Rationally Speaking

The mismeasure of neuroscience

2012-02-02T09:24:00.000-05:00

by Massimo Pigliucci

blog.lib.umn.edu

These days you can’t turn around without bumping into yet another news story about “the neuroscience of X.” Some of it is fascinating, some controversial, and quite a bit of it is, well, let’s say at the very least, misguided. Julia and I have already done a couple of Rationally Speaking podcasts touching on this subject (one on Cordelia Fine’s “Delusions of Gender” and one on what we term “neurobabble”), and no doubt there will be plenty of occasions to do more.

On the blog, I have criticized Sam Harris for making unwarranted statements concerning alleged scientific solutions to moral issues, which he largely bases on new findings from neurobiology (I know he has a new book on free will! Can’t wait!). And of course I keep promising an in-depth analysis of Alex Rosenberg’s new book on atheism and reality (a review will soon appear in The Philosopher’s Magazine, stay tuned).

It’s not that I don’t like neuroscience, on the contrary, it is precisely because I’m fascinated by the new discoveries, and because of the respect and love I have for science, that I think people do a disservice to the whole enterprise when they make claims that are simply unsubstantiated by the available evidence (or, worse, when they incur category mistakes, like Harris’ confusion between facts and values).

Fortunately, not everyone falls prey to easy sensationalism about neuroscience. For instance, I am in the process of reading (for a forthcoming review in Skeptical Inquirer) Michael Gazzaniga’s new book, Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (yes, I know, free will!), and I find the author to be eminently sensible about the whole thing. Not only does he knows his stuff, he also knows where to draw the line between science and speculation, and the book is peppered with a good dose of philosophically sophisticated reasoning (just like another of my favorite neuro-authors, Antonio Damasio).

Nevertheless, there are two general issues that I’m concerned about whenever discussions of “the neuroscience of X” come up: one has to do with an apparent confusion (in some people’s minds) regarding what exactly one establishes when one discovers a neural correlate for a particular human behavior; the other has to do with what can (and cannot) be learned from studies of brain damage, be it accidental or as the result of surgery to alleviate neurological problems.

Let’s begin with what exactly follows from studies showing that X has been demonstrated to have a neural correlate (where X can be moral decision making, political leanings, sexual habits, or consciousness itself). The refrain one often hears when these studies are published is that neuroscientists have “explained” X, a conclusion that is presented more like the explaining away (philosophically, the elimination) of X. You think you are making an ethical decision? Ah!, but that’s just the orbital and medial sectors of the prefrontal cortex and the superior temporal sulcus region of your brain in action. You think you are having a spiritual experience while engaging in deep prayer or meditation? Silly you, that’s just the combined action of your right medial orbitofrontal cortex, right middle temporal cortex, right inferior and superior parietal lobules, right caudate, left medial prefrontal cortex, left anterior cingulate cortex, left inferior parietal lobule, left insula, left caudate, and left brainstem (did I leave anything out?).

I could keep going, but I think you get the point. The fact is, of course, that anything at all which we experience, whether it does or does not have causal determinants in the outside world, has to be experienced through our brains. Which means that you will find neural correlates for literally everything that human beings do or think. Because that’s what the brain is for: to do stuff and think about stuff.

This does not at all mean that I don’t find these studies fascinating, they surely are. But they are answering a different question from the one that often gets pushed in news stories. Specifically, what neuroscientists are finding is how the brain does X, which constitutes an explanation of X only in a very limited and specific sense of the word “explanation.” Take moral reasoning as an example. What “explains” it? Well, at the neurobiological level, it is the result of the action of the above mentioned brain areas (and probably many more). Evolutionarily speaking, a sense of morality probably evolved to help large-brained primates deal with their social environment. Culturally, our sense of morality has evolved in different directions at different times and in different places (though with some interesting convergences). Sociologically, what is moral depends on a complex interaction between fundamental human needs (like the need to feel safe) and idiosyncratic rules adopted by certain groups of people for entirely arbitrary reasons (like those regulating the Sabbath). Which means that the neuroscience of X is a fascinating but very limited part of the larger puzzle comprised by the broader question of “what is X?” And it behooves us to keep this distinction in mind.

