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    • Wettstein’s practice-based attitude to religious faith: Is realist theism no longer the only game in town?

      In philosophy of religion, realist theism is the dominant outlook: belief in God is similar to belief in other real things (or supposedly real things) like quarks or oxygen. There is a rather triumphalist narrative about the resurgence of realist theism since the demise of logical positivism (see for instance, Plantinga's advice to Christian philosophers) when logical positivism and its verifiability criterion held sway, philosophers were dissuaded from talking about God in realist terms: religious beliefs were not just false, but meaningless. With the demise of logical positivism, however, theists could again defend realist positions, using a variety of sophisticated arguments. 

      Nevertheless, the question is whether theists in philosophers of religion are not conceding too much to atheists by talking about theism mainly in terms of beliefs. To ignore practice is to ignore a large part of the religious experience, and what makes it meaningful to the theist. Such an exclusive focus can indeed be alienating, as it seems to suggest that theists believe a whole bunch of ideas that are wildly implausible, e.g., that a man resurrected from the dead, or was born of a virgin. This picture of religious life as believing in a set of strange propositions is, as Kvanvig memorably put it, a view that most theists will not recognize themselves in:

      I hardly recognize this picture of religious faith and religious life, except in the sense that one can cease to be surprised or shocked by the neighbor who jumps naked on his trampoline after having seen it for years.

      That is not to say that many theists do believe these things, even in a literal sense, but without looking at the larger picture of practices that help to maintain and instil these beliefs, our epistemology of religion remains woefully incomplete. 

      It is therefore refreshing to read philosopher Howard Wettstein's recent interview in The Stone, who, coming from a Jewish background, emphasizes the practice-based aspects of a religious lifestyle. He argues that "existence" is the wrong idea for God, following Maimonides, and instead argues that "the real question is one's relation to God, the role God plays in one’s life, the character of one’s spiritual life." 

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    • Teach the Controversy

      No. No.  Not THAT controversy.   I just got back from a meeting at the insanely cool Carnegie Observatory in Pasadena, California (Hubble's old digs) with Wendy Parker, Paul Humphreys, James Ladyman, and  many extremely interesting and engaging astronomers.   (Barry Madore and Wendy Freedman were our hosts, and Stacy McGaugh, Bill Saslaw, Alar Toomre (who did an insanely cool computer simulation of galaxy collision back in 1972!), Frank van den Bosch, and James Bullock were in attendance.)   Among the many interesting things I learned is that the whole issue of Dark Matter is much more complicated than I ever imagined.   I used to think that Dark Matter was simply sprinkled liberally around the universe in exactly the right quantities to get the accelerations of galaxies and clusters right.    I thought, in other words, that it was a simple and straightforward Duhem problem.   Then, a few years ago, the images of the Bullet supercluster collision came out, and it was widely reputed to offer direct evidence of dark matter.    This made it seem like a standard "independant confirmation" of a Duhumian auxilliary hypothesis.  But of course, the situation is MUCH more complicated.   There are in fact at least 16 different moving parts in the Dark Matter controversy, and superclusters are just one of them.   And in fact, long before the Bullet cluster was observed, opponents of the standard model of "cold dark matter" (who advocate a modified theory of gravity) had admitted that superclusters probably had missing mass. But the rub is this:  there is plenty of known missing BARYONIC mass (the kind that the Big Bang neucleosynthesis model predicts the expected quantity of) to account for the missing mass in superclusters.   In fact, that would only take about 3% of the  baryonic mass out there, and as much as 30% is known to be missing.   So, the "dark matter" in the Bullet supercluster could easily be brown dwarfs, black holes, or other "normal" stuff.   So, the debate is much more intricate, and it involves trying to figure out how  the dark matter halos of the universe would have evolved from the tiny fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background and then predicting what velocity curves for galaxies those would produce.  The contest is then to see who can predict velocity curves better:  the people with modified theories of gravity, or the people who simulate the dark matter and then see what it does.   From what I can tell, the modified gravity people seem to have the edge in that, and they do with fewer free parameters.    All very fascinating stuff.

