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    • How to Disregard Extremely Remote Possibilities

      by Eric Schwitzgebel

      In 1% Skepticism, I suggest that it’s reasonable to have about a 1% credence that some radically skeptical scenario holds (e.g., this is a dream or we’re in a short-term sim), sometimes making decisions that we wouldn’t otherwise make based upon those small possibilities (e.g., deciding to try to fly, or choosing to read a book rather than weed when one is otherwise right on the cusp).

      But what about extremely remote possibilities with extremely large payouts? Maybe it’s reasonable to have a one in 10^50 credence in the existence of a deity who would give me at least 10^50 lifetimes’ worth of pleasure if I decided to raise my arms above my head right now. One in 10^50 is a very low credence, after all! But given the huge payout, if I then straightforwardly apply the expected value calculus, such remote possibilities might generally drive my decision making. That doesn’t seem right!

      I see three ways to insulate my decisions from such remote possibilities without having to zero out those possibilities.

      First, symmetry:
      My credences about extremely remote possibilities appear to be approximately symmetrical and canceling. In general, I’m not inclined to think that my prospects will be particularly better or worse due to their influence on extremely unlikely deities, considered as a group, if I raise my arms than if I do not. More specificially, I can imagine a variety of unlikely deities who punish and reward actions in complementary ways — one punishing what the other rewards and vice versa. (Similarly for other remote possibilities of huge benefit or suffering, e.g., happening to rise to an infinite Elysium if I step right rather than left.) This indifference among the specifics is partly guided by my general sense that extremely remote possibilities of this sort don’t greatly diminish or enhance the expected value of such actions. I see no reason not to be guided by that general sense — no argumentative pressure to take such asymmetries seriously in the way that there is some argumentative pressure to take dream doubt seriously.

      Second, diminishing returns:

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    • Parrhesia (Part 4): Friends Don’t Let Friends Study the History of Being

      At the beginning of a 1974 interview (D&E II, 521), M. D’Eramo puts the following question to Foucault: “you always start your analyses at the end of the Middle Ages, without ever speaking of antiquity, but it seems to me that ancient Greece is important for constructing what you call an ‘archaeology of knowledge.’ Are you avoiding the subject intentionally?”  Foucault’s response, which is one of the very few times in which he mentions Heidegger by name other than in the context of existentialism, should be quoted at length:

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    • Assessing inductive risk in the Williams and Ceci studies

      In their series that could be titled "Academic sexism is a myth", Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci have a newest installment: on the basis of fictive scenarios, faculty members in STEM disciplines had to make decisions about hiring particular male or female candidates. I'm not going to talk in detail about the methodology – which involved presenting faculty members fictitious scenarios about the on campus interviews of female and male candidates – but about the problem of inductive risk whenever we investigate biases against women and other underrepresented groups, such as African Americans, people with disabilities, etc.

      Inductive risk is the chance that one is wrong accepting or rejecting a scientific hypothesis. For instance, a food additive that poses a serious health risk is wrongly concluded to be safe, or conversely, a food additive that has no health risk is wrongly concluded to be carcinogenic. Both false negatives and false positives can potentially pose inductive risks. Heather Douglas has argued that inductive risk is one way to let values play a role in science. Because scientists are in an epistemic position to assess the risks and benefits of their work, they should assess the non-epistemic consequences (in policy, public perception, health hazards etc) of publishing particular research findings. How does this concept apply to the research by Williams and Ceci?

      When we investigate sexist biases against women in academia, there are two types of inductive risk: (1) There are no biases against women (indeed women are now being preferred as candidates for some positions in some fields). (2) There are in fact biases against women, but Williams and Ceci failed to detect it.

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    • In Memoriam, Pleshette DeArmitt

      Our discipline suffered a terrible loss yesterday with the sudden and untimely passing of Pleshette DeArmitt, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at University of Memphis. We here at NewAPPS extend our deepest condolences to her family, her colleagues and her considerable network of friends.

      From the University of Memphis’s announcement:

      Prof. DeArmitt's research and teaching interests included contemporary continental philosophy, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and social and political thought. She regularly taught undergraduate courses in feminist theory and 19th- and 20th-century continental philosophy. She taught graduate courses on Rousseau’s moral psychology, Freud’s metapsychology, Kristeva's philosophy of bios, and themes in contemporary continental philosophy.

      Prof. DeArmitt published scholarly articles on Derrida, Kofman, and Kristeva in journals such as Mosaic, Parallax, Philosophy Today, Research in Phenomenology, and The Southern Journal of Philosophy. She was the author of The Right to Narcissism: A Case for an Im-possible Self-Love (Fordham University Press, 2013) and the co-editor of Sarah Kofman’s Corpus (SUNY Press, 2008).

      She is survived by her husband, Kas Saghafi, also Associate Professor of Philosophy, and her beloved daughter Seraphine. Memorial announcements will follow.

