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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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    • Women in Philosophy 2004-2014: Which Programs Do Best?

      In order to update my post from January, I contacted Mark Fiegener of the NSF (National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics) who was kind enough to supply me with information from the Survey of Earned Doctorates on gender for graduates of doctoral programs in philosophy using a shorter time scale: 2004-2014. Using this information, I can now provide a new list of programs with an above average percentage of women graduates in philosophy. Only 86 programs had sufficient data in this time period, and 35 had an above average percentage of women graduates between 2004 and 2014 (information from the other programs was suppressed by the NSF for reasons of small numbers/privacy). Comparing these 35 to the previous list of 39 programs with an above average percentage of women graduates 1973-2014, 11 of the 39 do not make the more recent list (CUNY, Emory, Harvard, Illinois-Chicago, Maryland, NYU, Pittsburgh, Rice, Rutgers, Stanford, and UMass Amherst), and an additional 2 did not have sufficient data to be included (Claremont and Tennessee), but 26 of the 39 show up on this new list. Update: Note that some of these 11 do have above average percentages of women in the APDA data between 2012 and 2015 (namely, Emory, Harvard, Illinois-Chicago, Maryland, and Pittsburgh). I will aim to do a full comparison with the APDA data soon. Of the 11 programs that became a focal point for my previous post (because of what I took to be an unwarranted call for their closure), 1 did not have sufficient data to be included, but the other 10 had an average 36.93% women graduates (compared to an overall average of 29.31% women graduates for the 86 programs included). Note: I did not attempt to obtain shorter time scale data for racial and ethnic minorities simply because of the small numbers involved, which would have meant suppressed information for most programs. Here is the list of 35 programs with a greater than mean percentage of women graduates for 2004-2014:

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    • Women in Philosophy 1930-1979: What can it tell us about diversity today? (Updated Numbers, 5/29/16)

      Eric Schwitzgebel alerted me to a post at the Leiter Reports blog on the work of Jonathan Strassfeld (University of Rochester), who has compiled a document with philosophers appointed at 11 doctoral programs in the United States between 1930 and 1979: Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, U Penn, and Yale. I was curious whether appointments in this period could predict present day diversity for these programs. My prediction was that a higher percentage of women among those appointed in this period would predict a higher percentage of women among faculty and graduate students today. I also wondered, given my work with Eric Schwitzgebel, whether area of specialization would interact with this effect (in that work, women were shown to be more likely to specialize in Value Theory). Although this is not a formal analysis, it appears as though programs that appointed a higher percentage of women in this period do have a higher percentage of women and non-white graduates today, and that there is some interaction with area of specialization such that programs with more faculty in LEMM/analytic fields tend to correspond with lower percentages of women, and historical fields tend to correspond with higher percentages of women. Given this first pass look at Strassfeld’s data, I think it would be useful to attempt to collect this data for a larger set of programs, to more formally explore these connections. More details on my first pass look at Strassfeld's data below. (Numbers updated on 5/29/16 to reflect a change made to Strassfeld's data. Namely, I had incorrectly removed one woman faculty member from the analysis, which Strassfeld pointed out to me.)

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    • Elsevier eats SSRN

      If you’re an SSRN user, you got the notice in your Inbox yesterday; if you’re not, follow the links at the top of Leiter’s post here. Read the comments, too. It’s hard to know what to make of this acquisition, but for those not familiar, here’s a quick backgrounder: SSRN.com (“Social Science Research Network”) has, for a very long time, been a repository for freely available research online, particularly in law.  Most law faculty post their papers on SSRN, where anybody else may freely download and read them.  SSRN also has other categories: I post my papers there, and there’s an entire set of categories for philosophy.  When you post a paper on SSRN, it makes you swear that you have the right to do so, and underscores that it does not take copyright in anything. I’m a heavy user of the site, as is every legal academic I know (that’s how I got to it: I read lots of law journal articles).  Elsevier has now bought SSRN.

      Philosophers tend to use academia.edu, which is unfortunate.  You can’t download anything from the site without registering for it, and when you do, it tries to scrape the web and link your papers to your academia.edu site (or at least, it did when I make this mistake several years ago), and then sends you an email asking you to make sure the papers listed are all yours (the overinclusion in my case was comical, as there is somebody in physics whose initials are G Hull).  You also get a barrage of emails: somebody just searched for you on google and found your academia.edu page!  Click here to know where they were!  Good grief.  In computer terms, the site is basically trying hard to be sticky (causing people to go there and linger), and so it imitates Facebook, giving you lots of opportunities to curate your image, follow people, be followed, explore homepages, and so on, when all you thought you wanted to do was share your work for anybody who wanted to read it (the 5th comment on the Leiter page linked above goes into more detail). Did I mention that it comes with piles of corporate money?

