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    • Health Informatics, Negative Spaces, and Corporate Privacy

      by Gordon Hull

      Judge Richard Posner’s well-known application of law and economics to privacy yields results that appear, well, ideological.  First, he considers what individuals do with informational privacy. What is an interest in privacy of information, he asks?  Well, it’s an interest in enforcing an information asymmetry in markets.  Information asymmetry is presumptively bad because it causes distortion in the price mechanism; the price mechanism is in turn the reason that markets can claim to be both epistemically and normatively justified.  They are epistemically justified because market price signals the social value of something much better than any sort of centralized planning process would do, and it does so without introducing all the inefficiencies of an enormous state apparatus.  The price mechanism is normatively justified because it presents no special intrusion into the lives of individuals: we are all free to do what we want and signal (with our willingness to pay) what is important to us.  In the case of privacy, for example, if I present myself or some good I am selling to you, “privacy” basically means that I’m trying to withhold relevant information about that good from you.  If I apply for a job and hide a criminal record, then I’m trying to get you to overvalue me as a potential employee by keeping you ignorant of my past.  Accordingly, the law should not protect such refusals to disclose, and in some cases ought to compel disclosure.  Thus the first part of Posner’s article.

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    • Why I Will Be Contributing Rankings to the Gourmet Report

      by Eric Schwitzgebel

      I have been asked to be an evaluator for the 2014-2015 edition of the Philosophical Gourmet Report. Contrary to what seems to be the general (but not universal) sentiment of New APPS contributors and commenters, I support the rankings and will participate.

      The PGR rankings have at least three related downsides:

      1. They perpetuate privilege, including the privilege of people with social power in the discipline, the privilege of people in PhD-granting institutions over other types of institutions, and the general privilege of Anglophone philosophy and philosophers.
      2. They reinforce mainstream (“Gourmet ecology“) valuations of topics and approaches, in a discipline where the mainstream needs no help and it would probably be productive to push against the mainstream.
      3. They risk blurring the distinction between second-hand impressions about reputation (especially outside evaluators’ own subareas) and genuine quality.

      In light of these downsides, I understand people’s hesitation to support the enterprise.

      I view the rankings as an exercise in the sociology of philosophy. The rankings are valuable insofar as they reveal sociological facts about how departments, and to some extent individuals (especially in the specialty rankings) are viewed by the social elite in Anglophone philosophy — by the people who publish articles in journals like Nous and Philosophical Review, by the people who write and are written about in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries, by the people who teach at renowned British and U.S. universities like Oxford, Harvard, and Berkeley. As a part-time sociologist of philosophy interested in patterns of esteem, I am curious how people in this social group view the field, and I regard the PGR as an important source of data.

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    • Street harassment caught on camera

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      Related to my post on the invisibility of sexual harassment earlier this week, here’s a video that has been making the rounds on the Internet, and rightly so: a woman walks on the streets of NYC, and a hidden camera captures the unsolicited comments and aggressive attempts at making contact by numerous men she runs into. Now, that’s a good way to make (street) harassment more visible!

       

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    • An open letter from Jonathan Ichikawa to Berit Brogaard regarding her invitation to be a PGR evaluator

      Posted on Facebook and reposted here with his consent and encouragement (if I understand correctly)

       

      Dear Berit,
      Thanks for this invitation. While the interest in my opinion about my colleagues is flattering, I don't feel able to participate, for three reasons.
       
      First, as I think you know, I have signed on to the 'September Statement', which is a commitment to declining to provide volunteer work for the PGR while under Brian Leiter's control. While I'm aware that he's appointed you as a co-editor and announced an intention to step down after this year's PGR, it is unclear to me how much control he retains in his position as co-editor. And since the reason his control was relevant in the first place was his social power as a result of the general perception of his control, and the current unclarity will allow that perception to continue, I don't consider it consistent with the September Statement to participate. (Other signatories may well make contrary decisions for themselves about this point.)
       
      Second, I remain deeply ambivalent about the PGR itself. While it unquestionably does good for many prospective philosophy students, it also, in my opinion, unquestionably does harm to the structure of the discipline of philosophy on the whole. I just haven't been able to make up my mind about whether I would support a PGR, even if totally divorced from Brian Leiter. I really don't know whether it would count as a service or as a harm to the profession; under such moral uncertainty, I'm inclined to decline to participate.
       
      Third, I very much doubt that I would be able to provide anything like reliable judgments of philosophical quality based on the names of individuals in faculties, without spending an enormous amount of time reading people's work. Although I've been in professional philosophy for nearly ten years, and have gained at least some familiarity with a large number of philosophers, I think I know next to nothing about a large majority of the philosophers whose departments you'd be asking me to rate. At a minimum, I might be able to find and skim the CV of every member of a department in half an hour or so, but to employ any of my own philosophical skill to give anything like an expert opinion, I'd have to read and engage with people's work. Since we're talking about roughly a hundred departments, this represents a daunting task to say the least. (Even just skimming CVs, at 30 minutes per department, would take some 50 hours.) Or I could skip most departments, limiting my attention to those containing my friends and those colleagues I've interacted with enough to have an opinion about already; but I'd worry about selection bias, and even those departments are made up mostly of people I don't know. I'm just not comfortable contributing a meaningful opinion about the quality of someone's work without spending orders of magnitude more time than I could offer if I wanted to.
       
