New APPS

Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. Mostly Philosophy.

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    • Tolerance is not a virtue

      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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    • Discourse representation theory and x-phi

      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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    • Survey: philosophy of religion – a qualitative study of motivations and attitudes

      [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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    • Two modes of graduate school writing

      Two modes sketch

      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.)  

    • When should a journal article be retracted?

      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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    • The donor intent of strategic philanthropic investors must be protected

      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." 

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    • Aristotle’s notion of dialectic as a model for philosophical debate and inquiry

      This week, we’ve had a new round of discussions on the ‘combative’ nature of philosophy as currently practiced and its implications, prompted by a remark in a column by Jonathan Wolff on the scarcity of women in the profession. (Recall the last wave of such discussions, then prompted by Rebecca Kukla’s 3AM interview.) Brian Leiter retorted that there’s nothing wrong with combativeness in philosophy (“Insofar as truth is at stake, combat seems the right posture!”). Chris Bertram in turn remarked that this is the case only if “there’s some good reason to believe that combat leads to truth more reliably than some alternative, more co-operative approach”, which he (apparently) does not think there is. Our own John Protevi pointed out the possible effects of individualized grading for the establishment of a competitive culture.

      As I argued in a previous post on the topic some months ago, I am of the opinion that adversariality can have a productive, positive effect for philosophical inquiry, but not just any adversariality/combativeness. (In that post, I placed the discussion against the background of gender considerations; I will not do so here, even though there are obvious gender-related implications to be explored.) In fact, what I defend is a form of adversariality which combines adversariality/opposition with a form of cooperation.

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    • Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Sua estupidez’

      This week I had to deal with a fair amount of emotional stupidity from people who are very dear to me. So I was inevitably reminded of this song, ‘Sua estupidez’, composed by Roberto Carlos and Erasmo Carlos but at its best in this  Gal Costa version (1969), which I listened to a lot around the time that my father died, in 1998 (he was also an example of emotional stupidity of this kind). The key part of the lyrics: “Your stupidity does not let you see that I love you”. Enough said.

      UPDATE: This post seems to have gotten some people worried, apologies for that. It's nothing serious, just an argument with someone I'm very close to.

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    • Individualized grading, combative philosophy, and neoliberal subjects

      Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber responds to Jonathan Wolff and to Brian Leiter on the question of the combative style in philosophical discussion. Bertram: 

      Sometimes combat might be the right stance, but seeing that as the default mode for philosophical discussion leads far too often to destructive Q&A sessions that aim at destroying the opponent and bolstering the amour propre of the aggressor. Where the aim is victory, then all kinds of rhetorical moves can prove effective: there’s no reason to think that truth will emerge as a by-product.

      For my part, regarding blood-on-the-floor seminar rooms, I wonder to what extent the practice of awarding individual grades creates the impression among students of a zero-sum game in grades (whether or not a true zero-sum game is in operation*), exacerbating the combativeness aspect: “if I tear down Jones, that’s one less person in the top grade cohort I have to worry about.”

      Perhaps more of a reach — but that's supposed to exceed one's grasp, isn't it? — is the connection of individualized grades with the neoliberal self-entrepreneur, which Jon discusses below, in relation to Mike Konczal's review of Mirowski.

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    • How neo-liberal forces systematically compromise our ability to understand neo-liberalism

      Nice discussion of Philip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste here. The first half of the book theorizes neo-liberalism from a Foucaultian perspective and the second half excoriates the economics profession, e.g.

      According to Mirowski, there was a moment after the 2008 crash when the economics profession could have performed some rigorous self-criticism and made an honest assessment of what had gone wrong. But the proposed technocratic fixes — addressing the “efficient markets hypothesis” in finance, adding so-called bounded rationality to microeconomic models to make them “behavioral,” and adding various bells and whistles to macroeconomic models — were particularly ineffective in reforming or even clarifying what is going on in financial markets. And the various “explanations” of the crisis that were brought up for debate in mainstream publications and through a network of economic policy “experts” ended up not serving any notion of scientific inquiry but instead were means of deflecting, confusing, and delaying any progress toward uncovering truth or consensus.

      So how did the economists get away? According to Mirowski, they are protected through a web of prestige that stretches across the academy to quasi-accountable offices of the government like the Federal Reserve, as well as the network of policy think tanks that provide so-called expertise. This miasma of prestige has become too important to the actual logic of financial capitalism at this moment — elite economics dominates all these important international institutions, and there’s been a subtle wagon-circling at that level. Thus, like the banks, economists themselves are too big to fail.

      The whole article is a fascinating read, and shows what a scam neo-liberalism is. It's weird to think that we live in a carny-like reality, where something only succeeds to the extent that a certain number of marks systematically misunderstand how it succeeds.