The second issue that I see recurring in news or popular coverage of neuroscience is the one about what exactly we learn when the brain malfunctions. V.S. Ramachandran has written a whole mind boggling book on this sort of research, but perhaps the most spectacular of these case studies are those concerning so-called split-brain patients. As is well known, these are situations in which the corpus callosum, the tissue that normally mediates communication between the right and left hemispheres of the brain, is severed because of accident or surgery (usually to ameliorate epilepsy).

The above mentioned Gazzaniga is one of the leading experts on split-brain research, and he is very careful when he draws conclusions from what he observes in these patients. Nonetheless, it is not at all uncommon to hear people jump to the conclusion that these experiments show that the unity of consciousness is an “illusion” (a word which Rosenberg, for one, is surely fond of: it recurs a whopping 100 times in his book, in different but related contexts), and that our much vaunted rationality is really rationalization. These two notions arise from the experimental observation that split-brain patients are literally “of two minds,” since the experimenter can communicate with the right and left hemisphere separately, often obtaining contradictory or incongruent answers. Moreover, when the left hemisphere (which is in charge of spoken language) is asked to explain the incongruities, it simply makes stuff up by connecting the available evidence in an apparently coherent story. Gazzaniga refers to the left hemisphere as “the interpreter,” the structure that is in an important sense in charge of our conscious view of the world.

But observations of split-brain patients — as captivating and scientifically informative as they are — do not at all warrant the above mentioned conclusions. Remember that split-brains are not normal, they are a pathology. Pathologies do tell biologists something about how things work, but they certainly do not tell them the “real” nature of a biological process any more than a mutation tells geneticists the “real” structure of an organism’s trait. Let’s try to draw the analogy in a bit more detail. Biologists have discovered that a mutation in a particular gene causes a condition known as phenylketonuria. If you are affected, you absolutely need to stay away from the amino acid phenylalanine, which is found in a variety of foods, including soda drinks (next time you drink one, check the label, it has a warning to phenylketonurics).

Now imagine how ridiculous a geneticist’s statement would be if he said that the biochemical pathway that metabolizes phenylalanine is “really” an illusion, as demonstrated by the phenotype (the manifestation of phenylketonuria) that we observe in patients with the mutation. If you think this analogy is outrageous I’d like you to explain to me exactly why. In both cases one takes an individual with a pathology and uses his behavior to conclude that what appears to be normal is actually illusory, and that the pathology is a better guide to what’s “really” going on.

The same reasoning can be applied to the confabulation of the left hemisphere “interpreter.” Yes, the experiments do show very clearly that if the left hemisphere doesn’t have access (because of the severed corpus callosum) to the information coming from the right hemisphere, it makes stuff up in order to make sense of what it knows. This does not mean that we confabulate and rationalize all the time, it means that when our brains are fed bad information they weave it together the best they can. This surely has all sorts of implications, including for public education, but we have to keep in mind that we are observing a maladaptive behavior caused by a malfunction of the brain. We are not therefore licensed to conclude that it also malfunctions under normal operating conditions.

So, the next time you hear someone say that moral decision making is “just” your brain working, ask them what else could possibly generate that behavior, and whether that’s all there is to know about this crucial ability shared by all non-psychopathic human beings. And when someone tells you that consciousness is an illusion because split-brain patients have lost their unity of mind, ask them if they are also comfortable in drawing the conclusion that metabolic defects are the real way human biochemical pathways function. That ought to generate some interesting discussion.

Rationally Speaking podcast: Parapsychology

2012-01-31T07:00:00.000-05:00

www.crystalinks.com

In this episode, Massimo and Julia take on parapsychology, the study of phenomena such as extrasensory perception, precognition, and remote viewing.