      I'd be happy to discuss any of these considerations with you further if you're interested.
      Best wishes,
      Jonathan

    • Enlightenment Ethics as Critique of Progress

      I don't think I've got anything surprising to say for anyone whose read Enlightenment texts concerned with ethics texts at all attentively, at least in terms of pointing out what is obviously there, but what I'm discussing as far as I can see is underplayed in most discussion, and certainly in the 'average understanding' that circulates prior to any close reading of texts.

      The obvious exception is Rousseau who gets understood as the back to 'natural man' nostalgic. Some recent work on Smith and Rousseau (e.g. Dennis Rasmussen) maybe gets to some degree at Smith's concerns about the 'progress' of commercial society, and there is a discussion in Foucault of the relation between the subject of eighteenth century political economy and the 'savage', though that is not so much about endorsement of 'savage' ethics as bringing out a supposed persistent 'natural' person. Given that Vico was already criticising any tendency to read legally defined rights back into 'natural' humanity in the early eighteenth century, we should be careful about simply attributing a brute identification of individual rights in commercial society with 'natural or 'savage' humanity on the part of all Enlightenment advocates of commerce and legalism.

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    • What is the (recent) history of the term ‘intuitions’ in philosophy?

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      As reported a few weeks ago, I’ve been working on a paper with my student Leon Geerdink (for a volume on the history of early analytic philosophy being edited by Chris Pincock and Sandra Lapointe) where we elaborate on a hypothesis that I first presented in a blog post more than 3 years ago: that the history of analytic philosophy can to a large extent be understood as the often uneasy interplay between Russellianism and Mooreanism, in particular with respect to their respective stances on the role of common sense for philosophical inquiry. In the first part of the paper, we present an (admittedly superficial and selective) overview of some recent debates on the role of intuitions and common sense in philosophical methodology; in the second part we discuss Moore and Russell specifically; and in the third part we discuss what we take to be another prominent instantiation of the opposition between Russellianism and Mooreanism: the debate between Carnap and Strawson on the notion of explication.

      The paper is now almost ready (and we’d be happy to share the draft if anyone is interested), but one puzzle remains: when and how did the term ‘intuitions’ begin to be used in the philosophical literature in its current sense(s)? (As argued by C.S.I Jenkins, the term seems to be used in different senses in the current debates.) As established by Leon, Russell and Moore do not use the term ‘intuitions’ in any of these senses (and in particular, not in the sense of common sense and folk beliefs); instead, they use the term in the technical, largely Kantian, sense of immediate knowledge. We have not found occurrences of the term in the Carnap/Strawson debate either.

      Does anyone know the answer to this pressing question? The SEP entry on intuitions is silent on the history of the terminology, and I haven’t found any discussions of this issue in the recent papers I’ve been reading for this project (maybe I’m missing something?). Not much hinges on this matter for the purposes of my paper with Leon, but it did make us curious. Perhaps our knowledgeable readers know the answer? We hope so!

       

    • The invisibility of sexual harassment

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      A few years ago, I was going through airport security at Schiphol for a short European flight (to Munich, if I remember correctly), with hand-luggage only. As I was struggling with some lower back pain at the time, I was bringing an electric massager with me; sure enough, when my trolley went through the x-ray, the massager caught the guard’s attention. He made me open the trolley, and asked: ‘what is this?’ I said: ‘it’s an electric massager’. His reply (salacious voice): ‘oh, but isn’t it better if someone else does the massaging on you?’ (Wink, wink…) I am usually rather short-tempered, and normally would have made quite a fuss about it, but I didn’t want to risk missing my flight so I simply moved on.

      Now, this is only one of many similar episodes I and every single woman in the world have experienced in our lives – nothing very extraordinary about it. But when I told my friendly, well-meaning male friends about this episode, they just couldn’t believe their ears: yes, there it was, a male airport security guard making entirely inappropriate remarks to a female traveler.

      This episode illustrates a well-known phenomenon: the invisibility of harassment to those who do not experience it (and similarly for racism, ableism etc.). The ‘nicer’ guys who do not engage in overt harassment often think it is so inconceivable that anyone could be so grotesque that they fail to see it when it happens near them (and in fact, it often does not even happen near them; I doubt that the security guard would have made his remark had I been accompanied by a male travel companion). This tends to lead to an under-appreciation of the problem among these well-meaning men. Moreover, the men who do engage in such behavior often think there’s nothing wrong with it (‘hey, it’s just a joke!’), and so also fail to appreciate the gravity of the problem. 

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    • Too Big to Know–is Leitergate a microcosm of a much larger phenomenon?

