New APPS

Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. Mostly Philosophy.

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    • Mechanism, Salience, and Belief Change

      New APPS readers probably remember Helen De Cruz's excellent post on the polarized debate surrounding evolutionary science (which was picked up by NPR), as well as Roberta Millstein's follow-up post on the perhaps equally polarized debate concerning climate change. Both posts cite the work of Dan Kahan, who has a distinct take on these issues:

      "I study risk perception and science communication. I’m going to tell you what I regard as the single most consequential insight you can learn from empirical research in these fields if your goal is to promote constructive public engagement with climate science in American society. It's this: What people “believe” about global warming doesn’t reflect what they know; it expresses who they are."

      I just attended a talk by Michael Ranney, who opposes Kahan's position. In Ranney's view, communicating the mechanism of global climate change is enough to change the minds of people on both sides of the political spectrum. (Check out the videos!) Ranney shows, surprisingly, that just about no one understands the mechanism of climate change (Study 1). Further, he shows that revealing that mechanism changes participants' minds about climate change (Study 2). 

      Why might this be?

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    • Towards a unified theory of why it’s nearly impossible to cover Beatles’ songs

      I still keep wondering why even pretty good bands so reliably founder on Beatles' covers.

      Maybe it's as simple as this:

      1. Because of their experiences in Germany, the Beatles were one of the best live bands in rock history,
      2. When added to the complexity of their melodies this sets a very high bar for covers,
      3. George Martin's production then adds a feeling of canonicity to their specific performances.

      So then when you cover the song it usually sounds like just a bad copy or something different but not as good.

       

    • Everyone Here Speaks for Themselves

      It seems apropos to introduce a small point of order: New APPS is a group blog, which means that there are many authors here and we all speak for ourselves–and only ourselves. 

      A case in point would be my strong disagreement with Jon Cogburn's post below. I find it to trade in a series of unfortunate false dichotomies: 1) between valuing or appreciating ability and seeking to avoid speaking in a way that may be hurtful offensive to people with disabilities, or which marginalizes them; 2) between recognizing that illnesses (mental or physical), injuries, or other afflictions are real sources of suffering and seeking to avoid speaking about people suffering from such conditions in a way that marginalizes, delegitimates, hurts or excludes them; and more generally, 3) between being able to express oneself adequately or take joy in life and seeking to avoid harming others carelessly or thoughtlessly, especially where they may also be subject to various systems of marginalization, delegitimation, or exclusion. 

      I also disagree with Jon's suggestion that some of our former bloggers were wrong to push as hard as possible for the development in the profession and among those who engaged with us here of a much greater degree of sensitivity and care with respect to how we speak about folks who have historically been marginalized, delegitimated, and excluded by the profession and by the history of 'Western' philosophy.  

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    • Get ready for internet slowdown day.

      Sept 10th is Internet Slowdown Day, a day devoted to drawing attention to the issue of 'Net neutrality, which is in greater peril than it has been in a long time.    Amy Goodman has all the details  here.

    • In praise of anti-anti-ableism

      Increasingly, when I see someone accused of "ableism" because of some inartful (or perfectly fine) turn of expression, I become angry. It just strikes me as Forrest Gumpism. Everything is really peachy, as long as we confine our discourse to positive platitudes (and attacking those who don't so confine themselves).*

      But all else being equal, it is better to be able. Speaking in ways that presupposes this is not bad, at least not bad merely in virtue of the presupposition (see also the Johnny Knoxville/Eddie Barbanell video below).

      The place where my son gets occupational therapy (to deal with a bunch of sensory processing disabilities he inherited from me)** is called "Abilities." Good for them! I don't want my child to suffer as much as I do. The thought that I should feel guilty for that, or feel guilty for expressing something that presupposes it, just strikes me as insane. And I don't feel guilty for saying it strikes me as insane. To not be able to use "insane" as a derogation when it is appropriate would be to lose sight of the fact that it is horrible to be insane, which would in fact be extraordinarily cruel to the insane.

