but (B) we do not know which future selves we will actually be (particularly as the future becomes more distant), including (C) what our future selves' retrospective preferences will be regarding our decisions in the present. I then argue that this problem can be solved if and only if our various selves cooperate with each other across time--not just across seconds or minutes, but across decades--to act on principles that are rational for all of one's possible future selves to endorse in unison given mutual recognition of the problem.

The final part of the argument is that this cross-temporal agreement consists of principles of fairness--principles which require one to treat all of one's possible selves fairly, and by extension, all other persons and sentient beings. The reason for this is broadly as follows: because one has an infinite number of possible future selves--some of whom are selfish, others of whom care about other human beings, animals, etc.--the only principles that all of one's selves can rationally agree upon in unison are those that strike a certain kind of compromise between self-interest and the interests of others: a compromise comprised by four principles of fairness.

Anyway, I argue that a rapidly increasing body of neurobehavioral evidence supports picture (a little of which is nicely summarized here and here). In essence, it increasingly appears not only that (A) the neural mechanisms that enable us to care about our own possible future selves just are the neural mechanisms that lead us to care about others, but also that (B) moral behavior and (self-regarding) prudential behavior are simultaneously enhanced or degraded together in direct proportion to the extent to which we concern ourselves with our possible future selves.

Still, all of this is very abstract. Can a simpler, more down-to-earth intuitive case be made for how moral cognition and motivation are rooted in concern for one's possible future (and by extension, possible past) selves? I believe that Christmas parables, of all things, can help!

Reader query on teaching experience and the job market

In response to our latest "How can we help you?" post, a reader by the name of 'Eric' writes:

Another issue that may be worth discussing is how much teaching should an applicant have to be competitive at R1s, SLACs or large state schools provided that one has at least one decent publication. By decent publication I mean a third tier journal or better.

Some people think that (1) one or two classes will suffice to make one competitive but I've noticed some people think that (2) more than two classes can make help make one more competitive at either SLACs or large state schools.

There seems to be some consensus that to be competitive across all kinds of schools, one should have some teaching and at least one publication. But, beyond this, it seems that there is less consensus.

Good question! I'm not sure how much teaching experience matters for R1s, as they are plausibly interested most in one's promise as a researcher. When it comes to 'selective'/elite liberal arts colleges, the optimal amount of teaching seems less clear to me. Given that such colleges are highly ranked, they too are presumably looking for distinguished researchers--but, as liberal arts schools they also presumably prioritize teaching as well. So, can anyone from a selective liberal arts school chime in to provide Eric and others like him some guidance here? And what about large state schools that are not R1s?

For my part, I have worked at a small-to-mid-sized liberal arts college for 7 years now, and my experience here is that for schools like mine, provided one is publishing effectively and one's teaching reviews are strong, the more breadth of teaching experience one has the better. The reasons for this are simple. At many schools like mine, philosophy departments are small--but teaching is very much valued, and there may be very specific courses the search committee doing the hire needs the new TT hire to be able to teach. So, for instance, one school doing a hire may need/desire their hire to teach epistemology; a second school might need/desire their hire to teach ancient philosophy; a third may need/desire the hire to teach modern philosophy; a fourth biomedical ethics; and so on. The more of these courses a candidate has experience teaching, the larger the proportion of jobs at these schools they are likely to be competitive for--which is just another way of saying that, on the "teaching jobs" market, the more courses one has experience teaching, the more competitive one is likely to be (all things being equal of course). And my sense is that the same is probably true for community colleges as well.

Anyway, these are some of my quick thoughts. What do you all think?

Reader query on when to head on the job-market

In response to our newest "How can we help you?" post, a reader by the name of 'Eric' writes:

It would be helpful if there was a post discussing things one should consider when deciding to go on the job market. For example, should one go on the market in the beginning of their 5th year as a US graduate student if they do not have a publication. If they should go on the market without a publication, what things need to be true and what kinds of jobs should they apply for? These questions are motivated by my own situation as a 4th year graduate student at a top-15 program. But, it seems like a more general discussion of whether and where one should apply when one is a 5th year could be useful.

Good question! What do you all think?

Reader query on good things search committees did

In the comments section of our newest "How can we help you?" post, a reader by the name of 'Tom' writes:

Oooh! I have an idea. Let's have a thread sometime where job-seekers can write in with things they *liked* that search committees did. But not snarkily. E.g. I had a flyout once and when we went out to dinner the folks I was with both made sure to order drinks and then encourage me too. That was nice because I sure as hell needed one, and they made sure I felt ok getting one. Stuff like that.

