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    • Philosophical SF

      by Eric Schwitzgebel

      We might think of fictions as extended thought experiments: What might it be like if…? Ordinary fiction confines itself to hypotheticals in the ordinary run of human affairs (though sometimes momentous, exotic, or exaggerated). In contrast, speculative fiction considers remoter hypotheticals. Although much speculative fiction considers hypotheticals of future technology (and thus is science fiction), speculative fiction also includes fantasy, horror, alternative history, and utopia/dystopia. (The abbreviation “SF” can be read either as meaning science fiction specifically or speculative fiction more broadly.)

      Speculative fiction is often of philosophical interest: SF writers think through some of the same hypotheticals that philosophers do — for example about personal identity, artificial intelligence, and possible future societies. Good SF writers think through these hypotheticals with considerable insight. I would like to see more interaction between philosophers and SF writers.

      Since 2014, I have been collecting professional philosophers’ recommendations of “personal favorite” works of philosophically-interesting science fiction or speculative fiction. Each contributor has given me a list of 10 works, each with brief “pitch” pointing toward the work’s philosophical interest. So far, I have 48 sets of recommendations — almost five hundred recommendations total!

      Since the master list is huge, I have organized it in two ways: by contributor and by author recommended. The by-contributor list consists of each list of ten works, in alphabetical order by contributor. The by-author list lists the authors (or movie directors) in order of how frequently their work was recommended. For example, the single most recommended author was Ursula K. Le Guin. The list begins with her, gathering together the Le Guin recommendations from all of the contributors. Next come Ted Chiang and Philip K. Dick, so that you can see what work of theirs has been recommended and why; then Greg Egan, then… well, I don’t want to spoil your surprise!

      * Stable URL for both Master Lists and other “Philosophical SF” project links.

      * Master List by Contributor as of Aug 15, 2016.

      * Master List by Recommended Author as of Aug 15, 2016.

      Below are the three most recent sets of recommendations.

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    • NC Anti-LGBT Law Update: NBA Moves All-Star Game from Charlotte

      North Carolina’s infamous HB2, which prohibits LGBTQ people from getting the sorts of civil rights protections that women and racial minorities receive, as well as mocking the reality of trans* by demanding that everyone go to the restroom corresponding to the “biological sex” on their birth certificate (see here), has caused even more damage.  Today, the NBA announced that, because of HB2, it would move its all-star game out of Charlotte in 2017.  The league did add that if the HB2 problem were satisfactorily resolved, the city would get the game back in 2019.  The league had been threatening this move for some time, and it could cost the Charlotte area economy around $100 million.

      Governor Pat McCrory’s response to the move was truly breathtaking, however.  As quoted in the Charlotte Observer, McCrory emailed that:

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    • Regimes of Accumulation

      In a new paper, Maximilian Fochler conducted a series of structured interviews with scientists to make an STS point: when we think of capitalism as a system that depends on “accumulation,” there are many different kinds of things that one can accumulate, many of them non-financial.  I think Fochler makes an important point, but I also think it should be pushed in a somewhat different, more critical direction.

      First, though, the results of the interviews.  Fochler interviewed both academic and non-academic scientists in Austria.  On the academic side, he looked at those in charge of labs, and the post-docs who do most of the actual bench science.  Both are engaged in a race to accumulate.  The leaders have to produce peer-reviewed publications in order to get grants, which they need to then get more peer-reviewed publications (Fochler’s interview subjects were Austrian, but it should be noted that in this country, many of those scientists have to get grants to cover their salary.  No grant, no paycheck).  The post-docs are in perhaps the most dire situation: there are a lot more post-docs than there are positions for them, and so they have to engage in a competitive race to accumulate publications as well, in order to continue in their careers (or as Becker would say, adding a polite veneer, “invest in their human capital”), either by extending their current position or gaining another one.  Adding to the stress, postdoc positions typically last 2-3 years, which is not enough time to accumulate a significant publication record (I will leave it to readers to draw the connections between this situation and that faced by the humanities precariat).

