Close Range

Indifferentism

I have been trying to explain my views on religion (specifically, on the existence and nature of God) to a number of people lately and I haven't been able to find a label that correctly captures my position. The closest traditional category is agnosticism. Agnosticism, however, is too broad a tent for my comfort. My basic view is that resolving the question of whether or not there is a God (or other divine being or beings) is not of great philosophical or scientific importance. The view arises from the conjunction of the following four claims (which I won't try to support here):

1. Almost every major philosophical/scientific question can be answered more or less completely without any appeal to God.

2. Atheism is unwarranted: we do not have adequate grounds for beieving that every philosophical/scientific question can be answered adequately without any appeal to God.

3. Those philosophical/scientific questions which may require an appeal to God are not ones on which most other philosophical/scientific answers hinge. And, moreover, it is likely we will have to answer most or all of the questions which don't appeal to God before we can determine whether or not an appeal to God is needed to answer the remaining ones.

4. Those philosophical/scientific questions which may require an appeal to God are not ones on which have immediate practical bearing on my life (e.g., not questions of ethics, well-being, etc.).

I will call the conjunction of these four theses about God "indifferentism". And I hearby proclaim myself to be an indifferentist about God.

Spring Break

Gone for the week back to my roots in New Mexico. No posting until I return next Monday.

Ethics as a Skill

Here is a link to Jen Wright's paper noted in the last post. Ethics as a Skill. Good reading!

From the introduction:

In this paper, I will explore the idea that moral maturity should be conceived of not in terms of conformity to moral principles, but rather in terms of the development of a bodily and cognitive skill – what Francisco Varela has called “ethical know-how”. To this end, I introduce Dreyfus’ general account of expertise, examining the crucial role that know-how must play in any account of skillful engagement. I argue that if we conceive of ethics as a particular form of skillful engagement (what I will call a ‘life practice’), then moral maturity follows the developmental trajectory of other forms of expertise. But, there are objections to this account that must be considered: that such an account of ethics neglects the crucial role that propositional knowledge plays in moral discourse and that moral development does not have the kinds of standards-driven feedback loops that are necessary for skill development. After addressing these objections, I conclude with a brief discussion of the implications this account has for principle-based conceptions of moral maturity and the role of moral principles in mature moral judgments and actions.

Mt. Hollywood

I don't know if very many academics are familiar with this blog, but the guy caught my attention when he suggested that academics need to take academic freedom seriously enough to clean up such "shanty towns" as Chomskian linguistics and evolutionary psychology.

Still, there are some really good critical posts on the site (especially on the overproduction of PhDs) and I do think that Bruce is correct that we oughtta hash some of these issues out a bit more.

Here is a link: In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood.

A Moral Dilemma

It turns out that my daughter is pretty adept at mathematics. I don't really know how adept, but as a first grader she has a pretty decent grasp of multiplication, division, fractions and the basics of algebra. Not surprisingly, she is pretty nearly bored to death doing her math homework (which amounts to doing things like adding numbers to 10) and it is very hard for the teachers in the public schools to give her much individualized attention. So with a little guidance, we work with her on more interesting stuff at home. Not such a bad approach really, though it does rather extend her "school day" and she is still required to do all the tedious in-class work.

The situation has led me to look around a bit at the empirical findings regarding gifted students. The results are, I suppose, pretty well-known and also pretty interesting. Briefly, parents of gifted students are faced with the following dilemma. If a parent of a gifted student has the opportunity to remove that child from a general public education situation and put her in an academically enriched program full-time, then there are substantial benefits for the child. At the same time, if all or most of the gifted students are in this way isolated full-time from their less gifted peers, there are substantial negative effects on the remaining students. [It should be noted that this is the de facto situation. There are mixed-group strategies that benefit both gifted and remedial students, but we don't have the political will in this country to initiate them.]

So what ought a parent to do in the face of such a decision? I raise the issue because it seems like a philosophically rich test case for moral theory--especially with respect to the issue of special obligations vs. social obligations. Does anyone know if there has been any philosophical discussion of the issue?

Incidentally, I am inclined to remove my daughter from the public system to the extent that I can. I am pretty sure I could give a reasonable justification of that decision, but I am not sure that it wouldn't be as much a rationalization of what I am inclined to do anyway as a reasoned sort of deliberative conclusion. One of our MA students, Jen Wright (also PhD candidate here in psychology) has been doing some pretty interesting work on moral know-how. Her basic view is that a morally mature agent's behavior isn't rule governed or deliberative (on the traditional sort of "practical reasoning" paradigm), but is simply a matter of possessing the right sort of sensitivity to the ethical properties of a given situation. Could it be that on such a view this sort of post hoc rationalization makes a good deal of sense? I encourage everyone to drop in on her colloquium talk at the Central Division APA (V-I: Saturday, 3:30-4:30.).

Two Fallacies of Empiricism

[This post is intended to be tongue-in-cheek-ish.]