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    • Zubik v. Burwell: out with a whimper, not a bang

      The Supreme Court today issued a much-anticipated ruling in Zubik v. Burwell, the latest lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act's contraceptive provision.  The ACA requires that insurance plans offer contraceptive coverage at zero cost, and includes a clause that employers who object to providing such coverage can request exemption from it, in which case the insurance company provides the contraception coverage, and the government pays them.  In the current case, the nonprofit petitioners said that even being required to request exemption from the contraception mandate substantially burdened their religious freedom, since it would make them "complicit" in their employees' acquisition of contraception.  As I do every time someone mentions this case, I'll point out now that these employees also receive wages from the company, which could also be used to purchase contraception.  So that theory of the case would imply that wages are immoral.  Given the political climate in the U.S., I should probably add that I consider this argument a reductio. 

      Now we know how the Hollow Claim ends. After oral argument the Court requested additional briefs to see, essentially, whether the parties could work things out themselves, providing both contraception and religious accommodati0n.  Both parties submitted supplemental briefs indicating they could, and so today the SCOTUS ordered them to get busy on that project:

      "Following oral argument, the Court requested supplemental briefing from the parties addressing “whether contraceptive coverage could be provided to petitioners’ employees, through petitioners’ insurance companies, without any such notice from petitioners.” Post, p. ___. Both petitioners and the Government now confirm that such an option is feasible. Petitioners have clarified that their religious exercise is not infringed where they “need to do nothing more than contract for a plan that does not include coverage for some or all forms of contraception,” even if their employees receive cost-free contraceptive coverage from the same insurance company. Supplemental Brief for Petitioners 4. The Government has confirmed that the challenged procedures “for employers with insured plans could be modified to operate in the manner posited in the Court’s order while still ensuring that the affected women receive contraceptive coverage seamlessly, together with the rest of their health coverage.” Supplemental Brief for Respondents 14–15.

      In light of the positions asserted by the parties in their supplemental briefs, the Court vacates the judgments below and remands to the respective United States Courts of Appeals for the Third, Fifth, Tenth, and D. C. Circuits. Given the gravity of the dispute and the substantial clarification and refinement in the positions of the parties, the parties on remand should be afforded an opportunity to arrive at an approach going forward that accommodates petitioners’ religious exercise while at the same time ensuring that women covered by petitioners’ health plans “receive full and equal health coverage, including contraceptive coverage.” Id., at 1. We anticipate that the Courts of Appeals will allow the parties sufficient time to resolve any outstanding issues between them."

      In the meantime, it is worth pointing out that this is an exercise in the Courts ordering biopolitics to happen, and rejecting efforts to get out of that process through judicial fiat.  I mention that only because (shameless self-promotion), I think the logic, if not the language, is on the general same page as how the Courts handled school desegregation in its heyday: the Court sets the outer parameters, but basically they want a policy-making process to happen, if with juridical supervision.

    • The Gender Situation Is Different in Philosophy

      by Eric Schwitzgebel

      As Carolyn Dicey Jennings and I have documented, academic philosophy in the United States is highly gender skewed, with gender ratios more characteristic of engineering and the physical sciences than of the humanities and social sciences. However, unlike engineering and the physical sciences, philosophy appears to have stalled out in its progress toward gender parity.

      Some of the best data on gender in U.S. academia are from the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED). In an earlier post, I analyzed the philosophy data since 1973, creating this graph:

      The quadratic fit (green) is statistically much better than the linear fit (red; AICc .996 vs .004), meaning that it is highly unlikely that the apparent flattening is chance variation from a linear trend.

      Since the 1990s, the gender ratio of U.S. PhDs in philosophy has hovered steadily around 25-30%.

      The SED site contains data on gender by broad field, going back to 1979. It is interesting to juxtapose these data with the philosophy data. (The philosophy data are noisier, as you’d expect, due to smaller numbers relative to the SED’s broad fields.)

      The overall trend is clear: Although philosophy’s percentages are currently similar to the percentages in engineering and physical sciences, the trend in philosophy has flattened out in the 21st century, while engineering and the physical sciences continue to make progress toward gender parity. All the broad areas show roughly linear upward trends, except for the humanities which appears to have flattened at approximately parity.