      On the corporate side, we find the CEO’s of start-ups trying to generate peer-reviewed publications, positive lab results, and other indicia that their particular research program – and its endpoint product – is worthy of continued venture capital funding, with the goal of (eventually) selling the start-up to a larger pharmaceutical company. Since the scientific process apparently takes about 10 years, and the VC funding cycle is two or three years, this is a continuous worry.  The scientists, on the other hand, much to their surprise (and mine, as I read the paper) work in a collaborative, non-competitive environment.  This is because successes and failures are attributable to the entire company.  Of course, the downside of this is that these scientists don’t accumulate anything they can use to parlay into their next job.

      The simple point I would like to add is that, despite all of the accumulation, no one is making any real money.  Not the post-docs, especially, though a move into to a faculty position adds some salary and a little job security, but also adds to the need to publish. The CEO’s and employees of the start-ups aren’t likely to get rich either: 90% of start-ups fail generally; pharmaceuticals don’t do that much better; and one study reported  that “97% of drugs in preclinical tests never make it to market, and nor do 95% of the molecules in phase 1 clinical trials and 88% of molecules in phase 2. Not until phase 3 do their prospects get much better: Of the ones that make it that far, 56% are approved” (summative quote from here).

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    • The Internet of Nature

      Big Data theorists have, for a while, been warily eyeing the growth of the “Internet of Things” (IoT), which is when “smart” technology is integrated into ordinary household devices like refrigerators and toasters.  New fridges all have warning lights that remind you to change the water filter; IoT fridges will order the new filter for you.  “Smart” utility meters are another example: they can monitor your utility usage moment by moment, making adjustments, say, to the HVAC to optimize power (or to prevent brownouts by automatically raising the temperature of everybody’s house a degree or two during peak hours).  Such smart meters are obviously key if those with rooftop solar are going to sell their surplus capacity to the power company.  They also enable very detailed surveillance of people’s home lives: they apparently know when you’re using power for the dishwasher, the shower, the TV, and so on.

      Capital knows opportunity when it arrives; if your dishwasher is using more power than the average dishwasher, expect advertising for a new, energy-efficient model.  If you routinely have lights on until very late at night, maybe you need some medicine to help you sleep, delivered to your web browser.  Your boss sees opportunity as well: if you routinely disarm the alarm, turn on the lights and open the fridge at 3:30am, maybe you’ve been out clubbing too late to be a good worker, and you need to have your desk cleared by 5:00 today.  This inference will be assisted by the fact that clubs now keep networked electronic records – ostensibly for security purposes – of who goes in and out (and who is banned: if you get thrown out of a club, all the other clubs on that network can refuse you entrance).  What if your boss buys the data from the club networks, and the utility company and crunches it to measure productivity?  Or, sells it to the insurance company, where you’re told that your new wellness initiative requires you to allow your devices to report that you come home and stay there by midnight every night, under penalty of punitive premiums?  Your auto insurance bill will almost certainly go up too, because you’ll have installed the vehicle tracking devices that will, by then, be necessary to avoid punitive insurance rates.

      But all of that is about surveilling the human.  In a fascinating new paper, Kevin Haggerty and Daniel Trottier extend the study of surveillance to nature, noting that the practice is both pervasive and growing, on the one hand, and nearly completely ignored, on the other, with the partial exceptions of Latour and Haraway.  I suspect that this is a paper destined to have a big impact; Haggerty in particular is a very significant surveillance theorist, and in a 2000 paper, he and Richard Ericson made a very influential push to orient surveillance studies around the Deleuzian notion of an “assemblage,” arguing that the Foucauldian “panopticon” had become dated.  In the current paper, Haggerty and Trottier look at several ways that we now surveil nature that they expect to grow exponentially with developing technologies.  None of them are exactly new, but things like RFID tags will make them a lot cheaper, easier, and more commonplace: the representation of ever-more-remote aspects of nature, often turning it into spectacle; using animals as agents (for example, as the Germans did during WWI, attaching cameras to homing pigeons); the increased use of biosentinels (where we rely on an animal’s response to the environment to infer information about that environment.  The canary in the coal mine or the drug-sniffing dog are the textbook examples); and taking surveillance inspiration from nature (looking at insect eyes to develop cameras that can see a full 360 degrees, for example).  They then suggest three implications for research into surveillance: (1) there are non-technological aspects of surveillance that need highlighting and study; (2) not all surveillance is of humans (contrary to what most of the literature talks about); and (3) we need to look carefully at inspirations for surveillance.  They close by highlighting that the human/nature boundary has never been a particularly bright one, and it’s likely to get less so as we move on.