The desert-landscapes fallacy:

1. Theory T is committed to the existence of Fs.
2.  Fs do not exist in desert landscapes.
3.  Therefore, T is false.

The problem is that this argument presupposes that we can identify desert landscapes and their denizens. More accurately, define a desert landscape as the minimal theory T* such that T* provides an adequate account of phenomena P (or, alternatively, as the ontology derived from T*). Further, define a barren wasteland as any theory T# that purports to be a desert landscape but which, in point of fact, does not adequately account for P. The argument, thus, presupposes that there is some theory T! that is more likely than T to be a desert landscape than a barren wasteland. But, of course, T purports to be a desert landscape and purports that every more minimal theory is a barren wasteland. The argument, therefore, begs the question.

The scary movie fallacy:

1. Theory T is committed to Fs.
2.  Fs are ghouls (on T).
3.  Therefore, T is false.

Call a theory T a scary movie iff it essentially invokes primitive spooky entities (hereafter, ghouls). And call an entity spooky only if it is a character in a scary movie. The problem is now evident. In order to know whether or not T is a scary movie, we must know whether or not Fs are ghouls; and in order to know whether or not Fs are ghouls, we need to know whether or not T is a scary movie.

Any other newly discovered fallacies (whether or Empiricism or not) are welcome.

Evidence and Ersatz Evidence

This post is a follow up to a previous one on rationality and deceit. I will presuppose familiarity with that discussion, including the comments.

I obviously accept Duck's point that Mr. Z is rational in the more robust sense that he has appropriately used his experiences to draw a certain conclusion relative to background theory. The "irrationality" lies in the background theory somewhere. (Note that my intuitions change if we assume Mr. Z is in an X-files type circumstance where his belief in the connection itself is rational.)

In CO's example, I have a clear intuition that the Nazis were being deceived. So whatever difference there may be between the "ersatz evidence" in the original case and the evidence in the Nazi case, it can't lie in the fact that the experiences are staged. PERHAPS the answer lies in this vicinity: in order for m to be evidence that p, m must mean (either naturally or non-naturally) p. [I don't think this is quite right, see below.] But by implicit assumption, black cats don't naturally mean alien abductions. And clearly the circumstances are such that I don't meanNN by releasing the cats that alien abductions are occurring in Roswell. In contrast, the feints by the Allied forces do naturally mean (or at least it is reasonable to so take them as naturally meaning) that the real invasion will take place at Callais.

Now we clearly have a distinction between what some event naturally means and what it is reasonable to take that event to naturally mean. Its being reasonable to take m to mean p is neither necessary nor sufficient for m's meaning p. So perhaps the difference between genuine evidence and ersatz evidence is this:

m is genuine evidence that p for x iff it is reasonable for x to take m to mean (naturally or non-naturally) p; otherwise, m is ersatz evidence.

(Note: this definition predicts that it is possible for m to be ersatz evidence that p for x even if m really does mean p! Is that right? I think so. Retell the original example in such a way that black cats DO mean alien abductions, but Mr. Z is in no way reasonable in thinking that they do; the correctness of his believe is just blind luck.)

The Tenure Debate

So the right wing is calling for an end to tenure. As an advocate of free and open debate, I think it is in some ways a good thing to have this discussion (sans ignorant political posturing by the likes of Fruity-Newtie). Below are a few quick thoughts--I would be very interested in hearing what others have to say about this.

The more I think about the issue (which isn't very much, to be honest), the more I think it boils down to the following question: what is the value to society of having a relatively insulated class of "elite" gadflies? I do not mean to imply here that the crucial issue is unorthodox ideas in research; I mean to also include the pedagogical need for bothersome, critical discussion.

Is there some reason to think that university professors need somewhat greater free-speech protection than the run of the mill person? Clearly! We have here relatively high profile individuals who are challenging (in both research and teaching) many of the fundamental ideas of students and their parents, as well as elected politicians.

But the preceding point raises a crucial issue about the role of secondary education. Many parents who send their kids to school, don't do so with the intention of having the University produce a critical, open-minded thinker; rather, they send their kids to school with the intention of having the University produce a vocationally competent worker.

It seems to me that one cannot adequately address the issue of whether or not we need a large base of tenured faculty (rather than, a small elite base of highly research active tenured faculty) independently of resolving this issue about the point of a college education.

Cog Sci: 100 Best

Link: The Cognitive Science Millennium Project.

From the University of Minnesota Center for Cognitive Sciences. In light of the Rorty/Salmon/Soames/Weatherson debate, I find it telling that most of the philosophy listed here, while mostly analytic, isn't the sort of tight, highly rigorous work that Soames seems to be pushing as the paradigm of good philosophy. Rather, in my estimation, it is mostly more synoptic/programmatic work that seems to have been influential outside of philosophy.

And isn't there a bit of a snub here to formal semantics and the philosophy of language? I mean for Christ's sake, WITTGENSTEIN!!

Constructing Attitudes

Here is a link to my updated paper on 'that'-clause complements: Constructing Attitudes.

Abstract: The singular term theory maintains that that-clauses are complex singular terms which designate propositions. Though extremely well-supported, the theory is endangered by the existence of oblique that-clauses; that is, that-clauses occurring in what appear to be non-argument positions (e.g., ‘Lola was upset that Slick Willy had all the fun’). In this paper I argue that the best solution to the problem consistent with the singular term theory, invokes a construction-based grammatical theory. Such an approach challenges traditional views of semantic compositionality by rejecting a central dogma of semantics, namely, that linguistic constructions contribute only trivial logical or quasi-logical information to semantic interpretation (e.g., function-application relations).