      On a more personal note, I want to add that Pleshette was a dear friend, colleague and inspiration to me for many years. What has been lost in her passing far exceeds the summary of Pleshette’s scholarly production and academic accomplishments. For those who didn’t know her, Pleshette’s was an incredibly rare sort of gentle, unpretentious, amiable and warm-hearted disposition. She was quick to laugh, quicker to smile, and hilariously (often subversively) funny herself. She was generous to a fault. Often, in conversation, Pleshette would reach out, seemingly reflexively, and put a hand on your arm, as if to reassure you that she was there, engaged, attentively listening. There was never any doubt that she was all of those things. Pleshette was one of the most “present” people I’ve ever known.

      She was also, of course, an imaginative, critical, and whip-smart thinker, deeply invested in Philosophy as a discipline, a profession and a way of life. She was just as committed to its preservation as she was to its diversification. On that last point, I cannot emphasize enough how important Pleshette was as a role model, mentor, friend and colleague to so many women in Philosophy. Only a few months ago, at a dinner table where the “status of the discipline” was being discussed, I remember Pleshette leaning over and whispering in my ear: “you and I could fix this, if they’d let us.” I laughed, nodded, shrugged my shoulders. Then, Pleshette added, with that sly smile of hers: “I can’t see any reason to wait for them to let us, though.”

      Right on, Pleshette.

      I’ll miss her, Memphis will miss her, and I know so many others will, too. For the last several months, Pleshette has been organizing an Alumni Conference to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Philosophy PhD program at the University of Memphis, which will take place in just a few weeks. Without doubt, hers will be an unbearable absence at that event.

    • Why is this philosophy?

      By Roberta Millstein

      Most philosophers of science have been on the receiving end of this question at one time or another. A friend of mine recently called it a type of hate speech. I think my friend was joking. But maybe not. Philosophers of science struggle to get into grad programs, to obtain jobs, to earn promotion and tenure, to be perceived as "central" and important figures in the field, all because their work is not seen as philosophical. So, while it may not be hate speech, it is speech that does genuine harm.

      This isn't a new issue and it's one that others have touched before. But a number of recent events have brought the issue to mind for me and emphasized the importance of continuing to discuss it. One in particular was a conversation with a colleague whose opinion I value and whose good faith I have utter confidence in. And yet this colleague had doubts about an essay being philosophical even as I could see that it fell squarely within the domain of philosophy of science. The colleague was willing to take my word for it, but the fact that such a well meaning person had doubts really brought home to me the fact that this is (at least in some case) simply a lack of awareness about philosophy of science. Thus this post. I can't hope to fully convince anyone in a blog post length entry, but I can at least point to some of the other events that have got me thinking about this topic again.

      The second event was the excellent essay "Philosophical Enough" by Subrena Smith, a recent Featured Philosop-her. Smith rightly points out:

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    • Aristotle’s definition of the syllogism — a dialogical interpretation

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      (Cross-posted at M-Phi)

      (I am currently finishing a paper on the definition of the syllogism according to Aristotle, Ockham, and Buridan. I post below the section where I present a dialogical interpretation of Aristotle's definition.)

      Aristotle’s definition of ‘syllogismos’ in Prior Analytics (APri)  24b18-22 is among one of the most commented-upon passages of the Aristotelian corpus, by ancient as well as (Arabic and Latin) medieval commentators. He offers very similar definitions of syllogismos in the Topics, Sophistical Refutations, and the Rhetoric, but the one in APri is the one having received most attention from commentators. In the recent Striker (2009) translation, it goes like this (emphasis added):

      A ‘syllogismos’ is an argument (logos) in which, (i) certain things being posited (tethentôn), (ii) something other than what was laid down (keimenôn) (iii) results by necessity (eks anagkês sumbainei)(iv) because these things are so. By ‘because these things are so’ I mean that it results through these, and by ‘resulting through these’ I mean that no term is required from outside for the necessity to come about.

      It became customary among commentators to take ‘syllogismos’ as belonging to the genus ‘logos’ (discourse, argument), and as characterized by four (sometimes five) differentiae:

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    • Lon Fuller On The Inability Of The Judiciary To Police The Police

      By: Samir Chopra

      In The Morality of Law: Revised Edition (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1969), Lon Fuller writes:

      In this country it is chiefly to the judiciary that is entrusted the task of preventing a discrepancy between the law as declared and as actually administered. This allocation of function has the advantage of placing the responsibility in practiced hands, subjecting its discharge to public scrutiny, and dramatizing the integrity of the law. There are, however, serious disadvantages in any system  that looks to the courts as a bulwark against the lawless administration of the law. It makes the correction of abuses dependent upon the willingness and financial ability of the affected party to take his case to legislation. It has proved relatively ineffective in controlling lawless conduct by the police, this evil being in fact compounded by the tendency of lower courts to identify their mission with that of maintaining the morale of the police force. [pp. 81-82]

      There is little need to emphasize the topicality or relevance of these words, originally uttered in 1964 by Fuller, during the delivery of the Storrs Lectures on Jurisprudence at Yale Law School. Still, one is almost unavoidably drawn to the last sentence of the excerpt above. The considerations raised there are especially worth revisiting. (Fuller's larger project, of course, is to argue that law-abiding behavior is better ensured by a consideration of the moral weight attached to any injunction of the law.)