      Here at the Rotman conference on Climate Science, Paul Edwards is talking about "knowledge infrastructures" and how the production of knowledge has radically changed over the last 20 years from a much more individualistic enterprise, with pyramids of expertise, peer review, etc to a much more distributed model.   He mentioned this popular book Too Big to Know.    I wonder if this sort of transition is hiting philosophy and is being fought out in the various debates about the PGR and its possible more distributed alternatives.   Is this a fight about whether Philosophy should be preserving its pyramids of expertise, or be moving to more distributed model of credibiility sanctioning?

    • Open letter from the Northwestern University Philosophy Graduate Students

      The following letter was adopted by the Northwestern University Philosophy Graduate Students by way of a vote:

      As many in the philosophical community already know, sexual misconduct is a prevalent problem in the discipline. Our department is currently bearing the weight of its own controversy regarding sexual misconduct, and we fear that particular developments in the situation at our institution could have far-reaching consequences for victims elsewhere and going forward. After being accused by two different students of sexual assault, and being found responsible for sexual harassment by the university’s Sexual Harassment Prevention Office in each case, a member of our faculty responded by suing (among others) the university, one of his colleagues, and, most troubling to us, a graduate student.

       While some of the legal matters await final resolution, litigation itself raises new practical and ethical considerations. Anyone named as a defendant in a legal complaint will naturally be advised by her* attorney not to discuss the matter with others. The silencing effects for a student who is sued by a professor for alleging sexual misconduct within her university's own reporting procedures must be distressing: she will likely be isolated against her will from educational, professional, and personal support networks by someone who has proven willing to sue not only her, but also those who would support her.

       Many instances of sexual misconduct go unreported, in large part because the risks of reporting are many and serious while the potential gains are very slim. The risks of further loss of community, of damaging actual and potential professional relationships, of not being believed, or of being reduced to how one has been treated, rather than being perceived as an intelligent, talented, and valuable individual and member of a community, already deter victims from reporting. Add to these risks the possibility of being named in a lawsuit (and the consequent potential for financial ruin if not indemnified) as well as having personal information and details of a traumatic experience made public, and the hazards are substantially multiplied.**

       The pursuit of this legal strategy and its silencing effects should be troubling to the philosophical community. Suing a graduate student for filing an internal, and otherwise confidential, sexual misconduct complaint is intolerable. If the legal strategy implemented by this faculty member is treated as acceptable, it is not only injustice to our fellow graduate student that is at stake–though this is a substantial concern in itself. The implications for victims going forward, within the profession and otherwise, are staggering. Treating such an approach as acceptable effectively amounts to accepting those implications, as well as silence for ourselves. It should be noted that even if a faculty member feels that their due process rights have been infringed upon, and even if no university grievance process is available, there are other courses of action available under, for example, Title VII and Title IX. Consequently, we feel we must vigorously repudiate this legal tactic and provide vocal support to those whose voice would be taken from them.

       One necessary step to adequately supporting victims is opening up communication between administrators, faculty, and graduate students, both within departments and across them. We hope that the discipline’s internal conversation regarding sexual misconduct will continue, that it is honest yet sensitive to issues of vulnerability and power dynamics, and that we do not avoid confronting discrimination and exclusion because we are too concerned with privacy to do anything at all. When we act as if privacy concerns cannot be appropriately balanced with substantive communication, we only exacerbate the stigma that victims already feel. The fact that philosophy departments have become a central battleground for rights to non-discrimination in academic settings is a result of a collective failure on the part of our discipline, and as such will require collective action to rectify it. We hope this letter will serve as a small step towards that end.

       We admire our fellow graduate student for her strength and bravery and are proud to share an intellectual home with a colleague who is both uncommonly brilliant and courageous. We stand with her, and in support of victims everywhere.

       *While we are using the feminine pronoun, this is applicable to persons of any gender.

      **Here, we do not mean to claim that personal information need accurately be made public. Unfortunately, whoever initiates a legal complaint has the advantage of being able to make public a narrative of events that indeed need not be accurate, or even approximately accurate, unless it is to prevail in court. When filing a motion to dismiss, a defendant does not have the opportunity to dispute matters of fact. This only underscores our concern about the impact this new precedent may have on victims.   

       

    • Rotman Institute Conference on Knowledge and Models in Climate Science

      By: Eric Winsberg

      I am currently attending this exciting conference on Climate Modeling at the Rotman Institute at Western University.    I'll try to get a few posts up over the next few days about some of the highlights.   

      Last night was related event:  a public panel meeting on Climate Change: what should we do?   One of the most interesting claims made, to my mind, was by Gary Brown.   He argued for the city as a good agent for social change.   His basic claim was that Cities are the kinds of political entities in which positive political change is within our grasp  (think of London, ON and San Francisco banning plastic water bottles, or New York City almost banning large sugarry drinks) and that once Cities speak in this sort of way, they can change the political dialog of the whole country or beyond.