Its practitioners claim that there is more evidence for it than there is for other areas of scientific inquiry, such as string theory for which there is no empirical data at all. Yet string theory is taken seriously as a science whereas parapsychology is not.

So, what is the scientific status of parapsychology? What does the best academic literature on the subject tell us? Finally, what can we learn from parapsychology about the practice of science in general?

Some observations on the “free will” wars

2012-01-29T11:49:00.003-05:00

by Ian Pollock

hustletronix.com/wordpress

  It has been interesting to view the exchanges on free will (more neutrally, volition) between Massimo, Jerry Coyne, and the readers of both blogs. I felt like chiming in when I read this in Massimo’s latest sortie: 

“...And there are very decent philosophical arguments against determinism (and reductionism, which is also implied by this sort of claim)”

This fits in with my impression that many see incompatibilist determinism a la Jerry Coyne as either “reductionism gone mad,” or, putting a positive spin on it, the logical consequence of reductionism applied to human brains.

I confess myself perplexed by this, because it seems to me that the intuitions driving incompatibilism stem from absent or insufficiently applied reductionism. Let me try to explain.

Let’s start with Jerry’s “practical test” of free will:

If you were put in the same position twice — if the tape of your life could be rewound to the exact moment when you made a decision, with every circumstance leading up to that moment the same and all the molecules in the universe aligned in the same way — you could have chosen differently.

To see the problem with this test, suppose we are interested in a different question: whether Alice loves Bob. I propose as a practical test of this proposition: “What you need to do is take a look at Alice’s brain and see if areas associated with Bob display amorous patterns of neural firing.”

The obvious main problem with my “practical test” of love is that although it’s couched in sciencey language, the entire question of whether Alice loves Bob has been transfered to the word “amorous,” which has still not been reduced to something well-defined and testable. Explanatorily, we are no better off than we were before. Of course, the mistake in my test is trivially easy to see, but the mistake in Jerry’s test of free will is almost as obvious. “Choice” and “free will” and “volition” are damn near synonyms, so although a dictionary may reference “choice” in its definition of “free will,” a scientific test should never do such a thing. Likewise, "could" is a concept at the very heart of the matter! Jerry’s test of free will — “you could have chosen differently” — is not nearly reductionist enough.*

So how would I tackle the issue of free will/volition?

Suppose I am driving along an undivided highway when the stray thought comes into my head that I could steer into the opposing lane, resulting in a horrible, deadly accident.

Of course, I don’t do so, because... well, I like living and I don’t much want to kill others, either. And I just washed my car. But I could have done it....

Wait, was I right to say that I could have done it?

Yes and no. As we have seen, the pivotal word in that sentence is “could,” and “could” has at least two meanings that are relevant to the question of free will.

Meaning #1 maps physical possibility, and in this case returns the clear answer “No, the physical state of the universe was such that you could not have steered into oncoming traffic, as evidenced by the fact that you did not, in fact, do so. QED.” Jerry sees this clearly, and I have absolutely no argument with him.

Meaning #2 of “could” maps counterfactual statements. To say that you “could” have done something in this sense is (roughly) to say that IF circumstances had been otherwise, a different outcome would have resulted. Meaning #2 returns the answer “Yes, you could have steered into oncoming traffic, if you had wanted to.”

Meaning #2 is what people actually mean by “could,” most of the time.

If you’ve been sleeping through this post, pay attention now, because the entire click of compatibilism lies in this realization.

Proposition #1: “No, the state of the universe was such that it was physically impossible for you to have steered into oncoming traffic.”

Proposition #2: “Yes, you could have steered into oncoming traffic (if you had wanted to).”

These two propositions are both true in my example. THAT is the essence of compatibilism.

Also note the very important fact that “wanting to” corresponds to a different physical state than “not wanting to.”