    • Living with or without conspecifics

      Over the weekend I came across this hoax piece of ‘news’, 'reporting' that a boy who had been raised by orangutans has been recaptured so as to live a ‘normal human life’ again in Malaysia. Despite (or perhaps because!) the phoniness of the ‘article’, it did get me thinking: in such a hypothetical scenario, would capturing such a child and bringing them back to a life with humans be the obvious, right thing to do? On the one hand: isn’t it a form of species chauvinism to think that a human being would undoubtedly be better off in the company of conspecifics? Wasn’t the boy doing just fine among orangutans? (In the hypothetical scenario, that is.) On the other hand: can a human being really thrive and live a fulfilling life exclusively among members of other species (and from a very early age)? This strikes me as an eminently philosophical question, though also partially empirical.

      Relatedly, I am currently dealing with another surge of demands for a pet in our household. The current proposal is for rabbits, but I’m resisting this move by pointing out that rabbits belong in the wild, with other rabbits. They wouldn’t be happy living with us, no matter how often my kids will pat and caress them, as they promise. (It’s cute though to hear that this is their conception of what makes a living being happy: lots of hugs.) Coming to think of it, the only species that make any sense at all as pets are those that truly thrive in the company of humans, and as far as I can tell, this only holds of dogs and cats. (Maybe horses? Not sure.) Could it be that, just as I resist the idea of e.g. rabbits being ‘happy’ among humans, I should also resist the possibility of a human boy being happy among orangutans? My intuitions are clashing here.

      What do readers think? I especially welcome comments by philosophers of biology, who may have more data on intraspecific vs. interspecific cohabitation among the different species of animals.

      (PS There are of course lots of interesting implications for the nature/nurture debate in such scenarios, but I will leave them be for now.)

    • Two puzzles about our recognition of order and inference of design

      In the recent Mind & Language workshop on cognitive science of religion, Frank Keil presented an intriguing paper entitled "Order, Order Everywhere and Not an Agent to Think: The Cognitive Compulsion to Make the Argument from Design." Keil does not believe the argument from design is inevitable – I've argued elsewhere that while teleological reasoning and creationism is common, arguing for the existence of God on the basis of perceived design is rare; it typically only happens when there are plausible non-theistic worldviews available.

      Rather, Keil argues that from a very early age on, humans can recognize order, and that they prefer agents as causes for order. Taken together, this forms the cognitive basis for making the argument from design (AFD). (For similar proposals, see here and here). He proposes two very intriguing puzzles, and I'm wondering what NewApps readers think:

      1. Some forms of orderliness give us a sense of design, others do not. What kinds of order give rise to an inference to design, or a designer? 
      2. Babies already seem to recognize ordered states from disordered states. How do they do it? What is it they recognize?

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    • From Discipline to Control to “Please Hold while I transfer your call”

       

      In a famous essay, Deleuze suggests that our society has moved beyond Foucauldian disciplinary power to a more fluid “control society,” where the various sites of disciplinary control merge into a modulated network of interlocking sites of power, the primary technique of which is access control.  As Deleuze notes, the move is “dispersive,” and “the factory has given way to the corporation.” Hence, “the family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner – state or private power – but coded figures – deformable and transformable – of a single corporation that now has only stockholders.” (6)  The most vivid image of such a society he attributes to Guattari, who:

      “has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighborhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position – licit or illicit – and effects a universal modulation” (7)

      This thesis has been most widely applied to surveillance and security and is easily evidenced by things like NSA “don’t fly” lists and the number of passwords one has to generate online.  That said, I would like to suggest here that, at least in one respect, we’re moving past the control society.  Or, perhaps, we’re seeing the truth of the control society in an unexpected way.  One feature of the move from the dungeon to the panopticon is regulatory efficiency: it costs a lot less to get people to police themselves than to coerce them with brute force.  The move to control is similarly efficient in that multiple, closed panoptic systems are much less efficient than a more modular arrangement where panoptic technologies are (as Foucault said they would be) completely diffused into society and work together, rather than separately. 

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    • Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Duas de Cinco + Cóccix-ência’

      Still on time for a BMoF today, and here is a recently released video clip/short film by rapper Criolo (that I'm a bit of a fan is no secret to anyone) of two tracks, 'Duas de Cinco' and 'Cóccix-ência'. Hope ya'll in the mood for rap on Fridays today!