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    • Why we reason redux: intention alignment and transfer of epistemic assets

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      A bit over five years ago I wrote a blog post on Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber’s then-recently published paper on their argumentative theory of reasoning. At that point I was about to start a research project on deductive reasoning, having as my main hypothesis the idea that deductive reasoning is best understood from a dialogical – and thus, argumentative – perspective, and so naturally the argumentative theory of reasoning was something to pay attention to. Yesterday was officially the very last day of my research project, and fittingly, earlier this week we convened for the very last (official) reading group session of the project to discuss a very recent paper by Andy Norman (CMU), forthcoming in Biology and Philosophy: ,‘Why we reason: intention-alignment and the genesis of human rationality’. The paper presents a broadly evolutionary account of human reasoning faculties, which takes on board much of Mercier & Sperber's (M&S) argumentative theory, but modifying it in important respects. Here is the abstract:

      Why do humans reason? Many animals draw inferences, but reasoning—the tendency to produce and respond to reason-giving performances—is biologically unusual, and demands evolutionary explanation. Mercier and Sperber (Behav Brain Sci 34:57–111, 2011) advance our understanding of reason’s adaptive function with their argumentative theory of reason (ATR). On this account, the “function of reason is argumentative… to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade.” ATR, they argue, helps to explain several well-known cognitive biases. In this paper, I develop a neighboring hypothesis called the intention alignment model (IAM) and contrast it with ATR. I conjecture that reasoning evolved primarily because it helped social hominins more readily and fully align their intentions. We use reasons to advance various proximal ends, but in the main, we do it to overwrite the beliefs and desires of others: to get others to think like us. Reason afforded our ancestors a powerful way to build and maintain the shared outlooks necessary for a highly collaborative existence. Yes, we sometimes argue so as to gain argumentative advantage over others, or otherwise advantage ourselves at the expense of those we argue with, but more often, we reason in ways that are mutually advantageous. In fact, there are excellent reasons for thinking this must be so. IAM, I suggest, neatly explains the available evidence, while also providing a more coherent account of reason’s origins.

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    • New paper: Parrhesia under Neoliberalism

      (From the Dept. of Shameless Self-Promotion) I have just uploaded to ssrn a paper on Foucault's last two College de France lecture courses, On the Government of Self and Others and The Courage of Truth, looking at main concept Foucault analyzes there: parrhesia (roughly: frank speech).  Those of you who were at my SPEP paper last year will recognize that this is the much revised and expanded version of that paper.  The ultra-short version of my thesis is that I don't think that parrhesia as Foucault recounts in the ancient Cynics will get us anywhere today (that's going the opposite direction from the doxa on these lectures).  Here is the abstract:

      Foucault’s account of parrhēsia shows why it would have little critical traction today.  In Foucault’s analysis, parrhēsia has both a political and an ethical phase; Cynicism is the most radical version of the ethical phase.  The primary characteristic of Cynical parrhēsia is full visibility, something which Foucault does not endorse but which neoliberal biopolitics actively demands.  More fundamentally, ethical parrhēsia fails as a resistance strategy because branding capital blurs the boundaries between affirmations of capital and its critique, enabling the full cooption of parrhēsia-as-visibility into the process of branding.  Our problem is a lack of politics.