These propositions look incompatible because people (especially incompatibilists!) have an annoying tendency to forget about the implicit counterfactual “if” clause in proposition #2.**

Now we are in a position to see that incompatibilism is basically a huge equivocation fallacy. The incompatibilists prove Proposition #1, then assume that therefore, Proposition #2 is proven false. But this does not follow.

Sadly, those who wish to defend free will/volition seem tempted to deny Proposition #1, often by arguing against determinism and reductionism in very implausible ways. I think this is crazy, but I am not going to argue with them here, in the interests of maintaining a coherent stream of thought.

The main point I want to make is that incompatibilist determinists like Jerry are in some sense still in thrall to the dualistic ideas of their culture, although they have explicitly rejected them.

Dan Dennett is fond of repeating this great quote from Lee Siegel, who wrote a book on Indian street magic.

"I'm writing a book on magic," I explain, and I'm asked, "Real magic?" By 'real magic' people mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts, and supernatural powers. "No," I answer: "Conjuring tricks, not real magic." Real magic, in other words, refers to the magic that is not real, while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic.

Now consider this passage from Jerry Coyne’s USA Today article:

The ineluctable scientific conclusion is that although we feel that we're characters in the play of our lives, rewriting our parts as we go along, in reality we’re puppets performing scripted parts written by the laws of physics. Most people find that idea intolerable, so powerful is our illusion that we really do make choices. (my emphasis).

But um, Jerry, we do actually make choices, right? Don’t we? I mean, not in some amazingly deep philosophically or morally fraught sense of choice, as in “But did Hitler really have a choice to not be a monster?”, but in a basic, boring, everyday sense, as in “Do you want Froot Loops or muesli?” Surely you talk this way too, when you go home?

I think Jerry would concede that we do make such choices, but insist that they aren’t “real” choices. Well, what is a “real” choice as distinct from an unreal one? Like in the case of magic, it would appear that according to Jerry and other incompatibilists, “real choice” refers to the choices that are not real (i.e., don’t actually happen because they require supernatural powers), while the choice that is real — that can, y’know, actually be done — is not. real. choice.

And yet I would bet a large sum of money that Jerry et al. are perfectly willing to use the language of choice in their daily lives, as soon as they’ve forgotten about the day’s blogo-philosophizing. This is not just because choice is a powerful illusion (which would presumbably be their preferred rationalization) — it’s because the concept of “choice” cuts reality at the joints. Choice is one of the most important things that the human brain does; arguably, the brain’s ability to model the world and choose from alternative actions IS its survival value.

A half-reductionist would look at the concept of choice, experience the usual dualistic intuitions about it, then conclude that since dualism is false, choice must be an illusion. Hence the saying (which I just invented): a little bit of reductionism is a dangerous thing.

A good reductionist would look at this incredibly useful concept of “choice” and then try to figure out how it fits into the determined physical universe. Eventually, they would conclude that choice is a physical process like eating or breathing or thinking. As Gary Drescher says in the perfect expression of this insight:

Choice…is a mechanical process compatible with determinism... The objection "The agent didn’t really make a choice, because the outcome was already predetermined" is as much a non sequitur as the objection "The motor didn’t really exert force, because the outcome was already predetermined."

One final note: I have tried to interpret Jerry’s opinions as faithfully as possible, but I hope he will pardon me and let me know if he feels I have put words into his mouth. In truth so much has been written on this topic recently that it gets hard to keep people's opinions straight!

__________

* Unlike others, I have absolutely no problem with the fact that Jerry’s test would only be doable in principle, not in practice. Such thought experiments are extremely useful for all sorts of things.

** Of course, the counterfactual “if” can reference lots of different factors besides the desires of the agent. But this example does a nice job of showing that what prevents you from doing X is not necessarily a pernicious outside influence.