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    • Our Moral Duties to Monsters

      We might soon be creating monsters, so we’d better figure out our duties to them.

      Robert Nozick’s Utility Monster derives 100 units of pleasure from each cookie she eats. Normal people derive only 1 unit of pleasure. So if our aim is to maximize world happiness, we should give all our cookies to the monster. Lots of people would lose out on a little bit of pleasure, but the Utility Monster would be really happy!

      Of course this argument generalizes beyond cookies. If there were a being in the world vastly more capable of pleasure and pain than are ordinary human beings, then on simple versions of happiness-maximizing utilitarian ethics, the rest of us ought to immiserate ourselves to push it up to superhuman pinnacles of joy.

      Now, if artificial consciousness is possible, then maybe it will turn out that we can create Utility Monsters on our hard drives. (Maybe this is what happens in R. Scott Bakker’s and my story Reinstalling Eden.)

      Two questions arise:

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    • Thanks for having me!

      By Amy Ferrer, APA Executive Director

      Having now reached the end of my week as a guest blogger here at NewAPPS, I must thank the NewAPPS team for the opportunity, and again, in particular, John Protevi and Eric Winsberg. Thanks as well to my co-authors, Peggy DesAutels and John Heil, for joining me as co-authors. And thanks, finally, to all who read and responded to my posts.

      I know full well that I could write an entire blog solely devoted to issues relating to philosophy’s diversity and inclusiveness, so in a week of guest posts I had to pick and choose. There are a laundry list of things I could have posted about—recent petitions to the APA relating to a professional code of ethics, accessibility for disabled philosophers, and hiring practices; the goals and plans of our new task force on diversity and inclusion; issues of socioeconomic class; public perception of philosophy and its effects on the professional pipeline; contingent labor in academia. Rest assured that these issues and more are very much on the APA’s radar, despite the fact that they weren’t primary focuses of my posts this week. I hope that even if I didn’t cover everything you would have liked, you’ve found the topics and discussions this week to be of interest.

      It has been my priority from my very first day as APA executive director to be more engaged with the membership and communicate the APA’s work to the public more effectively. So I encourage you, too, to be engaged with me—I’m always happy to hear constructive feedback and suggestions, and comments on this post are open for just that reason. Don’t be afraid to reach out.

      I look forward to continuing these conversations with you here and elsewhere!

       [Please note: My appearance on this blog does not constitute an endorsement by the APA of the blog or its content.]

    • Funding for diversity—How can we do more?

       By Amy Ferrer, APA Executive Director

      The APA has a longstanding commitment to support—financially and otherwise—efforts to make philosophy more diverse and inclusive. For a number of years the APA has provided small grants through our annual $25,000 grant fund (supported by the Eastern Division), many to programs focusing on diversity: NYSWIP, the California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race, and the Mentoring Project for Pre-Tenure Women Faculty in Philosophy, for example. Other programs have been funded with direct grants from the board, including the 2013 Diversity in Philosophy Conference, the Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institute (PIKSI), and the Rutgers Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy. We are very proud of the programs we’ve supported and all that they have achieved, and we want to do more.

      To that end, last November, the board of officers decided to open a competition for $20,000 in APA grants to diversity projects in 2015. We know our members are creative, innovative problem-solvers, and we hope that this request for proposals (RFP) will generate many new ideas to improve philosophy’s diversity. In fact, we’ll be looking not only for programs that the APA can fund directly, but also programs that might be good fits for grants from foundations and government organizations, so that we can help get even more initiatives off the ground than our $20,000 will afford.

      Opening this RFP meant that, unfortunately, we could not immediately renew our funding of an important diversity initiative, PIKSI, which the APA has been supporting for nearly a decade. I want to take this opportunity to explain the rationale behind that difficult decision.

      By the end of 2014, PIKSI will have received nearly $200,000 in grant funding from the APA over the last nine years: the APA’s longest and largest grant ever. We are proud to have supported this valuable program that makes such an impact a critical point in the pipeline.