      These data speak against two reactions that I have sometimes heard to Carolyn’s and my work on gender disparity in philosophy. One reaction is “well, that just shows that philosophy is sociologically more like engineering and the physical sciences than we might have previously thought”. Another is “although philosophy has recently stalled in its progress toward gender parity, that is true in lots of other disciplines as well”. Neither claim appears to be true.

      [I am leaving for Hong Kong later today, so comment approval might be delayed, but please feel free to post your thoughts and I’ll approve them and respond when I can!]

      [Cross-posted at The Splintered Mind]

    • Dept. of Justice Threatens UNC over NC’s anti-LGBT Law

      When the North Carolina legislature passed – in 12 hours from start to governor's signature – HB2, consigning transgender individuals to the bathrooms of their "biological sex" as listed on their birth certificate, UNC''s new system president Margaret Spellings issued a prosaic statement that "university institutions must require" restroom access policies that comply with the law.

      The US Dept. of Justice, following its letters to the governor, has now sent a letter to Spellings and other top UNC administrators informing them that HB2's bathroom provision violates both Title IX and the Violence Against Women Act.  The system apparently nets somewhere around $1 billion in Title IX money annually.  The letter does not (as popular media tends to report) threaten that money directly – but it does threaten to get a court order forcing the system not to enforce HB2.

    • Reading List: Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos

      In critical work on neoliberalism, there’s probably two or three main schools of thought.  One approaches the subject as a matter of political economy.  David Harvey, whose analysis is explicitly Marxian, is the most well-known figure in this approach; another prominent author in that camp is Philip Mirowksi.  The other major school is broadly Foucauldian, taking its cue from Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics lectures.  A third group, represented by autonomist Marxists like Paolo Virno, Franco Berardi, and of course Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, attempt a synthesis (I won’t have much to say about them here).  All sides have methodological critiques of the other; here I just want to note that the Foucauldians generally tend to be concerned with a topic that seems neglected in political economy: granted that neoliberalism expects us all to behave as homo economicus, defined as a risk-calculating, utility-maximizing investor in himself (gendered pronoun deliberate), how does neoliberalism get people to actually do this?  After all, it is not a natural human set of behaviors.  More specifically, not just how does neoliberalism get people to do this, but how does it get them to do so enthusiastically, treating the definition of the human as homo economicus as the true, correct and only way to be human?  In other words, Foucauldians insist that critiques of neoliberalism need an account of subjectification.

      Wendy Brown’s new(ish) Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Zone Books, 2015) makes a substantial contribution to the Foucauldian camp by focusing on “Foucault’s innovation in conceiving neoliberalism as a political rationality” (120).  The political rationality is “governance” as “the decentering of the state and other centers of rule and tracks in its place the specifically modern dispersal of socially organizing powers throughout the order and of powers ‘conducting’ and not only constraining or overtly regulating the subject” (125).

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    • Orange on the Seder Plate

      by Eric Schwitzgebel

      … and celebrating the death of children?

      “Does it matter if the story of the escape from Egypt is historically true?” Rabbi Suzanne Singer asked us, her congregants, on Saturday, at the Passover Seder dinner at Temple Beth El in Riverside.

      We’re a liberal Reform Judaism congregation. Everyone except me seemed to be shaking their heads, no, it doesn’t matter. I was nodding, however. Yes, it does matter.

      Rabbi Singer walked over to me with the microphone, “Okay, Eric, why does it matter?”

      I say “we” are a Reform Judaism congregation, but let me be clear: I am not Jewish. My wife Pauline is. My teenage son Davy is. Davy even teaches at the religious school. My nine-year-old daughter Kate, adopted from China at age one, recently described herself as “half Jewish”. We’re members. We volunteer, attend some of the services. Sometimes I try to chant the chants, sometimes I don’t. I always feel a little… ambiguous.

      I hadn’t been expecting to speak. I came out with some version of the following thought. If the story of Passover is literally true, then there’s a miracle-working God. And it would matter if there were such a God. I don’t think I would like the moral character of that God, a God who kills so many innocent Egyptians. I’m glad it’s not literally true. It matters.

      I find it interesting, I added, that we (“we”?) have this celebratory holiday about the death of children, contrary to the values of most of us now. It’s interesting how we struggle to deal with that change in values while keeping the traditions of the holiday.

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