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    • Preferential logics, supraclassicality, and human reasoning

      (Cross-posted at M-Phi)
       
      Some time ago, I wrote a blog post defending the idea that a particular family of non-monotonic logics, called preferential logics, offered the resources to explain a number of empirical findings about human reasoning, as experimentally established. (To be clear: I am here adopting a purely descriptive perspective and leaving thorny normative questions aside. Naturally, formal models of rationality also typically include normative claims about human cognition.)  
       
      In particular, I claimed that preferential logics could explain what is known as the modus ponens-modus tollens asymmetry, i.e. the fact that in experiments, participants will readily reason following the modus ponens principle, but tend to ‘fail’ quite miserably with modus tollens reasoning – even though these are equivalent according to classical as well as many non-classical logics. I also defended (e.g. at a number of talks, including one at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy which is immortalized in video here and here) that preferential logics could be applied to another well-known, robust psychological phenomenon, namely what is known as belief bias. Belief bias is the tendency that human reasoners seem to have to let the believability of a conclusion guide both their evaluation and production of arguments, rather than the validity of the argument as such.
       
      Well, I am now officially taking most of it back (and mostly thanks to working on these issues with my student Herman Veluwenkamp).

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    • Brazilian music on Fridays: happy birthday, Chico Buarque!

      The great Chico Buarque joined the club of the ‘over-70’ yesterday (recall Caetano Veloso joining the club last year). Now, while one may speak of a constant stream of talented musicians in Brazilian music, we still haven’t come across anything like the brilliant generation of singers/composers emerging in the later 1960s, including Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Milton Nascimento and of course, Chico Buarque. They are now all in their early 70s, and alive and kicking. Chico Buarque in particular released an acclaimed new album in 2011 (Chico), and a DVD surveying his whole musical career in 2012. He also continues to pursue a celebrated literary career; in particular, his 2009 novel Spilt Milk has been translated into a number of languages (I very much enjoyed the novel myself). 

      To celebrate Chico’s birthday, here is ‘Essa pequena’ from his 2011 album (about his relationship with singer Thais Gulin – here is the two of them in the duo ‘Se eu soubesse’), and a classic, ‘O que será’ (1976), a duo with Milton Nascimento. So here’s to many more productive years for him, from which we all benefit…

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    • Washington Redskins Lose off the Field

      In case you hadn’t heard, it’s been a big week in intellectual property.  The biggest news item in the non-legal press was the Patent and Trademark Office’s decision to cancel several of the NFL’s Washington Redskins trademarks because they were “disparaging.”  This review and cancellation is required by statute, and the decision is generating a fair amount of First Amendment discussion, much of it incautious.  On the Diane Rehm show today, for example, Bruce Fein went completely off the rails:

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    • Presbyterian General Assembly votes for gay marriage and divestment

      Good news from San Fransisco Theological Seminary chaplain Scott Clark about the 2014 Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly here.

      The bill sent out from committee a couple of days ago would take the "one man, one woman" talk out of the Book of Order and add an accompanying authoritative interpretation that allows teaching elders to perform marriage ceremonies for same sex couples.

      Most people don't understand just how democratic reformed churches are. In the PC(USA) each presbytery sends one teaching elder (minister) and one ruling elder (non-minister serving on the Session or Deaconite) to the General Assembly. A change to the Book of Order has to be ratified by the General Assembly and then by over half of the presbyteries in the two years before the next General Assembly. So when we moved to allow ordination of gay priests and as we now move towards full inclusion of GLTB in the church this isn't something foisted on us by Bishops who have all the power (as they do in the Episcopal and Roman Catholic churches). Everyone I've talked to thinks that the presbyteries will ratify this.

      In other General Assembly news, it looks like the church will divest from three companies involved with apartheid in Israel. Story here.

    • Job Placement 2011-2014: Overview on AOS

      In keeping with the earlier post on gender, this is an overview post on the distribution of (first-listed) areas of specialization among placed candidates. I now have data on 722 candidates who have been placed in tenure-track, postdoctoral, VAP, or instructor positions between late 2011 and mid 2014 (ending today), drawn from ProPhilosophy (2011-2012 and 2012-2013) and PhilAppointments (2013-2014). I aim to make the spreadsheet with this data available by around July 1st (I will continue to add new data until that date). 