Maybe we could have one going the other way round, too? I imagine there are things candidates do that make search committees happy as well.

Great idea! In this post, let's address Tom's first suggestion: what things have search committees done that you particularly liked as a candidate? Tomorrow, I'll open up a thread on Tom's second suggestion!

I suppose I'll begin. One thing that really impressed me when I was interviewing for my current job was how I was given a good amount of "down time." I had some on-campus visits where I had to meet a dean at 9am in the morning, and then was rushed from meeting to meeting (with the provost, HR, etc.), lunch, teaching and research demos, and finally to dinner. As an introvert who is also decidedly not a morning person, I found on-campus visits like these a dreadful experience. Not that I didn't appreciate having the on-campus interview (I most certainly did!). It was just that at some places the actual visit was the most non-stop-stressful experience imaginable. In contrast, when interviewing at my current university, my first meeting of the day wasn't until 10am, the dinner was the night before my day of demos of interviews, and I was given plenty of downtime throughout the day to recharge my batteries. I really appreciated it. It made the on-campus visit a far more enjoyable experience!

Anyway, what have search committees done that you liked as a candidate?

How can the Cocoon help you? (December 2016)

It's been about a month and a half since our last "How can we help you?" post, and since it's almost Christmas and we're in the heart of the job season, I figured now might be a good time for another one.

For readers new to this series, this is a periodic opportunity to pose questions to our community on anything you could use some help with (anything at all consistent with the blog's mission). Just post your query in the comments section below! You can ask questions about the academic and non-academic job-markets, publishing, teaching, or the profession more broadly. I will then select questions from the comments section and open new posts on them for community discussion.

Given that the academic job-market is now in full-swing, feel free to ask the Cocoon community questions about:

• Skype and phone interviews
• On-campus visits
• Etc.

We're here to help, so fire away!

Reader query on how search committees judge interviewees

In our open job-market thread, an anonymous job-marketeer writes in:

I am wondering whether search committees tend to be forgiving when candidates botch (badly) one interview question out of very many. Suppose the entire interview went perfectly and the candidate nailed absolutely everything to the point where the search committee seemed like they were pitching themselves to the candidate - but then, in one of the candidate's last answers, s/he couldn't for the life of her answer a question about how to teach a course that was (admittedly) listed in the ad, fumbling through the answer and then honestly saying she'd need to think more about that course but would be excited to develop and teach it at institution X. Is this an immediate deal breaker?

I think this is a good query for a couple of reasons. First, it raises good micro-level questions that many candidates probably wonder about: does flubbing one question in an otherwise good interview "tank" a candidate? If so, when? Second, it raises some good macro-level questions: how do search committees judge candidates in an interview? What kinds of things reflect well on a candidate? What kinds of things are clear negatives and/or "disqualifiers"?

Any search committee members out there willing to weigh in?

Reader query on backing out of one job for another

In the comments section responding to a recent reader query on cover letters, an anonymous reader asks:

So given the new extended structure of the job market, many jobs are doing flyouts before another position has even done first round interviews. It is a very real possibility that an individual might be offered one job before they know if they will be offered another preferable job. I might be in a situation like this. It seems that in this job market the only logical choice is to take a position if offered.

So suppose one takes a position but then is offered a much preferable position? My adviser actually told me it is no big deal and just to go back on my contract. This seems horrible for a number of reasons. First, it just seems unethical. The school who offered you a job might be a small school who will be in a rough spot if you go back on your word. Second, you could make enemies.

On the other hand, choosing a job is a huge life decision. Job seekers are clearly in a desperate position. There also seems something wrong with refusing to take a better position which would clearly lead to a better life for you and your family.

Can someone please advise on this situation? I would like to know what someone should do and how they should handle it. If it is right to go back on your deal, how should one do that? If you have to turn down the preferable position, how should you do that?

Thank you!

Great questions - what do you all think?

Rubrics

By JG

In an earlier post I gave the advice of using rubrics rather than comments in grading, which started a good conversation in the comments. So I thought the idea of rubrics merited its own post, especially since it’s finals time for many of us. So join me below the fold...

Reader query on historical logic readings

A reader writes in:

I teach logic, and I guess many early career sorts teach a fair amount of logic. But I don't have any particular background in logic. I can teach class well, but I don't have the expertise to really give the class the extra oomph.

