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    • The invisible hand of argumentative reasoning doesn’t work so well – so what can we do about it?

      It is well-attested that people are heavily biased when it comes to evaluating arguments and evidence. They tend to evaluate evidence and arguments that are in line with their beliefs more favorably, and tend to dismiss it when it isn't in line with their beliefs. For instance, Taber and Lodge (2006) found that people consistently rate arguments in favor of their views on gun control and affirmative action more strongly than arguments that are incongruent with their views on these matters. They also had a condition where people could freely pick and choose information to look at, and found that most participant actively sought out sympathetic, nonthreatening sources (e.g., those pro-gun control were less likely to read the  anti-gun control sources that were presented to them).

      Such attitudes can frequently lead to belief polarization. When we focus on just those pieces of information that confirm what we already believe, we get further and further strengthened in our earlier convictions. That's a bad state of affairs. Or isn't it? The argumentative theory of reasoning, put forward by Mercier and Sperber suggests that confirmation bias and other biases aren't bugs but design features. They are bugs if we consider reasoning to be a solitary process of a detached, Cartesian mind. Once we acknowledge that reasoning has a social function and origin, it makes sense to stick to one's guns and try to persuade the other. 

      Like an invisible hand, the joint effects of biases will lead to better overall beliefs in individual reasoners who engage in social reasoning: "in group settings, reasoning biases can become a positive force and contribute to a kind of division of cognitive labor" (p. 73). Several studies support this view. For instance, some studies indicate that, contrary to earlier views, people who are right are more likely to convince others in argumentative contexts than people who think they are right. In these studies, people are given a puzzle with a non-obvious solution. It turns out that those who find the right answer do a better job at convincing the others, because the arguments they can bring to the table are better. But is there any reason to assume that this finding generalizes to debates in science, politics, religion and other things we care about? It's doubtful.

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    • Beyonce And The Singularity

      By: Samir Chopra

      A couple of decades ago, I strolled through Washington Square Park on a warm summer night, idly observing the usual hustle and bustle of students, tourists, drunks, buskers,  hustlers, stand-up comedians, and sadly, folks selling oregano instead of good-to-honest weed. As I did so, I noticed a young man, holding up flyers and yelling, 'Legalize Marijuana! Impeach George Bush! [Sr., not Jr., though either would have done just fine.]."  I walked over, and asked for a flyer. Was a new political party being floated with these worthy objectives as central platform  issues? Was there a political movement afoot, one worthy of my support? Was a meeting being called?

      The flyers were for a punk rock band's live performance the following night–at a club, a block or so away. Clickbait, you see, is as old as the hills.

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    • Beyond the September Statement: Other Forms of Protest

      by Carolyn Dicey Jennings

      I note here the existence of the October Statement, which 111 philosophers have signed to demonstrate their resistance to all ranking systems. (I have not signed this statement. As I say here, I favor a user-created ranking system.)

      In addition, Brian Leiter released a list of those who will serve on the board of the PGR for 2014. I checked this list against the board of the 2011 PGR and an earlier announcement and found 7 missing names. I do not presume to know why all 7 of these people appear to have stepped down from the board, but Brian notes at his blog that "Five Board members resigned over the past two weeks, some because of the controversy, and some because of unrelated concerns about the PGR methodology." Here are the missing names: Alex Byrne, Craig Callender, Crispin Wright, David Brink, Graham Priest, Lisa Shapiro, and Samantha Brennan. 

    • The September Statement: Some Numbers (Updated 10/10/2014)

      By Carolyn Dicey Jennings

      –out of 643 signatures* from philosophers at 290 departments, 33% are women (roughly 2 times the percentage of women who are full-time faculty in philosophy according to one source, and almost 1.5 times the "percentage of women on tenured/tenure-track appointments at Top-51 Doctoral Programs in Gourmet Report" according to another source). 

      –for all of the departments in the top 50 of the 2011 worldwide PGR, a mean 17% faculty signed the document**. (I am attaching the Excel spreadsheet I used here.)

      –there is little to no correlation between PGR rating and the percentage of faculty who signed for departments in the top 50 of the 2011 worldwide ranking (-.11). Of these departments, those with greater than 17% faculty signatures include: ANU, CUNY, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Indiana, King's College London, MIT, Northwestern, Rutgers, Syracuse, UCL, UCSD, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Leeds, U Mass Amherst, Michigan, Oxford, UPenn, Sheffield, USC, St Andrews/Stirling, UVA, Wisconsin.

      *I updated the list at approximately 2:45 p.m. PDT , October 10th, 2014. 