      My friend Justin Isom dealt with his blindness and cancer with incredible dignity. He played a very bad hand extraordinarily well. But any pretense that it was not a bad hand would have been insulting and condescending (just as he would have taken, on the other side, excessive pity to be condescending). Justin thought it was hilarious when I first squirmed about saying "see you later" to him. When you have a blind friend you realize just how much language is seeded with visual metaphors. For the anti-ableist, we are supposed to police our speech in ways that would pretend otherwise. (And please read Neil Tennant's obituary for Justin below,*** which speaks to Justin's astonishingly rich ability (not just astonshingly rich for a blind guy, but all the more interesting and impressive since it's a blind guy talking) to describe experiences, such as public street in Indonesia, in visual terms.)

      But for the anti-ableist speech policer, we can't say that a good idea is "visionary" because that might have hurt Justin's feelings. No. I reject that. You don't speak for Justin and you have no right to present him as emotionally infantile enough to care about such things.

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    • Salaita and the Accreditors

      Following a suggestion from a friend that some of what’s come to light about the roles of the administration and the board in the Salaita affair might not be consistent with accrediting principles regarding shared governance, I decided to check out the specific rules that UIUC is supposed to be operating under.
       
      The upshot of my survey, which I'll explain in detail below, is that UIUC is at least generally bound to respect principles of academic freedom and shared governance by their accreditation regime, and more specifically, that 1) the Board of Trustees is bound to remain free of undue influence by donors and other exteranl parties where this is contrary to the interests of the university, and 2) that the Board and the Administration are bound to let the faculty oversee academic matters. These last two considerations seem to create a real problem  given what we now know about the role of external donor pressure on the board and about the way in which the Trustees and the Chancellor seem to have avoided any consultation with the faculty in making the decision to 'dehire' Salaita.  (For those who need an update, your best bet is to read Corey Robin's blog, especially this post.)
       
      Below, I'll explain in a little more detail. 

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    • Steven Salaita And The Anger Of The Subjugated

      In response to my post yesterday, a couple of readers wondered about the analogy I had drawn between Professor F and Steven Salaita‘s cases. Reader Meir Alon suggested my comparison was ‘very wrong’, Darius Jedburgh said my comparison of Salaita was, indeed, ‘slanderous’, and yet another worthy wondered what the point of it all was.

      In constructing the analogy I noted Professor F, like Salaita, had a distinguished academic record, that she worked in a field which often featured polemically charged debates, many of which for her, because of her personal standing and situation–Professor F  has very likely experienced considerable sexism in her time–were likely to be charged emotionally, and that a few hyperbolic, intemperate responses, made in a medium not eminently suited to reasonable discourse, and featuring many crucial limitations in its affordance of sustained intellectual engagement, should not disqualify her from an academic appointment made on the basis of her well-established scholarship and pedagogy.

      I could very easily have constructed another analogy, using an accomplished professor of African American studies, Professor B, who stepping into the Ferguson debate, after engaging, dispiritingly, time and again, in his personal and academic life, with not just the bare facts of racism in American life and the depressing facts pertaining to informal, day-to-day segregation but also with a daily dose of bad news pertaining to the fate of young black men in America, might finally experience the proverbial last straw on the camel’s back, and respond with a few tweets as follows:

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    • The scariest thing about Stephen King’s 11/22/63

      There's not much new that one can currently do to add to the variety of possible time travel metaphysics explored in literature. Try-to-improve-stuff-make-other-stuff-much-worse is a pretty reliable trope by this point. Stephen King's 11/22/63 (in addition to being a great novel) is still philosophically interesting though. 

      What 11/22/63 makes distressingly clear is that in King's universe Leibniz is correct that this is the best of all possible worlds. When the time-traveller goes back in time the universe supernaturally conspires (through standard horror movie tropes such as inanimate objects behaving as if they are agentive, people acting possessed, etc.) to prevent him from altering anything that would change the course of history or to put history back on track once he's altered it. When the time traveller finally beats the universe at this game, the results are catastrophic, and he then becomes part of the universe horrifically setting itself aright.

      For the poor time-traveller it is impossible* to improve history. The thought that one might improve history is only the result of ignorance.

      Again, this is not new stuff. It's one response to the problem of evil. What's new in King's book is that he shows Leibniz's conclusion to be itself horrific. It would be madness to worship whatever supernatural forces ensure that this is the best possible world. By realistically portraying the moral psychology of humans buffeted by these forces (made visible to humans by time travel) King is able to demolish the Leibnizian intuition more effectively than Voltaire.