      In the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, both of which resulted in acquittals and failures to indict the police officers, it was transparent to most dispassionate observers that the judiciary did not see its work as upholding the law, as much as it saw it as supporting the police force, a 'partner' in the work it was engaged in elsewhere. Prosecutors and district attorneys work with police forces to enforce the law; they were not interested in bringing any of their 'co-workers' to justice, to subjecting them to the same standards employed on other legal subjects.

      These facts are worth keeping mind when we think about the developments in the latest case of murderous policemen: the shooting, in South Carolina, of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, supposedly for grabbing an officer's stun gun. The police officer, Michael T. Slager, who shot him in the back as he ran away–and then planted evidence, the allegedly stolen stun gun, next to Scott's body–is now facing murder charges. My first reaction to this story dipped deep into a constantly replenished well of cynicism:

      My guess is, the new strategy is go ahead and indict, and avoid the fuss that will be made if you don't. You can always acquit later with the right kind of jury.

      Hours have passed since I wrote the comment and I see no reason to reconsider. Video evidence–the kind that led to the formulation and pressing of the initial murder charges–has never been considered probative when it comes to assaults on black men by police. And as always, the enduring and transient members of the judiciary–like the jury–will, in all likelihood, worry more about the hit the morale of the good police officers of South Carolina, and perhaps nationwide will take. Such dangerous work, such little reward; surely these men in the line of duty, standing shoulder to shoulder with us in the administration of the law, should be forgiven their minor transgressions?

      Note: This post was originally published–under the same title–at samirchopra.com.

    • Bakhtin’s Europe and the Greek Novel

      Recent reading largely devoted to philosophical aesthetic questions about the form of the novel, have also led me into some thoughts about the idea of Europe. There is of course a very familiar idea of the novel as something that evolves from epic, beginning with Homer, and tied up with the history of Europe. I alluded to this in my last post on ‘Homer and the a-Ambiguities of Europe’. Some reading of Bakthin, as in Mikhail Bakthin (1895-1975) a name well known in literary theory, not quite so much in philosophical aesthetic of a Continental European tendency, but know, and little known outside those circles and maybe some overlapping circles. 

       So in brief, Bakhtin was a Russian who wrote about philosophy of language and literary history during the Soviet Socialist period, with amazing originality and depth by any standards, and it is an even more extraordinary achievement  given that Bakhtin lived through the height of Stalinist terror as art of decades of state enforced conformity in all spheres of thought. He is best know for Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Rabelais and His World , and four essays (‘Epic and Novel’, ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotype in the Novel’, ‘Discourse in the Novel’) collected in The Dialogic Imagination on the basis of a much bigger collection of essays in Russian.

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    • The philosophy of internet shaming

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      In recent times there has been quite some discussion on the phenomenon of internet shaming. Two important recent events were the (admirable, brave) TED talk by Monica Lewinsky, and the publication of Jon Ronson’s book So you’ve been publicly shamed. Lewinsky’s plight mostly pre-dates the current all-pervasiveness of the internet in people’s lives, but she was arguably one of the first victims of this new form of shaming: shaming that takes world-wide(-web) proportions, no longer confined to the locality of a village or a city. Pre-internet, people could move to a different city, if need be to a different country, and start over again. Now, only changing your name would do, to avoid being ‘googled down’ by every new person or employer you meet.

      As described in Ronson’s book (excerpt here, interview with Ronson here), lives can be literally destroyed by an internet shaming campaign (the main vehicle for that seems to be Twitter, judging from his stories). Justine Sacco, formerly a successful senior director of corporate communications at a big company, had her life turned upside down as a result of one (possibly quite unfortunate, though in a sense also possibly making an anti-racist point) tweet: ““Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” From there on, her life became a tragedy of Kafkaesque proportions, and she’s only one of the many people having faced similar misfortunes discussed in Ronson’s book. Clearly, people truly delight in denouncing someone as ‘racist’, as in Sacco’s case; it probably makes them feel like they are making a contribution (albeit a small one) to a cause they feel strongly about. But along the way, for the sake of ‘justice’, they drag through the dirt someone whose sole ‘crime’ was to post a joke of debatable tastefulness on Twitter. But who has never said anything unfortunate, which they later came to regret, on the internet? 

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    • Foucault And Kripke On Names And Rigid Designators

      By: Samir Chopra

      In 'What is An Author', Michel Foucault writes:

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