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    • Counting the Graduates of PhD Programs in Philosophy

      The Academic Placement Data and Analysis project (APDA) hopes to release program specific placement rates in the next week or two (before April 15th). These placement rates compare placement data to graduation data, so good graduation data are crucial. Yet, finding consistent graduation data is surprisingly tricky. The project currently uses the following external sources:

      —Review of Metaphysics' "Survey of Graduate Programs: Doctoral Dissertations" 2011-2015 

      –Survey of Earned Doctorates' "Philosophy by Institution (1973-2014)"

      —PhilJobs: Appointments' Data Feed, using Graduation Statistics 

      –American Philosophical Association 2015 Guide to Graduate Programs in Philosophy

      We gather data from multiple sources because each data set is incomplete, and for different reasons. For instance, the Survey of Earned Doctorates gathers data from programs in the United States alone, while the American Philosophical Association collects data from programs in the United States and Canada. Since the Review of Metaphysics publication supplied names we were able to integrate this information into APDA. For the other three sources we compiled the number of graduates for the years 2012-2015 into a single spreadsheet, assuming the later of the two years when a range was provided (e.g. 2011-2012). If I remove the programs that had missing data from all three remaining sources (SED, PhilJobs, APA) then we have data on 105 universities. How do these sources compare to one another and to the data contained in APDA? 

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    • North Carolina’s new “anti-discrimination” law is unconstitutional, isn’t it?

      Yesterday was a long day, legally speaking.  First, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Zubick v. Burwell, which argues that it substantially burdens the religious beliefs of corporations to opt-out (by signing a form) of providing contraceptive coverage for their female employees, as mandated by the Affordable Care Act.  The argument is absurd on its face, because it relies on the premise that it is a “substantial burden” of religious freedom to announce that you are exercising your religious freedom by refusing to do something that everybody else has to.  But nevermind; according to everything I’ve read or heard about the session, it looks like the Court is heading for its first 4-4.  Sorry, women in the states covered by the 8th Circuit! (UPDATE: this is somewhat oversimplified: the argument is that it makes the religious organizations "complicit" in immoral behavior.  This is subject, however, to an obvious reductio: presumably these women draw a salary, and they can use that money to fund their contraception and any form of sexual activity they desire.  Men of course also draw salaries, and there seems to be no worry about their sexual activities.  One question is whether less intrusive means are available to achieve the same ends.  See here and here).

      Here in North Carolina, we began a special legislative to put a stop to a grave public health threat: allowing trans* individuals to use the restroom of the gender with which they identify.  Why now?  Because Charlotte passed a non-discrimination ordinance a few weeks ago allowing just that.  So there had to be a special legislative session before April 1 (when the ordinance would have become effective), because kids.  Or something.  I can't make sense of the law except as a display of trans* phobia.  First, something like 200 municipalities have adopted such rules, and there have been zero problems.  So we’re solving a problem for which there is not a scintilla of non-speculative evidence that it actually exists. That suggests that claims of state interest are wildly overblown.  The law is being used purely as an expressive device, even though it is about to make life more difficult for real people. Even if there’s a state interest here, I don’t understand how the statute does anything meaningful to advance that interest: predators would avoid public restrooms that are highly trafficked, and a law like this wouldn’t deter those predators (again, "predator" and "trans*" actually refer to different sets of people!) at less trafficked areas.

      But the legislature likes to think big, and the bill does a lot more than restore restroom access: it sets up (for the first time) a list of things on the basis of which you’re not allowed to discriminate in NC.  This initially sounds promising; The Raleigh News and Observer reports:

      “The bill would create a statewide law that would ban discrimination on the basis of “race, religion, color, national origin or biological sex” at businesses and other “places of public accommodation.” But the law wouldn’t include sexual orientation and gender identity as categories protected from discrimination”

      And that's about where it stops sounding so promising: it bans local governments from going further and granting additional protections.  In other words, it specifically bans efforts to protect LGBTQ rights.  We should pause at "biological sex," which features in the statute, and which the state defines as the one written on your birth certificate.  The state points out that you can have that changed (assuming, I guess, you were born here, which a huge percentage of Charlotteans at least were not).  But this is an attempt to define trans* right out of existence: Caitlin Jenner was not born a woman, she became one.  The entire discussion brings to mind Judith Butler's remarks on "Gender Identity Disorder" and the way the state functions as part of a damaging dialectic of recognition.