On free will, response to readers

2012-01-26T09:17:00.000-05:00

by Massimo Pigliucci

www.scientificamerican.com

It has been interesting reading through the (at last count) 104 comments on my recent post concerning Jerry Coyne’s take on free will. The post has been viewed (again, so far) 5,660 times, which puts it in 6th place in the all-time ranking of Rationally Speaking entries (interestingly, number 4 is also about Jerry, concerning his changing views on the relationship between science and supernaturalism). Some recurring themes have emerged from that thread which seem worthy of further discussion.

One of the things I had pointed out is that there seems to be a clear inconsistency in the writings of several people who deny free will, since they also regularly add that it is good that we realize how things really are, because this is going to improve our lives, behaviors etc. Some readers thought there was no contradiction. For instance, here is what pin pin said:

> “Haves” and “oughts” and “shoulds” are exhortations that can change the desires of the people you are exhorting. If you think a certain set of people have bad desires (i.e. desires that would make the world a worse place), you can try to use moral language to mold those desires into better desires. <

As a matter of empirical psychology this is certainly the case, but I think there is an equivocation about the word “change” here. Does this mean that people have a choice of some sort, or simply that we are all Pavlovian automata that can be conditioned to do whatever the environment (including our fellow human beings) sets us up to do? The latter — I wager — is what Coyne, Rosenberg et al. really mean, and yet their language simply doesn’t seem to be able to avoid volitional connotations.

Several readers of course brought up dualism, even accusing me of being a crypto-dualist. Here is Gadfly:

> If there's no Cartesian meaner, there's no Cartesian free willer. <

True enough, but this assumes that the only way to meaningfully talk about volition (again, my and others’ preferred term instead of the metaphysically loaded “free will”) is in dualistic terms, a position that has been rejected pretty much by all compatibilist philosophers, from Dennett down.

The twin “isms” of reductionism and determinism have, of course, played a major role throughout the discussion. as Matthew Putman wrote:

> Certainly science, not just neurobiology, deals with causation all of the time, and that can be carried over to notions of freewill. ... I see no reason why a physical structure such as the brain should be any different than the filled polymer system. ... When we study the brain experimentally, either with animal models, or postmortem, we find very predicable behavior of neurons, and glia cells. <

He then goes on to invoke the specter of Descartes, again. But there are several issues lurking within the above quotes. To begin with, there is a free use of the concept of causality which, as I pointed out in my original post, is far from being clear at all, and of course is most definitely extra-scientific, meaning that science can only help itself to it, not investigate it empirically. Second, it is interesting to see that Matthew cannot conceive of a significant difference between filled polymers and brains, despite the obvious fact that brains, and not filled polymers, are alive, thinking, feeling, etc. Please do not take this as an argument for vitalism, it most definitely isn’t what I mean. But I find that that line of argument is somewhat question-begging: we are trying to figure out how chunks of matter can behave in such drastically different ways from other chunks of matter, so to point out the obvious (that they are all chunks of matter) hardly helps moving the debate forward. And of course, as someone commented in response to Matthew, it is no surprise that postmortem brains are just as inert as polymers. What interests us is what happens before they become postmortem.

Gadfly also highlighted something that I took for granted, but evidently I shouldn’t have:

> Belief in free will is ALSO arguably not a scientific proposition. It certainly is no more provable right now than is the denial of free will. <

Indeed. But my beef with Coyne is that he is the one making the strong claim that free will denial is a scientific proposition. I am not at all making the symmetrical claim that affirmation of free will is demonstrated by science, only the neutral one that science has precious little (okay, pretty much nothing) to say about free will.

Which brings me to comments questioning my view of science itself. For instance, elik says:

> If I interpret correctly, you have placed counterfactual language into the realm of unscientific metaphysical speculation. I doubt you would consider statements e.g. “were it below 20 degrees yesterday, the surface of this pond would have frozen over” to be unscientific. <

No, I do not think that all counterfactual language is non scientific (to use the term “unscientific” is pejorative, and I don’t think that only science is in the business of knowledge and understanding). But I think it uncontroversial that some counterfactual reasoning has nothing to do with science (think of purely logical or mathematical questions). To consider elik’s specific example, the reason that particular counterfactual is convincing is because established science already tells us a lot about the state transitional properties of water in relation to temperature. No such knowledge is available in the case of determinism, reductionism and their implications for free will.