One thing I'd like to do is blend a few readings in the history of philosophy into the course (which is otherwise almost a foundations of mathematics course). Even if they don't blend perfectly, I'd like to expose some of my general education students to some great writings, perhaps to spark an interest in further philosophy courses. Maybe something from the greeks when we are doing the categorical logic, and something from the 19th century when we get to propositional logic. Really, any time period is great--but I don't know the writings, and when I google "history of logic syllabus" I don't get very much.

So I thought I'd ask the cocooners if they had any advice.

This isn't an area I teach in, so unfortunately I don't have any suggestions--but hopefully some of our readers do!

Sunday funday

Teaching experimental philosophy to third-year undergraduates

This year, I developed a course in experimental philosophy for third-year students at Oxford Brookes. Classes have now ended, and I am getting the first large end-of-term essays in, and it is looking promising so far. In this post, I want to explain how I taught experimental philosophy and how I approached the subject. 

What I wanted to do in the course

At our university, as in most UK institutions, we have 12-semester weeks, and the last week is usually devoted to writing up papers, so that leaves only 11 2-hour teaching sessions. Nevertheless I wanted to teach

• An overview of experimental philosophy
• Basics of statistics
• Some elementary notions of experimental design

This was quite an ambitious set of goals. Of course, given that I had only 22 contact hours to teach this course, I had to be careful in selecting appropriate exercises and readings. 

Why teaching experimental philosophy is a good idea

Only 14 students enrolled in this course (our typical class size is about double for the second and third years), probably because it was offered late and also because some students worried about the mathematics involved in the statistics.

However, I think experimental philosophy is a good course to offer because of its transferable skills on the job market. Being able to design a simple questionnaire and conducting statistical tests are attractive graduate skills.

Next to that, I think experimental philosophy is also useful for students to get the chance to do philosophy a bit differently: engage with people by having them participate in your experiment or code for you, and reflect on practices in our discipline, such as reliance on intuitions. For both these reasons, I think an experimental philosophy course is most suited for final year students (UK undergraduate degrees have three years).

The basic setup of the course

The course consisted in part of a theoretical introduction to the field of experimental philosophy, including the following topics:

• What is experimental philosophy? (Positive, negative, descriptive programmes)
• Intuitions of ordinary people and why they matter
• Are philosophers experts?
• The experimental philosophy of morality

For the statistics/practical part of the course, I made a selection of concepts and tests that are useful and relatively simple.

In spite of recent criticisms levelled against it, I decided to stick with significance testing, but with paid attention to the pitfalls of this practice (p-hacking etc.), and information about controlling for multiple tests. I also gave them the right definition of a p-value (from the recent American Statistical Association) and emphasized that p-values and effect sizes are different things.

• Designing experiments and collecting data (within/between experimental designs, and some mixed designs, getting approval from ethics committee, designing an information sheet, different forms of surveying)
• Basics of statistical inference – types of variables, levels of measurement, the z-distribution, testing for normality, the central limit theorem
• Three kinds of t-test, interpreting a p-value, confidence intervals
• Chi-square tests, cross-tabulations, and Fisher’s exact test
• Pearson’s correlation, elements of linear regression, scatter plots

For each of these, I carefully explained the statistical concepts involved such as what the chi-square distribution is, how to calculate (and what are) the degrees of freedom, what the chi-square statistic means, and different critical chi-square statistics for alpha levels.

I regularly introduced little quizzes where I probed students’ statistical understanding. For example, suppose a lecturer, Kevin is very concerned about recent findings that women find philosophy courses less appealing and interesting. He wants to do a statistical test on student evaluations where he will compare how interesting men and women find his course on a likert scale from 1-7. He wants to make sure that, if there is an effect, he detects it. Should he place the alpha-level higher or lower than .05, and motivate your choice.

What the students did

The students did four small tasks and wrote a large essay. For example, they had to attempt to replicate the Knobe effect. The Knobe effect, first described by Joshua Knobe in 2003, is the tendency of people to attribute whether an action is intentional or not, based on the perceived moral character of that action. In Knobe’s original study, the majority of participants who heard about a CEO who knowingly started a program that would maximize profits but also harm the environment (as an unintended, but foreseen side-effect) said the CEO harmed the environment intentionally. If “harmed” is changed to “helped”, by contrast, most participants think that the CEO did not help the environment intentionally. We put all the data of the students together (140 responses in total). Knobe’s original findings replicated beautifully. The students wrote the null and alternative hypothesis, performed a chi-square and t-test (the t-test was on how much blame or praise the CEO deserved, the independent variable was the condition), and wrote the results in the APA (American Psychological Association’s) style.