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    • Philosophy of Mind: What should we be teaching?

      When I first took philosophy of mind at St Andrews in 2002 as an undergrad, we discussed the mind-body problem, behaviorism, identity theory, functionalism, modularity, and qualia. I wrote my term paper on anomalous monism and strong supervenience, entitled: "Is it possible for someone to be in a particular mental state without having any propensity to manifest this in behaviour?" I answered "yes" (!) citing 16 articles, including works by Armstrong, Child, Crane, Davidson, Heil, Kim, Moore, and Quine. I argued that Davidson's arguments for strong supervenience ignored the possibility of circular causality and of acausal mental events, which I admitted might be undetectable. My closing remarks: "Anomalous Monists hold that it is impossible for a person to be in a particular mental state without having any propensity to manifest it in behaviour…I have shown that it is possible, where possibility includes unobservables, that a person be in a mental state without having any propensity to manifest this in behaviour. Whether the person in question can discover this mental state is a question of practicality: a matter for psychologists." 

      Now, almost 15 years later, I am planning to teach my first course in philosophy of mind. But the field has changed, as have my intellectual leanings. In 2008 Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols published their "Experimental Philosophy Manifesto." In that same year I presented my first poster at the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness meeting in Taipei, which officially changed my research trajectory from philosophy of physics to empirically-informed philosophy of mind. In 2010 I presented a poster at my first Vision Science Society meeting, a meeting only rarely attended by philosophers. I now teach in an interdisciplinary program with neuroscientists, psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, and philosophers. In short, I have come a long way from boundary policing. Moreover, the field has come a long way from the metaphysical debates that caused so much excitement in the early aughts. So where is philosophy of mind now? What should we be teaching our students in philosophy of mind courses? This is where you come in. 

       

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    • Donald Trump is the Perfect Expression of Contemporary Capitalism

      There are a couple of emerging narratives about Donald Trump. One is that he is the unreconstructed id of middle-aged, white American men who were left behind by the economy. They aren’t quite sure who they’re mad at, but the list probably includes everybody who doesn’t look like them, women in general, and all those libruls who insist on the “political correctness” of being civil whilst in civil society. It also includes the Republican establishment, which Trump supporters have finally realized not only has virtually nothing in common with them, but also does not care about their actual interests. So the base devolves to all it has left: a generalized rage. The other narrative says that Trump is a European-style nationalist: you can have your social services, but you can’t have people who don’t belong to your tribe running around and using those services. These narratives have in common the idea that Trump is appealing because he is racist.

      One should never underestimate the explanatory power of racism in American politics, but there’s a third narrative about Trump that belongs in the picture, because I think it adds some explanatory value that the other two don’t: Trump is also the perfect embodiment of contemporary capitalism, by which I mean brand capitalism. I want to take a little time to explain this via a detour into Saussure, but if you don’t want to go there, here’s the gist of it: Trump doesn’t have policy positions because he’s not selling any product other than himself, and there isn’t anything to him other than his being the embodiment of TrumpTM.

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    • Apple, the FBI, iPhones, and the Extended Mind Hypothesis

      The FBI has the iPhone of the San Bernadino shooters, and would very much like to examine its contents. But they have a problem: the contents are encrypted; guess the wrong password ten times, and the phone will self-destruct like one of those tapes in Mission Impossible (that’s not a technically correct analogy, of course: the data would end up permanently encrypted, and there would be no smoke). The FBI thus got a judge, using the authority of the 1789 (sic!) All Writs Act (more on this another day; for some initial analysis, see here), to order Apple to disable the auto-destruct, which would allow the FBI to fire up its biggest computers to try to guess the password by brute force. In what is likely to be the beginning of a very long legal fight, Apple refused, arguing that there would be no way to open this individual phone without creating a back door that would enable access to all phones of that type.