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    • Against Those Year-End Faculty Meetings to Discuss the Graduate Students

      Every year’s end at UC Riverside, the philosophy faculty meet for three hours “to discuss the graduate students”. Back in the 1990s when I was a grad student, I seem to recall the Berkeley faculty doing the same thing. The practice appears to be fairly widespread. After years of feeling somewhat uncomfortable with it, I’ve tentatively decided I’m opposed. I’d be interested to hear from others with positive or negative views about it.

      Now, there are some good things about these year-end meetings. Let’s start with those.

      At UCR, the formal purpose of the meeting is to give general faculty input to the graduate advisor, who can use that input to help her advising. The idea is that if the faculty as a whole think that a student is doing well and on track, the graduate advisor can communicate that encouraging news to the student; and also, when there are opportunities for awards and fellowships, the graduate advisor can consider those highly regarded students as candidates. And if the faculty as a whole think that a student is struggling, the faculty can diagnose the student’s weaknesses and help the graduate advisor give the student advice that might help the student improve. Hypothetical examples (not direct quotes): “Some faculty were concerned about your inconsistent attendance at seminar meetings.” “The sense of the faculty is that while you have considerable promise, your writing would be improved if you were more charitable toward the views of philosophers you disagree with.”

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    • Is this a violation of academic freedom?

      Is there a word for this, where you not only have to waste time doing something absolutely meaningless ("Kafkaesque"?), but where it's also the case that successful completion of the meaningless tasks requires enthusiastic pretense that the task isn't meaningless?

      Whatever the term is, it increasingly applies to university assessment procedures. Not only do you have to do a week or so of make-work, but more and more of the make-work is showing the people who check your reports exactly how the assessment process helps your classes get better and better to infinity.

      Is this a violation of academic freedom? I did enough philosophy of mind (and virtue ethics) in the past to know how foolish it is to think that simple quantitative surveys of the type acceptable to the assessment Czars (who know nothing about the academic subjects in question) could yield useful information of the sort that would help improve programs. Decent practical reasoning doesn't work this way. I even have a paper with Jason Megill relevant to this topic, and a substantive blog post on four sources of stupidity relevant to assessment. Yet the metastasizing assessment (which at LSU has gone from yearly to now three times a year and almost certainly soon to be quarterly) regime forces me to say things inconsistent with commonsense and the relevant scholarship (again, some of which is my own).

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    • Using Medicaid to Produce Homo Economicus

      I am increasingly convinced that any Foucauldian effort to understand neoliberalism needs to focus on it as a strategy of subjectification (more specifically, it’s the strategy of subjectification specific to contemporary biopower, and it says that the truth of the human being is as homo economicus).  One reason I think this is that one finds repeated examples of where policy or governmental prescriptions specific to neoliberalism conflict with neoliberalism as a strategy of subjectification; in such cases, the strategy of subjectification generally seems to win.  Let me explain with an example which will hopefully serve as proof of concept of the admittedly very big thesis I’ve just announced.

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    • Juan Cole on Seven Myths about the Sunni advance in Iraq

      here.

      "Warning Iraq against Shiite Iranian influence is like warning Italy against Vatican influence."

    • Disabled Scholars at Conferences

      Shelley Tremain, the philosopher of disability, brought my attention to a recent article in the CHE entitled Indifference Toward Disabled Scholars, Especially at Conferences, Troubles a Disabilities Scholar .* In it, bioethicist William Peace details a "nightmare" he experience as a disabled scholar trying to attend a conference.

      Peace also blogged about the experience here.

      Tremain offers the following commentary:

      ——-
      In my article "Introducing Feminist Philosophy of Disability" (https://independent.academia.edu/ShelleyTremain), I offered some details about ways in which the APA fails to treat disabled philosophers equally and promote our status within the discipline and profession. A recent petition that I and others circulated was motivated by this neglect. Some of the measures that the APA fails to take on our behalf concern the lack of information about disability (e.g., how to make conferences accessible, what APA chairs and presenters should do to make divisional meetings accessible, etc.) on the newly-furbished and inaccessible APA website. A recent conference on philosophy of disability at Syracuse University (at which all three APA disability representatives presented) demonstrates the impact that the APA's failure to provide leadership in this regard has throughout the profession. 
       

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