New APPS

Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. Mostly Philosophy.

recent posts

about

    • Online sexism and racism is a thing (surprise surprise!)

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      Yesterday the Guardian published the results of a research conducted on the over 70 million comments that have been placed at Guardian articles over the years. The question was: is there a pattern in who gets most abusive comments? Given the Guardian’s policy to block comments (blocked by moderators) when they are not aligned with the spirit of constructive debate, this constitutes an extremely dataset to explore online behavior (it is reassuring by the way that only 2% of the 70m comments were blocked!). It has been long felt that women, and in particular women speaking from a feminist perspective, receive much online abuse in reaction to what they write. (Comment sections are one such venue, but think also of Twitter and other social media platforms.) But crunching the numbers is the right way to go if one wants to move from the level of ‘impressions’ to more concrete corroboration. The results will probably not come across as surprising:

      Although the majority of our regular opinion writers are white men, we found that those who experienced the highest levels of abuse and dismissive trolling were not. The 10 regular writers who got the most abuse were eight women (four white and four non-white) and two black men. Two of the women and one of the men were gay. And of the eight women in the “top 10”, one was Muslim and one Jewish.

      And the 10 regular writers who got the least abuse? All men.

      (more…)

    • Big Data, Commodification and Original Accumulation

      In an interesting new piece, Jim Thatcher, David O'Sullivan and Dillonn Mahmoudi propose that big data functions in the context of capital as “accumulation by dispossession,” which is David Harvey’s term for what Marx called “primitive accumulation,” the process by which capital adds to its wealth by taking goods from others and adding them to the system.  Marx: “so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production” (Capital I, 875 [I am using the Penguin edition]).  Perhaps the best example of this is the one detailed by Marx: the enclosure movement in England involved the privatization of agricultural common spaces in England, such that it was no longer possible to graze sheep on lands held by the community in common; the result was that a lot of peasants, who ended up with no or inadequate amounts of private property, lost everything of value they had and became “free labor,” forced to sell themselves to the emerging factories.  As Marx sums up the process:

      “The spoliation of the Church’s property, the fraudulent alienation of the state domains, the theft of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of ruthless terrorism, all these things were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation.  They conquered the field for capitalist agriculture, incorporated the soil into capital, and created for the urban industries the necessary supplies of free and rightless proletarians” (895)

      I am very sympathetic to the thesis, and there is something profoundly right about it, insofar as Thatcher et al. rely on the separation of the valued information from the person who produces it.  But I also think it needs tweaking, for reasons that emerge in the paper itself: the data trail that a person leaves is generally itself without value, and only becomes valuable when aggregated with a lot of other data.  In other words, as I tried to argue a while ago, data is itself without value; it is only when it becomes information that it realizes that value.

      It seems to me that the accumulation processes of big data is involved in a much earlier stage, the commodification of data into information itself, which involves both the elevation of exchange value over use value, and the conversion of qualitatively different items of data into commensurable units of information.  These are, to an extent, equivalent processes, as Marx notes: “as use values, commodities differ above all in quality, while as exchange values, they can only differ in quantity, and therefore do not contain an atom of use-value” (128).  Still, I think it’s worth teasing the two threads apart here.

      (more…)

    • Some Pragmatic Considerations Against Intellectualism about Belief

      By Eric Schwitzgebel

      Consider cases in which a person sincerely endorses some proposition (“women are just as smart as men”, “family is more important than work”, “the working poor deserve as much respect as the financially well off”), but often behaves in ways that fail to fit with that sincerely endorsed proposition (typically treats individual women as dumb, consistently prioritizes work time over family, sees nothing wrong in his or others’ disrespectful behavior toward the working poor). Call such cases “dissonant cases” of belief. Intellectualism is the view that in dissonant cases the person genuinely believes the sincerely endorsed proposition, even if she fails to live accordingly. Broad-based views, in contrast, treat belief as a matter of how you steer your way through the world generally.

      Dissonant cases of belief are, I think, “antecedently unclear cases” of the sort I discussed in this post on pragmatic metaphysics. The philosophical concept of belief is sufficiently vague or open-textured that we can choose whether to embrace an account of belief that counts dissonant cases as cases of belief, as intellectualism would do, or whether instead to embrace an account that counts them as cases of failure to believe or as in-between cases that aren’t quite classifiable either as believing or as failing to believe.

      I offer the following pragmatic grounds for rejecting intellectualism in favor of a broad-based view. My argument has a trunk and three branches.

      ——————————————–

      The trunk argument.

      Belief is one of the most central and important concepts in all of philosophy. It is central to philosophy of mind: Belief is the most commonly discussed of the “propositional attitudes”. It is central to philosophy of action, where it’s standard to regard actions as arising from the interaction of beliefs, desires, and intentions. It is central to epistemology, much of which concerns the conditions under which beliefs are justified or count as knowledge. A concept this important to philosophical thinking should be reserved for the most important thing in the vicinity that can plausibly answer to it. The most important thing in the vicinity is not our patterns of intellectual endorsement. It is our overall patterns of action and reaction. What we say matters, but what we do in general, how we live our lives through the world — that matters even more.

      Consider a case of implicit classism. Daniel, for example, sincerely says that the working poor deserve equal respect, but in fact for the most part he treats them disrespectfully and doesn’t find it jarring when others do so. If we, as philosophers, choose describe Daniel as believing what he intellectually endorses, then we implicitly convey the idea that Daniel’s patterns of intellectual endorsement are what matter most to philosophy: Daniel has the attitude that stands at the center of so much of epistemology, philosophy of action, and philosophy of mind. If we instead describe Daniel as a mixed-up, in-betweenish, or even failing to believe what he intellectually endorses, we do not implicitly convey that intellectualist idea.

      (more…)

    • Visualizing Placement Data (Updated 4/6/16)

      As I noted in a previous post, APDA is in the middle of finalizing data for a new report. This will be a follow up to the report released in August 2015. We hope to include data on graduates with no listed placements and Carnegie Classifications, among other improvements. It is our aim to release the new report by April 15th, so that it can be useful to those who have applied to graduate programs this year. (Until that time, editing on the site has been turned off so that we can verify and analyze the data. We will turn back on editing in May when we turn on a new feature to allow for individual editing.)

      In preparation for that report, I have been trying to determine the best way of displaying our data. I am attaching four DRAFT images that present data for 104 universities using pie charts (on gender, AOS, job type, and graduation year: gender and AOS use data from APDA alone, whereas job type and graduation year also uses graduation information from outside APDA, discussed in this post). I used pie charts because they are visually intuitive and I want the data to be as accessible as possible. I used suggestions from this post to help avoid some common criticisms of pie charts. (Note: I tend to analyze data in R, using ggplot2 for graphs, which is the language I provide below for anyone with expertise in this area.) At the top left of each image are the data for the full set of 104 universities. (Universities are included only if we have both an external source of graduation data and placement records for that university with recorded graduation years in this time period.) 

      I am looking for feedback on these charts. Are these easy to understand? Are there alterations that would be beneficial? Two other options, with images below: 1) Replace pie charts with bar graphs (one sample version below). 2) Make university-specific sets of charts. (This is more time-intensive than 1.) 

      Note also: We aim to release tables and regression analyses, as we did last time, and any images we release will be in addition to that work. Your input is welcome! 

      (more…)

    • 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? 

      (more…)

    • 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.

      (more…)

    • 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. 

       

      (more…)

    • 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.

      (more…)

    • 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.

      (more…)

    • 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.

      (more…)