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    • Fairness vs. Welfare: What if people like fairness?

      I’m currently teaching an ethics and public policy course, and for this week we read Kaplow and Shavell’s Fairness vs. Welfare (actually, we read the first 70 pages of the NBER paper that became the much bigger book). Their central claim is that to pick fairness as the dominant principle in policy-making is by definition to make some people worse-off than they were, and that there are numerous cases where the priority on fairness would make literally everyone worse off. An important subtext is that they don’t think “fairness” means anything, except as a poor, error-inducing proxy for “welfare;” the argument is like reading chapter 5 of J.S. Mill’s Utilitarianism on justice.

      The argument is a preference-based one, and it interprets “welfare” broadly – there’s no correcting of preferences here (or apparent awareness of problems with adaptive preferences). They also allow for a “taste for fairness” – i.e., the preference many people feel for a situation they believe is fair. More on that in a minute. It’s a little unclear who their target is, as well: it sounds like Rawls, but of course Rawls is quite clear that his version of rationality is lifted directly from economics. Kant is the only person I can think of who spends a lot of time separating preferences (heteronomous desires) from what reason demands, so he’s as good a target as any. In any case, I want to focus briefly on the claim that fairness-based policies can make everyone worse off.

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    • New Essay in Draft: “Women in Philosophy: Quantitative Analysis of Specialization, Prevalence, Visibility, and Generational Change”

      Eric Schwitzgebel and Carolyn Dicey Jennings


      This article brings together lots of data that we have been gathering and posting about over the past several years, here and at The Splintered Mind. Considered jointly, these data tell a very interesting story about the continuing gender disparity in the discipline.

      Here’s the abstract:

      We present several quantitative analyses of the prevalence and visibility of women in moral, political, and social philosophy, compared to other areas of philosophy, and how the situation has changed over time. Measures include faculty lists from the Philosophical Gourmet Report, PhD job placement data from the Academic Placement Data and Analysis project, the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates, conference programs of the American Philosophical Association, authorship in elite philosophy journals, citation in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and extended discussion in abstracts from the Philosopher’s Index. Our data strongly support three conclusions: (1) Gender disparity remains large in mainstream Anglophone philosophy; (2) ethics, construed broadly to include social and political philosophy, is closer to gender parity than are other fields in philosophy; and (3) women’s involvement in philosophy has increased since the 1970s. However, by most measures, women’s involvement and visibility in mainstream Anglophone philosophy has increased only slowly; and by some measures there has been virtually no gain since the 1990s. We find mixed evidence on the question of whether gender disparity is even more pronounced at the highest level of visibility or prestige than at more moderate levels of visibility or prestige.

      Full paper here.
      As always, comments, corrections, and objections welcome, either on this post or by email.

      [Cross-posted at The Splintered Mind]

    • Mount St. Mary’s, Metrics, and Perverse Incentives

      by Ed Kazarian

      As I remarked on Facebook yesterday, there is a lot of spectacular mendacity involved in the current crisis at Mount Saint Mary's Unviersity.  As of yesterday, the University's provost has been forced to resign, and two faculty members have been summarily fired, one a tenured associate professor of philosophy and another an untenured professor of law.  The justification for these firings, where available, made explicit reference to violating a "duty of loyalty," which adds to the already overwhelming impression that they come in retaliation for the exposure of the university president's plan to cull incoming students deemed likely to leave school without completing their first year before the school was required to report enrollment data to the federal government.* As a whole, the case is outrageous—and one hopes that these firings will be reversed, that the president and any board members who engineered them will be forced to resign, and that the principles of academic freedom, tenure, and the university's contractual obligations to its employees and its pedagogical obligations to its students that have been abrogated in the whole mess will be restored, reaffirmed, and strengthened. (Anyone who hasn't should consider signing the petition begun by John Schwenkler, located here.)