      **I did not match the names of the signers to the names of members of faculty, but compared the number of people who signed the document claiming a particular affiliation to the number of faculty listed in the current PGR faculty lists. It is possible that persons not included in the PGR list for a department signed the document with that department's affiliation, which would potentially lower this percentage as well as the percentage for that particular department.

      Update (October 1st, 2014): Nottingham is the first department to ask not to be evaluated by the PGR, due to these events. 

      Update (October 3rd, 2014): John Protevi is hosting the "October Statement."

      Update (October 6th, 2014): Sheffield is the second department to announce that it is not cooperating with the PGR this year. The October Statement has 111 signatures, as of October 4th. (I have not worked out how much overlap exists between these statements, so it would not be correct to say that these statements together constitute 745 signatures–the number is smaller than this, but I don't yet know by how much.) 

      Update (October 10th, 2014): Signatures on the September Statement have closed, and an announcement has been added, as below.

      "The September Statement, signed by twenty-one philosophers on September 24, 2014, and its addendum, signed by six hundred twenty-four philosophers in the weeks following, was a pledge not to provide volunteer work for the Philosophical Gourmet Report under the control of Brian Leiter.

      On October 10, Leiter publicly committed to stepping down from the PGR following the publication of the 2014 edition, which will be produced with Leiter and Berit Brogaard as co-editors. After its publication, Leiter will resign as editor, and become a member of the PGR's advisory board. (See Daily Nous's account here.)

      The September Statement did not specify the conditions under which the PGR is considered to be "under the control of Brian Leiter". It is up to each individual signatory to decide whether it is consistent with the pledge to assist with the 2014 PGR with Leiter as a co-editor, or with future editions with Leiter as a board member.

      We are grateful for the support of the philosophers who signed the September Statement, as well as that of those who worked in other ways to make clear that this kind of bullying behaviour is unacceptable in professional philosophy."

    • Paul Morel and Travis Bickle: The World-Dissolving Melancholic Gaze

      By: Samir Chopra

      In Sons and Lovers (1913), D. H. Lawrence directs many glances at the Derbyshire landscape, often through his characters' distinctive visions. Here is one, this time through Paul Morel:

      He was brooding now, staring out over the country from under sullen brows. The little, interesting diversity of shapes had vanished from the scene; all that remained was a vast, dark matrix of sorrow and tragedy, the same in all the houses and the river-flats and the people and the birds; they were only shapen differently. And now that the forms seemed to have melted away, there remained the mass from which all the landscape was composed, a dark mass of struggle and pain. The factory, the girls, his mother, the large, uplifted church, the thicket of the town, merged into one atmosphere—dark, brooding, and sorrowful, every bit. [Bantam Classic, 1985, pp. 271]

      In this vivid passage, Paul's melancholia affords him a lens through which to interpret his surroundings, now infected with his own subjectivity. The world he 'sees' has the shapes and forms that it does because they are the ones he has imposed on it. So overpowering is his current sense of desolation that the boundaries between objects break down, principles of individuation fail to hold sway, and the substratum that is the foundation of the visible world is revealed. In this state of mind it can only be the 'vast, dark matrix of sorrow and tragedy', 'a dark mass of struggle and pain.' As a daily coping mechanism, this brooding assemblage is understood as, and interacted with, as physical objects, including animate and inanimate ones, like 'houses and the river-flats and the people and the birds' but at times like these–a characteristically intense interaction with a woman, in this case, Clara Dawes, his lover–this construction crumbles, and the artifice of it all is revealed. As is the grim underlying reality. (Paul's interpretive scheme is not a linguistic one; it seems to be constructed from felt emotions and sensations.)

      An interesting analogy with Lawrence's technique here is that employed by Martin Scorsese in Taxi Driver when showing us Travis Bickle's New York City. Scene after scene shows a grim tapestry of violence, sexual degradation, and corruption of all stripes–'the filth'–which so corrodes Bickle's sensibilities and generates an ultimately violent retaliation. So relentless is this depiction of 'the open sewer', so ubiquitous its presence outside Bickle's car window, that viewers of Taxi Driver might wonder if Bickle was driving around the same city block again and again. But that, of course, is the point of it all: the diversity of the city has been dissolved and made shapeless and formless by Bickle's gaze. What we see on the screen is Bickle's subjectivity imposed on the landscape outside, now understood and contextualized by his distinctive perspective into 'one vast matrix of of vice and dirt', with its streets and corners and peoples and street lights all merged into one atmosphere–dark, brooding, and sorrowful, every bit.'

      Paul Morel and Travis Bickle live in distinctive worlds of their own.