Along similar lines, Matthew Clark opined:

> Of course we can’t actually perform this experiment, but the deterministic claim rests on the rather robust intuition that similar causes produce similar effects. <

The crucial part here is “we can’t actually perform the experiment,” which means that we are doing philosophy, not science. And there are very decent philosophical arguments against determinism (and reductionism, which is also implied by this sort of claim). Moreover, what is at issue here is precisely whether “the same causes” are at work. Physics would have to have established causal closure in order to argue that, and it most definitely hasn’t. (Another way to put this is that everything in the universe behaves in a way that has to be compatible with the known laws of physics. This says nothing about whether those laws as we understand them comprise all there is to know about how the universe works.)

elik, along with several other readers, also asks the recurring question:

> How does quantum indeterminacy help free will, for example? <

Well, one way it may help is through two-stage models, which have been mentioned during this and a previous discussion thread. But I am not staking my agnosticism on these or any other explanation for volition, I am simply pointing out that, contra popular (in some quarters) opinion, there are options out there. (Interestingly, very few readers took me up on another possibility: that of truly emergent properties, which is yet another question that at the moment — and perhaps permanently — cannot be resolved by science. We know that there are emergent properties, but we don’t know if they appear to be so because of our epistemic limitations or because they truly do represent novel behaviors of matter when certain complexity and organizational conditions are met.)

elik (not picking on him/her, I assure you!) also used a thought experiment to argue against free will, bringing up the possibility of The Device, a machine capable of predicting the content of an essay several minutes in advance of the essay being written. Intriguing, but besides the obvious fact that such experimental demonstration hasn’t been done by anyone (again, undermining Jerry’s claim that it is science that refutes free will), this conflates predictability with free will. As my CUNY colleague Jesse Prinz pointed out during a recent roundtable on this topic, we can already predict a lot of things about how people will behave under certain circumstances using standard psychology and certainly without having to settle the question of free will.

Why, in the end, do I think there is a problem that Jerry et al. are missing or ignoring? Again, Matthew Clark:

> What we seem not to observe, given our ever increasing ability to control for causal factors in experimental situations, are inexplicable departures from these regularities. <

Of course we do observe departures from regularities, it’s called human behavior! Yes, as I mentioned above, it is predictable to a point, but it is nothing like the movement of planets or the behavior of polymers. And there is, of course, the first person experience of making decisions after deliberation. That experience constitutes data (albeit not of the controlled fashion that would make them amenable to straightforward scientific investigation), and that data that needs to be explained, not explained away. My problem with Jerry’s position is that it is a form of eliminativism, a position in philosophy (not science!) of mind made popular by Paul and Patricia Churchland. When the Churchlands provocatively say that pain “just is” the firing of neuronal C-fibers they only begin to explain the subjective experience of pain. Yes, without the C-fibers we wouldn’t feel pain, but there is a huge difference between saying that the C-fibers are necessary for feeling pain (which we could express as: other conditions ... > C-fibers > pain) and saying that firing C-fibers are the same thing as pain (C-fibers = pain). So too with eliminativism about free will: yes, we need the laws of physics to be able to make decisions, nor can we make decisions that violate said laws. But this is not at all the same as saying that therefore decision making is an illusion brought about by physics, no more than pain is an illusion courtesy of C-fiber firing.

Considering the consequences

2012-01-23T10:14:00.000-05:00

by Michael De Dora

I have never thought much of consequentialism, the moral theory which asserts that determining “the good” or “the moral” is a matter of measuring outcomes. Decisions about what is moral, consequentialists say, should depend on the potential or realized costs and benefits of a moral belief or action. There are myriad problems with this line of thought, and while I have already discussed several on this blog, I would like to use this post to examine in more depth what I think are the four strongest objections to consequentialism.