      But while our attention is held by outrage over what is happening to these faculty and the cavalier attitude toward students reflected in the plan, we run the risk of overlooking the way that this case is an instance of a much more general problem. With the rise of various forms of quantitative assessment protocols (many of which, in practice, have been implemented ad hoc, and not always by folks with the training or expertise to produce reliable social science), we have also gotten a substantial increase in pressure to improve performance on such metrics, and thus to improve one's position on the rankings that are inevitably derived from them—rankings which have very real consequences for institutions, both in terms of their ability to recruit students (and their tuition) and in terms of other funding flows, like federal student aid money. 

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    • Every Breath you Take…

      by Gordon Hull

      News this week of a planned asthma inhaler that connects to the Internet of Things. On the one hand, this seems like a pretty good use of the Internet: as you try out different medicines, they can learn precisely how well those medicines work, and work in genomics might even show that some medicines work better for some people and other medicines work better for others. All the data can all get amalgamated so that you can get an inhaler that works sooner. Some time ago, I suggested in a few posts that there are really two different kinds of biopolitics at work here – a mid-century public-health-oriented variety, which is being eclipsed by an individualizing, neoliberal version. The asthma inhaler shows that how we interpret big data will make a difference in which, a point which I want to make by way of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan (I’m not using the word ‘tragedy’ because ‘tragedy’ implies inevitability, and the problems in Flint were absolutely not inevitable). In Flint, we see the decay, if not active destruction, of a public health infrastructure under the weight of neoliberal policies.

      On the public health front, the data from things like this inhaler might produce some important public health discoveries: what if the people of Flint turn out to have been breathing air so toxic that it is associated with a higher incidence of asthma? The answer to that question depends partly on who has access to the data. As Frank Pasquale has argued at length in the context of Pharma, for big data to make a meaningful public health impact, it is going to have to be de-siloed, and publicly accessible. The experience of Flint’s water supply is strong evidence that he is right, because it shows the disaster that neoliberalism can otherwise become as it individualizes and privatizes health information. 

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    • In defense of journal editors who make mistakes

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      All of you reading this will certainly have witnessed the uproar this week in response to a paper published in Synthese which is problematic, to say the least, for a number of different reasons. (It is worth noticing, as has been often noticed, that this paper has been online for 22 months, but presumably having appeared in the latest printed edition of Synthese, those on the Synthese mailing list will have received a notification, and someone actually took the trouble of checking the paper. From there on, it went ‘viral’ through the usual channels – Facebook, blogs etc.) In particular, it contains a passage with clear homophobic and sexist content. [But see UPDATE below.] But this is not the only issue with the paper, which overall seems to be below the level of scholarship that one would expect in a journal like Synthese.

      [Full disclosure: I’ve known the author, JYB, for many years, and have attended a number of the events he regularly organizes. He was supportive of my career at its early stages. I know two of the Synthese editors-in-chief quite well, and the third I have close indirect contacts with (he is a regular collaborator of one of my closest colleagues). I have 5 papers published in Synthese, two of which are forthcoming in two different special issues.]

      There is no question to me that this paper should not have been published in its current form. JY Béziau has made important contributions to logic earlier in his career, but in recent years his work has not been of the same caliber as his earlier work (this is also the opinion of a number of people I’ve talked to much before this episode). So purely on the basis of the paper’s merits, the decision to publish it in Synthese (whoever made the decision) seems to have been misguided. Adding to that the homophobic and sexist content, then the decision to publish it is not only misguided but also deeply disturbing. But the issue I want to discuss here is: what does this say about the editorial process in Synthese? Does this episode warrant calls for the resignation of the current editors-in-chief?

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