      In addition to more textual work, the main additions are probably to the section on capital and branding, where I use the pharmaceutical industry as an example (drawing from this book by Phillip Mirowski.  You should pour a stiff drink before starting).  I also engage in the conclusion with an important paper by Kelly Happe on OWS (I discuss a different aspect of that paper here).

    • Abortion Rights Vindication, or: Moral objections aren’t thereby Scientific

      The Supreme Court delivered a major victory for reproductive rights today in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, striking down two of Texas’ recent restrictions on abortion (these have been copied in other states, so the effect of the ruling is much larger than Texas): requiring abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, and requiring abortion facilities to meet ambulatory surgical center standards.  The net effect would have been to radically curtail the availability of abortion to women in Texas, as the law would have closed most of the clinics in the state.  As always, poor women who couldn't travel the sometimes extravagant distances needed would suffer the most (it was so bad that the appellate Court said that women in West Texas could just go to New Mexico, which has very permissive abortion laws.  Apparently women's health isn't that important).  The fig leaf with which the Texas legislature tried to cover these restrictions will be familiar to those who have been watching state legislatures on abortion: “women’s health.”  In getting the case to the Supreme Court, the 5th Circuit basically announced that the Courts were bound by legislative findings of fact and then a rational basis review test.  In an opinion by Justice Breyer (n.b. not Kennedy, who joined the majority, however), the Supreme Court invalidated both of those lines of argument in this case.

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    • On Brexit, Regulations and Austerity

      People in the UK today are voting on whether to leave the EU, in what has universally become known as the “Brexit.”  Current polling shows the referendum will be very, very close, and the political situation is extremely volatile.  Over the weekend, a liberal, pro-Europe MP was brutally murdered by a member (or at least supporter) of a far right party who gave his name as “Death to Traitors” in his first court appearance.  Ironically, the murder may have hurt the exit campaign.  On the other hand, the BBC is now running a story that if the Brexit succeeds, it may prompt London – which will almost certainly vote to stay – to demand its own exit from the UK;  Northern Ireland and Scotland might follow suit.  I haven’t seen anyone say that further devolution is likely, but it would be on the table for discussion.  In the meantime, British far right parties like UKIP have supported the exit, claiming that there is too much immigration and too many regulations emanating from Brussels.  It’s an occasion for right-wing nationalism to gain political power and prominence.  In other words, Brexit is the UK’s Donald Trump, with two primary differences: the Brexit vote looks like it’s going to be close, and  the new mayor of London really is Muslim.

      I’ve lived in England on two separate occasions – once in London on a semester-abroad as an undergraduate, in Fall 1992, and for a year in graduate school (1997-98), reading in the Bodleian library in Oxford.  Fall 1992, of course, was when the Maastricht treaty establishing the EU and setting the groundwork for the common currency was debated and ratified.  The UK joined, though it stipulated that it would not join the Euro, and demanded a number of other specific concessions as conditions for membership.  One of the main anti-Europe arguments was that there were too many regulations emanating from Brussels, and the no-campaign selected British Beef as a good example of the sort of industry that did not require foreign regulation.  Not long after that, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, aka “Mad Cow Disease,” went from a minor to a major news item.  BSE, which one contracts mainly by eating infected meat, is invariably fatal, has a very long incubation period of several years, is essentially undetectable prior to symptoms (I will never be able to donate blood because I lived in England when I did), and is virtually impossible to destroy – it withstands temperatures of 600 degrees.  It also turns out to have started in England, where the British Beef industry had been feeding rendered carcasses to cattle as a protein supplement.  The EU banned such feeding practices in 1994, having previously banned  beef from England into other member states.

