The Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy is hosting a pioneer event: a summer school exclusively for female students. Summer schools for female students are now well established in mathematics, but to my knowledge this is the first summer school in philosophy geared explicitly towards female students. (In a similar vein, Rutgers hosts the wonderful Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy.) I am posting below the official announcement that has been circulated today. Please pass on the information to anyone you think may be interested, and do encourage your motivated female students to apply!
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I thought I would make my inaugural post on NewAPPS a follow-up to Roberta's post about the retraction of the article in Food and Chemical Toxicology. I don't want to continue the debate about whether the retraction was justified; that debate can continue in the original thread. Here, I want to discuss one of the reasons why we should be paying vigilant attention to events such as these, and why their importance transcends the narrow confines of the particular scientific hypotheses being considered in the articles in question. What I worry most about is the extent to which pressures can be applied by commercial interests such as to shift the balance of “inductive risks” from producers to consumers by establishing conventional methodological standards in commercialized scientific research.
Inductive risk occurs whenever we have to accept or reject a hypothesis in the absence of certainty-conferring evidence. Suppose, for example, we have some inconclusive evidence for a hypothesis, H. Should we accept or reject H? Whether or not we should depends on our balance of inductive risks—on the importance we attach, in the ethical sense, of being right or wrong about H. In simple terms, if the risk of accepting H and being wrong outweighs the risk of rejecting H and being wrong, then we should reject H. But these risk are a function not only of the degree of belief we have in H, but also of negative utility we attach to each of those possibilities. In the appraisal of hypotheses about the safety of drugs, foods, and other consumables, these are sometimes called “consumer risk” (the risk of saying the item is safe and being wrong) and “producer risk” (the risk of saying the item is not safe and being wrong.)
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A headline story this morning, featured in several news outlets, reported on a new study published online in PNAS yesterday that allegedly confirms that there are major brain differences between men and women. In the study Ragini Verma, an associate professor in the Department of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues examined the neural connectivity across the whole brain in 949 individuals (521 females and 428 males) aged 8 to 22 years using diffuse tensor imaging (DTI).
The researchers found that in certain age groups, females had greater inter-hemispheric connectivity in the supratentorial region (the part of the brain above the cerebellum), whereas males exhibited greater intra-hemispheric connectivity as well as greater interhemispheric connectivity in the cerebellum. The cerebellum has been implicated in certain forms of knowledge of action and knowledge-how, interhemispheric connectivity seems crucial for many social skills, and intrahemispheric connectivity in local sensory regions may lead to richer perceptual experiences. So, on the basis of these findings, many news reports concluded that men have a greater perception to action potential, whereas women have a greater potential for communicating and connecting “the analytical and intuition.” Some concluded that gender differences in brain connectivity are hard-wired.
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Francesco del Punta, a well-known and much admired scholar of medieval philosophy, sadly passed away yesterday. Upon hearing the news from his former student Luca Gili, I asked Luca to write an obituary for NewAPPS, and here it is.
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After a long and dreadful illness, Francesco Del Punta (1941-2013) passed away yesterday evening. He was a great scholar and a great man, and he will be much missed. Del Punta is well known especially for his edition of Ockham’s commentary on Aristotle’s Sophistici Elenchi (St. Bonaventure, New York, 1978), and for his edition of Paul of Venice’s treatises De veritate et falsitate propositionis and De significato propositionis (Oxford, 1978).
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This is my first foray into newAPPS waters– and I thank the newAPPS coterie for the invitation!– so I thought I’d start by tossing out a fairly straightforward philosophical claim: Tolerance is not a virtue.
When I say that tolerance is not a virtue, to be clear, I don’t mean to imply that tolerance is a vice. No reasonable moral agent, certainly no moral philosopher worth his or her salt, would concede that. Rather, I only want to point out that “being tolerant” requires at most little if not nothing more than refraining from being vicious. Not only is it the case that we don’t define any other virtue in this explicitly negative way, but we also don't generally ascribe any particular kind of moral credit to persons who are merely refraining from being vicious.
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I have recently been working on a paper about some of the testable implications of DRT (discourse representation theory) and related dynamic semantic frameworks. One of the questions I am stuck on is that of how to put the semantics of proper names to the test. The general framework of DRT does not commit us to a special theory of proper names. However, Hans Kamp traditionally treated them as individual constants, which is consistent with the philosophical (and post-semantic) theory that non-empty names stand in causal-historical relations to their referents. In subsequent work Kamp has treated names as predicates but with an anchor to a particular individual satisfying the predicate. This, too, is consistent with a causal-historical constraint.
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[This call has also been spread on Prosblogion, but by posting on NewApps I hope to reach a wider audience]
If you are a professional philosopher of religion (including graduate students), I would be very grateful if you could fill out the following survey: https://surveys.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_4UvmgvHInmoRgkR
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Both of these writing modes are essential skills for graduate students to master, but it’s hard to get them to even try the “teacher-development” mode, perhaps because it’s more difficult. (It’s especially important for continental philosophy students to master this, since they will very often be addressing non-CP experts when addressing professional colleagues.)
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The editor of the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT), Dr A. Wallace Hayes, has decided to retract the study by the team of Prof Gilles-Eric Séralini, which found that rats fed a Monsanto genetically modified (GM) maize NK603 and tiny amounts of the Roundup herbicide it is grown with suffered severe toxic effects, including kidney and liver damage and increased rates of tumours and mortality.
But as this article points out, the retraction goes beyond the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), of which FCT is a member. The guidelines state that the a journal should consider retracting a paper if:
- they have clear evidence that the findings are unreliable, either as a result of misconduct (e.g. data fabri- cation) or honest error (e.g. miscalculation or experimental error)
- the findings have previously been published elsewhere without proper crossreferencing, permission or justification (i.e. cases of redundant publication)
- it constitutes plagiarism
- it reports unethical research
But none of these applied to the paper by Séralini et al. The journal found "no evidence of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of the data" but that there " is a legitimate cause for concern regarding both the number of animals in each study group and the particular strain selected."
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Quite a morning on Facebook. First, someone posted a link to this NDPR review, which prompted this reflection on my part:
The choice of doing a review or not on Objectivism entails a bit of a double-bind: "sunlight is the best disinfectant" (or less obnoxiously, "let's let the marketplace of ideas* do its work") vs "recognition lends legitimacy." The choice of reviewer is equally problematic: with a highly polarizing topic the choice of a friend or a foe stacks the deck and neutral observers are difficult to find. The Stanford EP article on Objectivism was discussed critically along those lines a while ago if I'm not mistaken.
Subsequent discussion led me to this Forbes column on (often privately funded) university centers for "free market oriented policy research."
New APPS 