First, consequentialism says nothing about the substance of one’s ethic. While most consequentialists are utilitarians — a position I also consider vague and tenuous — one obviously needs only value consequences to qualify as a consequentialist. Yet, since everyone has different moral goals, everyone will have different views about potential outcomes. For reasons discussed below, consequentialism does not help us decide which are better or worse. Rather, one’s moral values come prior to consequential calculation, and help determine what one thinks about the consequences.

Second, consequences are often not at all predictable or in line with the actions that caused them. For example, does the fact that certain Muslims riot over the printing of anti-religious cartoons suggest that printing said cartoons is immoral or wrong in some other way? Not in the slightest. It only suggests people have some twisted ideas regarding free expression. Or, consider an exchange I witnessed at a recent Intelligence Squared debate. At the event, two sides of two speakers each debated the motion “The U.N. should admit Palestine as a full member state.” The side taking position against the motion argued that the audience ought to stand with them because of the potential military situation — probably started by Israel — that could be brought on as a result of the U.N.’s recognition of Palestine. Unfortunately, there was no discussion about whether such military action itself would be reasonable.

This gets at a third problem with consequentialism: it often ignores foundational questions of right and wrong for questions of expediency. Or, it ignores concerns about intent for pragmatic concerns. The question of whether a war might start due to the U.N. admitting Palestine as a full member state is an important and interesting one, but it does not answer the distinct question of whether it is right to admit Palestine to the U.N. as a full member state. Those are two different questions that must be considered separately.

Lastly, consequences must be weighed alongside other factors and possibilities. Let us examine a recent exchange on this blog. It occurred in the comments to the recent post, “Massimo’s Picks, special Hitchens edition.”

In the comment thread, Massimo wrote about his skepticism toward the effectiveness of New Atheists like Christopher Hitchens to better the public acceptance of atheism. I replied that:

“Hitchens might not have been the person best fit to sway the majority to our side, but he was part of a movement (the so-called "new atheists") that I think did do two things to help us get to the point where that’s even feasible. First, their out-front writings and speaking engagements put atheism on the forefront of the Western world's consciousness, and created the space for more widespread conversations on religion (like this one!) that were not happening here beforehand. Second, their public work encouraged many apathetic secularists and fence sitters to be more assertive and engage with the problem of religious dogmatism. I think both of these were productive first steps toward getting a majority to embrace secular thinking. And I think these two points can be accepted whether or not you agree with their arguments, or how they stated their arguments.”

Massimo replied:

“… for an allegedly evidence-driven community I hear a lot of claims about all the good that the New Atheists have done, with precious little backing up in terms of data. Are we seriously arguing that atheism wasn’t widely discussed before the Hitchens-Dawkins-Harris-Dennett books? And on what evidential grounds are you asserting that more fence sitters have been drawn inside the movement rather than repelled by the NA’s rhetoric?”

I replied by asking Massimo: “certainly atheism was being discussed long before the arrival of the New Atheists, but on such a widespread and popular scale? The NA all had best-selling books, major TV and magazine appearances, and auditoriums packed with sometimes thousands of people.” His reply: “Nobody doubts that the NA have had an impact. The question is whether it was an overall positive one.”

Massimo’s legitimate empirical question aside (any takers?), I think his last comment is most relevant to our discussion on consequentialism. Whether or not the New Atheists were effective in broadening public acceptance of secular thinking, Massimo raises the following questions: Were the New Atheists necessary to raise such recognition? Couldn’t atheism have been put on the map in some other form or fashion? Indeed, hadn’t atheists previously in human history tried other effective methods? If not, why?

The point here is that there are certainly other possibilities for fostering the kind of space atheists wanted, or an even better space. None of those possibilities were enacted, so we should be thankful for where we are right now. But that does not make what happened desirable.