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    • Interpersonal justification, argumentation, and epistemic autonomy

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      I am currently supervising a MA thesis on interpersonal justification (by Sebastiano Lommi), and this is providing me with the opportunity to connect the dots between a number of topics and questions I’ve been interested in for years. In particular questions pertaining the epistemic value of deliberation, metaphors for argumentation, and the Enlightenment ideal of epistemic autonomy are all coming together. In this post I argue that the process whereby knowledge is shared through argumentation and exchange of reasons preserves the autonomy of the knowing subject to a greater extent than through testimony alone. Ultimately, the goal is to hit the sweet spot between preserving the autonomy of the knower while avoiding an overly individualistic picture of knowledge, i.e. one where the social dimension of knowledge is not sufficiently recognized.

      The work of developmental psychologist Paul L. Harris (e.g. his book Trusting what you’re told) has been an important influence for my thinking on these matters. It is thanks to him that I got to see these issues through the lenses of Enlightenment ideals — the exhortation to think for yourself — which were a reaction to the then-prevailing model of (excessive) deference towards authority and testimony. Harris argues that the emphasis on the autonomy of the knowing subject thus conceived (as found in e.g. Kant, Rousseau, and centuries later in Piaget) swung the pendulum too far in the opposite direction, leading to a mistaken conception of knowledge and learning as essentially individual processes, disregarding how much we in fact learn from others.

      In recent decades, the importance of taking into account the social aspects of knowledge became increasingly acknowledged in epistemology, leading to the emergence of the subfield of social epistemology. Arguably, the main focus of social epistemology until now has been on testimony, though there has also been some work on interpersonal justification, understood as "argument addressed to those who disagree with us, or to ourselves when we are of two minds" (Ralws) (see here for Goldman’s classic ‘Argumentation and interpersonal justification’, where he argues (mistakenly, in my opinion) that personal justification remains the primitive notion). While these may not be the two only processes whereby a person shares knowledge with others, for present purposes I take these to be paradigmatic cases.

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    • HB2: Expressive Law and Bare Life

      Today, the Fourth Circuit – which covers North Carolina – allowed to let stand its earlier ruling legitimating the Department of Education’s definition of “sex discrimination” to include “gender discrimination.”  The case was specifically about a Virginia trans* male high school student who was banished to the women’s room.  No doubt there will be an appeal to the Supreme Court, but for now, the law of the land here is that refusing to allow public school students to go to the bathroom that matches their gender identity puts states at risk of losing a lot of federal money.

      Last week, there were two more noteworthy developments around North Carolina’s HB2 (the law that forces trans* people to go to the bathroom of their “biological sex” as listed on their birth certificate, bans cities from expanding anti-discrimination law to include protections for the LGBTQ, and which bans municipalities from raising their own minimum wage).  First, on Friday, the UNC System filed legal papers indicating that it will not enforce HB2 on system campuses.  The move seems to have been orchestrated by new system president Margaret Spellings, and the affidavit includes the statements that “there is nothing in the Act that prevents any transgender person from using the restroom consistent with his or her gender identity,” and that neither the system nor its member institutions has “changed any of its policies or practices regarding transgender students or employees,” since the act lacks any enforcement provision. UNC mainly wants off the defendant list, but Spellings’ leadership here – and I don’t say this sort of thing often – has been pretty good.  She hasn’t denounced the law in so many words, but she’s both protecting the system and our trans* students.  Second, the bad PR continues: the law made the New Yorker  (the op-ed draws the correct connection to racial integration, and how Southern states resisted that).

      With all this news, maybe it’s time to point out some of the obvious problems in the arguments of the bill’s defenders, and what their theoretical assumptions seem to be.  Collectively, these demonstrate two, intertwined things. On the one hand, the law is mainly expressive: that is, it doesn’t actually do anything, except scream from the rooftops that the state of North Carolina does not like LGBTQ people.  And that, more than anything else, I suspect, is why the backlash against it has been so intense.  On the other hand, it shows that the North Carolina legislature operates according to a theory of sovereignty that finds its clearest expression in Carl Schmitt, and the law itself is an attempt to relegate trans* people to what Agamben calls homo sacer.  Here’s the arguments:

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