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    • The Gordon Ramsay Hunger Games (and why the world should be more like Iron Chef and Professional Wrestling)

      I don't own a television (one of many area men I approximate), but with the advent of Hulu now my wife and I watch an episode of some reality cooking show nearly every evening after the kids go to bed. I've seen nearly every episode of the Gordon Ramsay vehicles Master Chef and Hell's Kitchen. In both shows twenty or so people compete with one another in inventively designed cooking contests. One loser is thrown off every episode until the lone survivor emerges victorious at the end of the season. The ginned up drama is fun and there's lots of interesting food.

      Recently though Ramsay's schtick has started to wear thin. Before throwing people out at the end of every episode of Hells Kitchen, he makes two or three people tell him why they deserve to stay in Hell's Kitchen. What follows are desperate platitudes about how they are a fighter and getting better all of the time. It's infantalizing. Then Ramsay strings it out dramatically, telling one person to step forward and starting a sentence where you might think one thing will happen and then ending it by telling them the opposite. It's frankly obnoxious. And of course he yells at and belittles the contestants in the manner of an abusive father starting to lose his temper. And nearly every episode has the obligatory bits where the contestants gush at length about what a wonderful person this obnoxious man is. It's Orwellian.

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    • Anatomy of a drubbing

      of Brazil here.

    • Against the ‘this is nonsense!’ objection

      Carolyn Dicey Jennings has a post up discussing the unfortunate implications of criticizing a person’s views in terms of their presumed (lack of) intelligence. I agree with much of what she says there (though I don’t think the issue is exclusively or even predominantly about criticism of women and members of other disadvantaged groups, even if impacts these groups to a greater extent). I want however to bring up another aspect of Brian Leiter’s criticism of Carolyn’s analysis, namely his use of the adjective ‘nonsense’, and connect it to what seems to be a pervasive but somewhat questionable practice among philosophers.

      In fact, I was thinking of such a post even before reading Carolyn’s post. The idea was prompted by a conversation with Chris Menzel over lunch last week in Munich. Chris was telling me about some of his thoughts on Williamson’s Modal Logic as Metaphysics, and how Williamson describes the actualism vs. possibilism debate as ‘confused’, i.e. as something that he cannot make sense of. So technically, Williamson is (here) not accusing specific people of holding nonsensical positions, but according to him this is a nonsensical debate, as it were. (Chris Menzel is working on a paper on this material where he objects to Williamson's diagnosis of the debate.)

      The notion of ‘nonsense’ has an interesting philosophical (recent) history, dating back at least to the Tractatus, and then later appropriated by the Vienna Circle. (I’d be interested to hear of earlier systematic uses of the notion of nonsense for philosophical purposes.) So, to be sure, it is in itself a philosophically interesting notion, but I think it becomes problematic when 'this is nonsense!' counts as a legitimate, acceptable move in a philosophical debate.

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    • Congratulations to Naftali Weinberger and Charles Rathkopf

      for winning the 2013 Philosophy of Science Association prizes for best essay by, respectively, a Graduate Student and a recent PhD.  More details here.  

      Welcome to the club!  :)

       

    • A pretty awful argument against scientific replication (h/t Dan Weiskopf).

      Jason Mitchell, a Harvard social neuroscientist, gives an argument against scientific replication, and a defense of unreplicated science, here.   His argument, in a nutshell, is that all we ever learn from the failure to replicate an experiment is that the attempted replicator is a lousy experimenter.  Quoting Mitchell: 

      • Recent hand-wringing over failed replications in social psychology is largely pointless, because unsuccessful experiments have no meaningful scientific value.
      • Because experiments can be undermined by a vast number of practical mistakes, the likeliest explanation for any failed replication will always be that the replicator bungled something along the way.  Unless direct replications are conducted by flawless experimenters, nothing interesting can be learned from them.

      Mitchell is giving, pretty much out of a bottle, what Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch call "The Golden hands" argument.   "If you can't replicate what I did in the lab, that shows I have golden hands and you have iron claws."   Interestingly, C&P generally believe that this is always a rationally defensible claim that any scientist can make.   Of course, unlike Mitchell, C&P understand that was is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.  If the above is, as both M and C&P maitain, always a defensible claims, then so is its converse:  "If I got the opposite result in the lab and you can't replicate it, then that shows I have golden hands and you have iron claws."

      The problem is, if all the above is true, then this would vindicate C&P's claim that all scientific reasoning is circular.   This is, after all, and for example, what they think the famous case of Pasteur and Pouchet and spontaneous generation shows.    Pasteur can always claim that Pouchet has iron hands, and Pouchet can always claim that Pasteur has iron hands, and this explains, from each one's point of view, why the other is getting results that don't accord with the first one's theoretical views.    

      C&P are absolutely right to think that it follows from this that all scientific reasoning is circular.  It becomes a matter of definition, on this conception, that you have iron hands just in case you get results that don't accord with my theoretical views.   But scientific reasoning isn't circular.  And hence there has to be something wrong with this conception.    And what's wrong is that pace C&P, there are often, in the long run (and hopefully not such a long run that we are all dead, thought that may have been the case in the Spontaneous Generation case) independent means of deciding whose experiment is the valid one.  And that means that pace Mitchell, scientific replication, and the process of figuring out who has the iron claws and who has the golden hands, is a crucial part of the scientific enterprise. 

    • Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Garota de Berlin’

      [Special edition] After the massacre of yesterday, there is little left to do other than reminding oneself of other, more mutually rewarding Brazilian-German encounters. So here is ‘Garota de Berlin’, the song that owes its existence to the brief but intense encounter between German singer Nina Hagen and Brazilian singer Supla. This happened back in 1985, when Hagen went to Brazil to perform in the first edition of the Rock in Rio festival. At the time, Supla, now also a reality TV celebrity of somewhat dubious reputation (and the son of two influential politicians – quite a mix!), led the post-punk band Tokyo, and so the band ended up recording ‘Garota de Berlin’ with Hagen’s participation.

      The video-clip below is almost comic in its badness, and the song is not exactly a high point in Brazilian music. (I didn’t say that this particular Brazilian-German encounter would be rewarding for all the parties involved, including listeners.) But it is a funny episode in the history of Brazil-Germany relations, and in any case way less painful than those depressing 6 minutes in yesterday's match — which are easily the most painful 6 minutes in the history of the Seleção.

      (On the bright side, I get another chance today! The joys of carrying two nationalities…)

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    • Intelligence as a Criticism

      When the NewAPPS bloggers first invited me to submit a guest post on my attention research as a graduate student, I decided to submit a post on the term "genius" instead. In the case that it was the only post I would write, I wanted the post to have maximum utility. After some thought, I decided to target the obsession with genius, thinking it a pernicious problem easily deflated. I am not alone in finding it to be a problem. In fact, I may well have been alerted to the problem by Eric Schwitzgebel's blog post on "seeming smart." Commentators on the problem have looked at everything from its impact on women and racial/ethnic minorities to its impact on child prodigies, some of whom have written against it in favor of work-based praise (and for good reason). So, I was half-right: I was right to think it is a problem, but I was wrong, of course, in thinking the problem could be easily deflated. I am going to give it another stab, this time aiming closer to the heart of what I find to be the problem–the way that the terms "genius" and "smart" are used to silence minorities. I know about this first hand–just last week Brian Leiter implied that I was not smart enough to understand a particular distinction that he felt I had overlooked.

      Update (6/9/2014): I urge skeptical readers to examine these much more respectful posts, where there is no mention of intelligence, for sake of comparison: on David Marshall Miller, on Andy Carson, and again on Andy Carson. These job market analyses were perfomed after my first analysis in April 2012 and have many similar elements. Furthermore, the content of Brian Leiter's criticisms to these analyses is much the same, but without the damaging remarks about mental capacity, intention, etc. 

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    • Helen De Cruz’s posts on what philosophers do showcased by the Atlantic Monthly

      The article by Atlantic Monthly Senior Editor Rebecca Rosen is HERE.

      Pretty Cool! De Cruz's posts actually produced postive national coverage of academic philosophy. The Rosen article is currently at the top of their web page.

    • Did Russell’s Paradox entail that set theory is incomplete (if axiomatized)?

      Tonight I was fondly recalling Michael Hand and Jonathan Kvanvig's old paper on Tennant's solution to Fitch's Paradox (it's a beautiful read) and a weird thought occured to me.

      Hand and Kvanvig argue that Tennant's solution would be analogous to a set theorist responding to Russell's Paradox by proposing naive set theory with Frege's comprehension axiom restricted to instances that don't allow one to prove absurdity from that instance and the other axioms (call this theory N'). For Hand and Kvanvig this is a reductio of Tennant, and in my response* I argued that Tennant's solution was not actually analogous to N'.

      If I remember right, Hand and Kvanvig argue that N' is bad because it doesn't illuminate the nature of sets in the way we properly expect of solutions to paradoxes. But they don't go into the logical properties of N' at all, and tonight I'm thinking that this is actually an important question in its own right. Let's just consider consistency, completeness, and axiomatizability.

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    • The Causal Power of Non-existing Events

      While glancing through Graham Priest's new book I came across a place where he said something to the effect that what distinguished existing from non-existing things was whether or not the thing in question was causally efficacious.

      Following up on Mark Lance's suggestion that we should be most skeptical when a philosopher suggests something taken to be obvious enough not to elaborate on (look for adverbs of the clearly family).* I think that this is probably a case of that.

      On counterfactual analyses of causality, non-existent entities and events clearly have causal powers. At the 2014 Narrative Theory Conference at MIT I saw a great paper by Emma Kafelanos called "How Can Events that Do Not Occur Make Things Happen?" that conclusively showed that any theory of narrative structure will have to include nodes denoting events that didn't happen. The speaker gave real world examples such as Obama not ordering the bombing of Syria. She didn't mention counterfactual analyses of causation, but clearly many counterfactuals of the form "If it were not the case that Obama hadn't ordered the bombing of Syria, then it would not be the case that P" are true.

      This doesn't just occur with non-existent events but also with impossible events. The fact that Max can't surf explains quite a lot about him. Consider the sentence "Hobbes' inability to square the circle caused him to experience no small amount of ridicule." On a counterfactual analysis of causation with impossible worlds** there is nothing wrong with sentences such as that. Maybe these work as counterexamples to the counterfactual analysis. I don't know.

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