      From the beginning, though, the grant to PIKSI was explicitly intended to be start-up funding, with the expectation that the APA would not provide ongoing, sustaining financial support. This is because the APA is not, primarily, a grantmaking organization; the association’s finances do not permit us to provide continuing funding to any program, no matter how valuable it is to the profession.

      So, after careful consideration, the APA board of officers decided in November, on a unanimous vote of all board members in attendance, not to renew the APA’s funding for PIKSI at this time. Instead, the board decided to open the diversity and inclusiveness RFP. We want to support the development of new programs to address philosophy’s diversity problem and expand the breadth of projects taking on this important task. We believe the RFP will encourage program development, and we welcome applications not only from new projects, but also from PIKSI and other existing efforts. We will fund those that we believe will make the biggest impact, whether they are brand new or well established.

      At the same time, the board made a commitment, again on a unanimous vote of all present, to work with PIKSI to develop alternative sources of funding and creative funding strategies. Since the board meeting at which these decisions were made, I personally and others in the APA leadership have been in contact with members of the PIKSI board and with grantmaking organizations on PIKSI’s behalf, providing advice and exploring new potential avenues, such as crowdfunding. We intend to continue working closely with PIKSI for years to come.

      You might ask, why not just do both—renew PIKSI’s grant and open the new RFP? The board discussed this possibility, but was faced with the unfortunate reality that it just wasn’t in our budget. For several years the APA has spent more than it brought in, leaving us with razor-thin financial margins and very little safety net. I have made and will continue to make every reasonable effort to get the APA on stable footing, and we are now in a much better fiscal situation than we were a couple of years ago. But financial sustainability is and will continue to be a challenge. Through these difficult years, we have continued to make diversity funding a priority, but unfortunately we cannot do as much as we would ideally like given the resources available to us. If it had been possible to double the funding available for diversity projects in 2015, I have little doubt the board would have voted to do so.

      All of us at the APA want to do more—more programs, more grants, more advocacy, more scholarship. Right now, we’re stretched very thin, getting all we can out of every dollar. So to do more, we need more.

      If you want to help the APA to expand our diversity funding and other efforts, there are several things you can do: (1) become an APA member or renew your membership, if you haven’t already; (2) make a donation to the APA or our Fund for Diversity and Inclusiveness; and (3) urge your colleagues and friends to do the same.

      And further, I encourage you to join us in supporting PIKSI’s efforts to seek new funding. Share your ideas. Approach your institution and ask them to support PIKSI. Connect PIKSI with foundation funders or major donors you’re aware of. Help brainstorm creative funding strategies. Together we can do more than the APA can do alone.

      [Please note: My appearance on this blog does not constitute an endorsement by the APA of the blog or its content.]

    • Counting infinities

      (Cross-posted at M-Phi)

      In his Two New Sciences (1638), Galileo presents a puzzle about infinite collections of numbers that became known as ‘Galileo’s paradox’. Written in the form of a dialogue, the interlocutors in the text observe that there are many more positive integers than there are perfect squares, but that every positive integer is the root of a given square. And so, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the positive integers and the perfect squares, and thus we may conclude that there are as many positive integers as there are perfect squares. And yet, the initial assumption was that there are more positive integers than perfect squares, as every perfect square is a positive integer but not vice-versa; in other words, the collection of the perfect squares is strictly contained in the collection of the positive integers. How can they be of the same size then?

      Galileo’s conclusion is that principles and concepts pertaining to the size of finite collections cannot be simply transposed, mutatis mutandis, to cases of infinity: “the attributes "equal," "greater," and "less," are not applicable to infinite, but only to finite, quantities.” With respect to finite collections, two uncontroversial principles hold:

      Part-whole: a collection A that is strictly contained in a collection B has a strictly smaller size than B.

      One-to-one: two collections for which there exists a one-to-one correspondence between their elements are of the same size.

      What Galileo’s paradox shows is that, when moving to infinite cases, these two principles clash with each other, and thus that at least one of them has to go. In other words, we simply cannot transpose these two basic intuitions pertaining to counting finite collections to the case of infinite collections. As is well known, Cantor chose to keep One-to-one at the expenses of Part-whole, famously concluding that all countable infinite collections are of the same size (in his terms, have the same cardinality); this is still the reigning orthodoxy.

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