Throughout the classes, students also were tasked to invent new experimental designs. For example, they had to try to come up with a factorial design for a variation of the Knobe effect experiment where you have 2 factors. The first is the familiar harm/help condition. Students came up with interesting other factors, such as the side-effect not being harm or help to the environment, but something else such as poverty in developing countries, or something specific such as polar bears, or varying the gender of the CEO.

The large essay was a replication of Shaun Nichols’ experimental study on the genealogy of norms. Nichols argued that emotions can influence cultural evolution, and used the survival of norms to the present day to test this. He used an etiquette book, Erasmus’ On Good Manners for Boys (1530), distilled 61 rules from it, and had these coded by coders. He hypothesized that rules that prohibit doing something disgusting (e.g., “there should be no collection of mucus in the nostrils”) would have a better survival rate compared to rules prohibiting something non-disgusting actions (e.g., “only cut bread with a knife”).

Students received the dataset, which I in turn had received from Shaun Nichols, and they had this coded by coders; one who had to code whether the action mentioned was an elicitor of core disgust (something involving bodily fluids), and a second to judge whether it was part of contemporary manners. This is where I had the one major glitch in my course, because it turned out many coders weren’t careful or had not understood the instructions. To avoid problems with many students ending up with suboptimal datasets, I selected the mode (most common) response of each coding. In this way, all students had the same dataset. Nichols’ original findings were replicated, but the results were not as extreme as in his original study; perhaps a result of cultural differences in norms between the UK and the US.

Feedback from students

Students were very positive about this course. Many of them liked to do the statistical tests, and one student even mentioned in their evaluation they wanted to know more about statistics than I was able to offer. They were also encouraged by the fact that they could list some knowledge of SPSS, statistics and experimental design in their CVs.

Literature

I assigned experimental philosophy papers, such as Knobe’s side effect paper, but also thoughtful, theoretical papers such as Jennifer Nagel’s Intuitions and Experiments: A Defense of the Case Method in Epistemology (PPR, 2012).

In addition to experimental philosophy papers, I used two books. Both books were very helpful, although I could not use the materials on working with R in Sytsma and Livengood, given that I went with SPSS.

• Justin Sytsma and Jonathan Livengood, 2015. The Theory and Practice of Experimental Philosophy
• Sarah Boslaugh, 2013. Statistics in a nutshell.

Guest post on the Perils of Practicing Public Philosophy

On the Perils of Practicing Public Philosophy

By Shane Ralston

First of all, I’d like to thank Marcus for the opportunity to share with you some ideas I have about public philosophy. My name is Shane Ralston and I’m a mid-career philosopher and faculty member at Penn State University Hazleton (for more, see my professional website and/or my Academia.edu page). I am fully aware that not all of you will agree with my claims, but I hope that we can still be respectful and supportive in our disagreement (as dictated by the Cocoon community’s mission) and of course learn from each other in the process.

For the sake of clarity, let’s start with a fairly non-controversial definition of ‘public philosophy’ offered by Jack Russell Weinstein in his essay “What Does Public Philosophy Do? (Hint: It Does not Make Better Citizens)”:

In contrast to philosophy simpliciter, public philosophy denotes the act of professional philosophers engaging with non-professionals, in a non-academic setting, with the specific goals of exploring issues philosophically. In other words, public philosophy involves getting people to think about the assumptions that govern the things they do, the controversies they are immersed in, and the experiences of their day-to-day lives by looking at those aspects that are either invisible to them or taken for granted. Public philosophy and philosophy as it is usually understood are not too far apart, although their audiences differ radically. What public philosophy need not be, however, is professionalized and refined.

Weinstein claims that “[p]ublic philosophy and philosophy as it is usually understood are not too far apart,” except that “their audiences differ radically.” Doing public philosophy is different than what we do here in a friendly community of supportive (and, to at least some degree, like-minded) fellow philosophers. Public philosophy is practiced in a world that is not always friendly to liberals or intellectuals, a world where people commonly troll, harass and bully others (and, I might add, it’s probably become worse since the election of Mr. Trump).

As public philosophers, we often discover that institutional forces do not always operate in fair or rational ways. In speaking truth to power, we can become unwitting targets of retaliation. Given this danger, early-career philosophers should be wary of doing public philosophy, particularly when it jeopardizes their career and reputation. For instance, there have been an alarming number of recent incidents in which universities retaliated against professors who tweeted controversial political messages (see here, here and here). Also, professors who are outspoken in their left-leaning political activism have been added to a “Professor Watchlist” in an attempt to tarnish their reputations (see here, here and here). I’ll return to this point about the dangers that doing public philosophy poses for early-career philosophers.