Here is something both hilarious and deeply informative. (Don't watch if you're from Québec, where the Indian headshake violates secular values.)
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In comment #9 at this post, Susan makes a kind of canonical case I've heard from lots of assessment people.
First, I should say that I agree with 95% of the intended answers to Susan's rhetorical questions. We should be much clearer about what we want our students to get out of their degrees, and we should put in the hard work of assessing the extent that we are successful.
But "assessment" in contemporary American bureaucracies almost always accomplishes exactly the opposite of the laudable goals that Susan and I share. And there are deep systematic reasons for this. Below, I will first explain three fallacies and then explain why everyone involved in assessment faces enormous pressure to go along with these fallacies. Along the way I hope to make it clear how this results in "assessment" making things demonstrably worse.**
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If you would like to report hiring information from 2013-2014, please fill in the form at this link; the data entered there feeds into a spreadsheet available here. Quite a bit of hiring information is already available at Leiter Reports, here.
UPDATE 8 March 10:30 am CDT: This form and spreadsheet need not be limited to this NewAPPS post. If any other blog would like to link to it, they are welcome. In that case, I would be happy to make the relevant bloggers co-owners of the Google documents in question. Ideally, the information would be available in a neutral location, but having the links posted to several different blogs would come close to that.
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Really nice conversation between Gary Gutting and John Caputo about religious belief at the Stone here.
Gutting's interventions are great, with the exception of: "After all the deconstructive talk, the law of noncontradiction still holds."
No. No. No. Deconstruction in part shows exactly where it fails (cf. Chapter 14 of Priest's Beyond the Limits of Thought). This is not just Priest's appropriation of Derrida (as making a version of Russell's paradox) though. In the interview itself, Caputo puts enough on the table to suggest an enclosure paradox with respect to religious belief and practice.
I wish I could assign Kvanvig's "Affective Theism and Reason's for Faith" as a homework assignment and then be a fly on the wall as Gutting and Caputo discussed it. That would be pretty cool.
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The story is here. I think there are two things to note here:
1: the threat to jobs of our colleagues: "The head of the University of Maine System said Friday that further state budget cuts could force the system to shed 95 jobs, on top of its plan to eliminate 165 in the next budget year."
2: the use of the seemingly neutral and technocratic term "revenue shortfall" here: "Page said the potential funding cut of nearly $10 million – part of an across-the-board spending reduction to cover a state revenue shortfall – could force the system to eliminate another 95 jobs in the year that starts July 1."
The problem with the use of that term is that it hides deliberate decisions by Maine politicians to cut state taxes, thereby creating the "shortfall" that is then the pretext to gut the university. I'd say this is a perfect example of ideology, as the hidden ratchet effect of taking previous decisions as unquestionable baselines.
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I second this. I also await Brian Leiter's promised reply, which I hope, in addition to an apology to McKinnon, will explain that he did not mean to imply that criticism of his use of "vigilante justice" to describe the non-violent protest of Northwestern students constitutes "a lynch mob."
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In comments here at Schliesser's blog. Follow up comments should be directed there.
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In "Changing Places" David Lodge describes "the humiliation game," where English professors have to list the most important book they've never read. The winner is the person for whom it is the most humiliating to admit s/he hasnt read the book s/he gives.
In the novel, humiliation ends up generating something analagous to a Priest type enclosure paradox with respect to practical reasoning.* Howard Ringbaum represents a particular kind of hyper-competitive obnoxious American academic, and so of course at a party with all of his colleagues present the game renders him momentarily speechless as his will battles out what to do. He has to win the game, but you win by looking the stupidest, which for someone like Ringbaum also means losing game in a broader sense.**
Lodge's game worked perfectly as satire given the level of status anxiety of the star culture of the 1980s English departments. I don't know the extent to which it works for philosophy today. First, we don't quite have that star culture any more. With punk/grunge DIY, the internet and open access, our swath of academia is increasingly starting to resemble folk art, where you get small groups of people making philosophy for each other*** (in the Baby Boomer era Lodge satirizes, all of the pressures worked to push people to ape mass art with respect to academic celebrity). Second, analytic philosophy isn't really a culture of the book.
Continental philosophers can I think still play humiliation in its original form. What's the most important philosophical book that you haven't read? For analytic philosophy at least, the analogue would have to concern a position or argument or maybe paper. It would be something like this- Given your area of expertise, what is the most important argument about which you are shockingly ignorant.
All philosophers could amend the game in this way. What is your most strongly held commitment that is deemed least plausible to those around you? Call the contest involving this question "humiliation-prime."
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The brilliant but controversial Stephen Wolfram is up to something again:
[H]e is proclaiming his new project, the Wolfram Language, to be the biggest computer language of all time. It has been in the works for more than 20 years, and, while in development, formed the underlying basis of Wolfram’s popular Mathematica software. In the words of Wolfram, now 54, his new language “knows about the world” and makes the world computable.
From the point of view of the philosophical debates on artificial intelligence, the crucial bit is the claim that his new language, unlike all other computer languages, “knows about the world”. Could it be that this language does indeed constitute a convincing reply to Searle’s Chinese Room argument?
To be clear, I take Searle’s argument to be problematic in a number of ways (some of which very aptly discussed in M. Boden’s classic paper), but the challenge posed by the Chinese Room seems to me to still stand; it still is one of the main questions in the philosophy of artificial intelligence. So if Wolfram’s new language does indeed differ from the other computer languages thus far developed specifically in this respect, it may offer us reasons to revisit the whole debate (which for now seems to have reached a stalemate).
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