      Reformation Theology can be summed up by three Gs: Guilt, Grace, Gratitude. For King, if this really were the best possible world, that's all the more reason to be ungrateful. We're not faced with a good God who can't do better than this (is that process theology?). But rather horrific processes that we can't understand making it impossible that things could be better. 

      [Notes:

      *To be fair, horror impossibility is not the kind of impossibility philosophers normally think about. In horror the impossible is sometimes actual. Noel Carroll comes closest to explaining how this works. Neal Hebert and I tried to expand on Carroll's analysis, but I think our account was overly epistemic. I'm going to teach Harman's book on Lovecraft next year and hopefully be able to rethink this.]

    • Brazilian music on Fridays: the last one

      After more than 3,5 years of weekly Brazilian music posts, I decided to discontinue the weekly regularity. For a number of reasons, it had become increasingly difficult for me to keep up with the rhythm (and NOT due to paucity of good Brazilian music!). I may still occasionally post when I come across or am reminded of something particularly inspiring, but it will be a ‘go with the flow’ thing rather than a weekly column. 

      For this last (regular) BMoF, I’m posting Caetano Veloso’s ‘If you hold a stone’, which I had intended to post at the very beginning of BMoF (at the time, BMoT) back in February 2011. After writing the whole text, I came to realize that the song was not available on youtube (beginner’s mistake…); for whatever reason, now it is. So if you are interested, go back and read what I wrote back then, and listen to the best song about being homesick that I know of — appropriate for a goodbye, I suppose.

      Many thanks to readers who regularly (or irregularly!) followed BMoF over the last 3,5 years; it's been great fun for me, and hopefully a bit fun for you too. Most likely, there will still be some Brazilian music here at NewAPPS, only less frequently.

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    • The Ferguson Lesson: Another Way to “Take Up Arms”

      As someone who has spent the better part of her career researching, analyzing and teaching not only about the structure and nature of oppressive power regimes, but also better and worse ways to resist or transform such regimes, I've nevertheless been unable to settle in my own mind, to my own satisfaction, my position with regard to the moral or political value of revolutionary violence.  I can say that my core moral intuitions (for whatever those are worth) definitely incline me toward favoring nonviolence as a principled ethical commitment… though, over the years, I have found those intuitive inclinations fading in both intensity and persuasiveness.  As a philosopher, a citizen and a moral agent, I continue to be deeply unsettled by my own ambivalence on this matter.

      First, a preliminary autobiographical anecdote: I spent a year between undergraduate and gradate school in the nonprofit sector, as the Director of the M.K.Gandhi Institute for the Study of Nonviolence.  (That was back in 2000, when the Gandhi Institute was still housed at Christian Brothers University in Memphis, which is now my academic home, evidencing the kind of bizarro turn-of-fate that can only be credited to some particularly clever– or ironically humorous– supernatural bureaucrat.)  I went to the Gandhi Institute initially because nonviolence was an all-but-unquestioned moral virtue for me at the time.  But, after a few years in graduate school and consistently since, the many and varied until-then-unposed questions about the moral or political legitimacy of violence pressed their way to the fore of my mind.  In roughly chronological order, I'd say that the combination of (1) my first real engagement with Frantz Fanon's argument in "Concerning Violence" (from his Wretched of the Earth), the arguments by Marx (and Marxists) in various texts advocating more or less violent revolution, and Noam Chomsky's considerations of the same, (2) my extensive research into human rights violations, transitional justice and transitional democracies, postcolonial theory, feminist theory and critical race theory, which collectively constituted the subject of my dissertation, (3) the radically dramatic shift in what counts as properly-speaking "political" and/or "revolutionary" violence in the post-9/11 world and (4) my own experiences, from near and afar, with the increasing number of (threatened, proto-, aborted, defeated and/or more-or-less successful) revolutions taking place in my adult lifetime (e.g., OWS, the Arab Spring and, much closer to home and far less violent, the current and ongoing academic revolution surrounding the Salaita case), all worked together to contribute to my rethinking the merits and demerits of violence as a way of resisting/combatting/correcting oppressive, exclusionary or otherwise unjust power regimes.

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