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

    • The upside down world paradox

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      (Cross-posted at M-Phi)

      As most kids (I suspect), my daughters sometimes play ‘upside down world’, especially when I ask them something to which they should say ‘yes’, but instead they say ‘no’ and immediately regret it: ‘Upside down world!’ The upside down world game basically functions as a truth-value flipping operator: if you say yes, you mean no, and if you say no, you mean yes.

      My younger daughter recently came across the upside down world paradox: if someone asks you ‘are you playing upside down world?’, all kinds of weird things happen to each of the answers you may give. If you are not playing upside down world, you will say no; but if you are playing upside down world you will also say no. So the ‘no’ answer underdetermines its truth-value, a bit like the no-no paradox. Now for the ‘yes’ answer: if you are playing upside down world and say ‘yes’, then that means ‘no’, and so you are not playing the game after all if you are speaking truthfully. But then your ‘yes’ was a genuine yes in the first place, and so you are playing the game and said yes, which takes us back to the beginning. (In other words, 'no' is the only coherent answer, but it still doesn't say anything about whether you are actually playing the game or not.)

       

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    • Continuing Comments on Christian Coseru’s “Philosophy’s Western Bias and What Can Be Done About It”

      … here, have been approved.  Some ended up in spam, some I lost track of in the flood of comments on other posts.  Sorry about that!  If you have submitted one and it's still not showing, please email me.  I'm delighted that the discussion has been so fruitful!

      — Eric Schwitzgebel

    • Possible Psychology of a Matrioshka Brain

      by Eric Schwitzgebel

      Enclose the sun inside a layered nest of thin spherical computers. Have the inmost sphere harvest the sun’s radiation to drive computational processes, emitting waste heat out its backside. Use this waste heat as the energy input for the computational processes of a second, larger and cooler sphere that encloses the first. Use the waste heat of the second sphere to drive the computational processes of a third. Keep adding spheres until you have an outmost sphere that operates near the background temperature of interstellar space.

      Congratulations, you’ve built a Matrioshka Brain! It consumes the entire power output of its star and produces many orders of magnitude more computation per microsecond than all of the current computers on Earth do per year.

      Here’s a picture:

      (Yes, it’s black. Maybe not if you shine a flashlight on it, though.)

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    • Ghost From The Machine: Once Again, The Dead Return

      By: Samir Chopra

      Matt Osterman's Ghost from the Machine (2010)–originally titled and known internationally as Phasma Ex Machina--is touted by its marketing material as a 'supernatural thriller'. A low-budget indie, it uses a cast made up of genuine amateurs who sometimes look distinctly uncomfortable and self-conscious on camera, and wears its modest production values on its sleeve. The story sounds hokey enough: a young man, an amateur inventor of sorts, tries to bring his dead parents back to life by building an electrical machine that changes the electromagnetic field surrounding it (I think.) The parents, unsurprisingly, do not return from the dead, but other folks do: a widowed, fellow-garage-tinkerer neighbor's long-dead wife, and a pair of murderous old folk. (The return to life of this latter bunch makes the movie into a 'horror' or 'ghost' film; bringing back the garage-tinkerer's wife would only have made it 'supernatural.')

      For all that PEM manages to often be genuinely thought-provoking. It is so because its treatment of its subject matter invites immediate analogizing–not comparison–with two cinematic classics: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Andrei Tarkovsky's  Solaris. 

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    • Concerning events at the journal Science

      By Roberta Millstein

      My friend Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, a historian of science at the University of Florida, has drawn my attention to a number of concerning events at the eminent journal Science.

      One was an appalling magazine cover, for which they were roundly and rightly criticized. The Editor-in-Chief issued a non-apology for the cover, saying that she is "truly sorry for any discomfort that this cover may have caused anyone" and promising "that we will strive to do much better in the future to be sensitive to all groups and not assume that context and intent will speak for themselves." 

      A second recent development is the shortening of book reviews to 600 words, with an increased focus on popular books and fewer reviews coming from scholars in the history and philosophy of science as compared to the past. This is an unfortunate loss of an important perspective from Science.

      Now, a blog post from Michael Balter, who has been with the journal for over 21 years, talks about some of the behind-the-scenes troubles at Science and its publishing organization, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). These include the recent dismissal of four women in the art and production departments, with essentially no notice in three cases and very little notice in the fourth case, and the absence of any serious response to the concerns expressed by the overwhelming majority of Science's news staff about the way these dismissals were handled.

      I am not in a position to fully comment on these recent developments; I am only reporting what I have read and what I have been told. But as a member of the AAAS Section on History and Philosophy of Science (Section L) I am very concerned. Indeed, perhaps given the important role that Science plays, we should all be concerned about what what is involved with the "strategic transformation that AAAS is currently undergoing, to enhance its engagement with its members and to be in the forefront of the multimedia landscape of the future."