Regardless, consequentialists could reply that ignoring what may be terrible consequences is unethical. Would they have a point? Consider this common thought experiment: you are a German hiding a Jewish family during World War II, and Nazi guards are at your door asking if you have seen any Jewish people lately. Do you lie to potentially save their lives? Or do you tell the truth and essentially kill the Jewish family? The point here is not that there is an easy answer between lying and not lying. The point is that the consequences — a dead family — are so compelling that they warrant consideration. And this is just one of numerous examples.

What are the implications of all this? That consequences are important, you might conclude? Not necessarily. Instead, I think we have realized only that we have a range of different values, some of which are or can be in tension among themselves. For example, in the case we just considered, we might be stuck between, on one hand, the value of honesty, and on the other, the value of human lives.

As such, perhaps consequentialism should not be looked at as an ethical system in itself — again, it is bare of ethical content — but as a way to figure out if our different ethical systems — based on duties, obligations, virtues, rights, etc. — are working properly or as intended. In other words, consequentialism might help us to see if we are securing the kind of consequences we want. And if we aren’t, it’s time to adjust our aim and try for better consequences.

Radical reform for peer review?

2012-01-19T15:29:00.000-05:00

scienceforseo.com

by Massimo Pigliucci

A recent piece by Scott Jaschik in “Inside Higher Education” pointed out what a number of my colleagues have been thinking for a while now: the peer review system for scholarly journals doesn’t work very well, needs to be reformed, and really ought to take radical advantage of new technologies. There is, of course, going to be quite a bit of resistance to any change coming from the usual quarters, beginning with older academics who still think of social networking in terms of meeting colleagues after work for a martini (well, okay, nothing wrong with that), administrators who are used to the simple (and simplistic) bean counting operations for tenure and promotion made possible by the current system, and journal publishers who make a ton of money while adding next to nothing in value to people’s publications (after all, they don’t pay for the research, don’t pay the writers, and don’t pay the editors and reviewers — which of course doesn’t stop them from charging an arm and a leg to university libraries).

Of course, since the new technologies are making an overhaul of the system possible, and since there is widespread frustration with the current modus operandi especially among younger faculty, change will happen one way or another — witness the rise of open access and online journals that bypass traditional publishers. It’s only a question of which paths to take, and that’s where the conversation gets interesting.

The most radical suggestion mentioned in the Inside article is the one by Aaron J. Barlow, associate professor of English at the City University of New York, where I work. Barlow is quoted in the article as saying that “peer review — in the sense that people work and a consensus may emerge that a given paper is important or not — doesn’t need to take place prior to publication.” He is, of course, right and as a matter of fact most peer review has always taken place after publication. A lot of bad or simply irrelevant stuff gets published and ends up augmenting someone’s c.v. by a line or two (good for promotion and tenure!), but then dies the common death of much academic scholarship: complete lack of citations by anyone other than the author.

The question that Barlow is raising is whether it wouldn’t be better to skip the preliminary step — the pre-publication filter — and simply leave everything to the community at large. I am sympathetic to that position, particularly because as author, editor and reviewer I have seen my share of unseemly behavior, gender and racial biases, personal vendettas, and so on that certainly don’t belong anywhere within a scholarly environment. But I think pretty much everyone agrees that we already have far too much pyrite to sift through in order to find the gold nuggets, and I shudder as to what would happen if anyone were suddenly able to claim “scholarship” by simply posting their papers on the web and ask people — anyone, not just the relevant expert community? — to comment, “+1” or “like.”

This is the same problem that has been faced by the publishing and journalism industries. These days anyone can self-publish a book at the click of a button, and anyone can set up an online newspaper with free or cheap software and access to a server. But I doubt these new technological possibilities will spell the demise of editors, publishing houses and newspapers like the New York Times, for the simple reason that these “classic” outlets do exercise a very valuable (if flawed, incomplete, sometimes biased) function of filtering a lot of distracting or poor quality nonsense (as the NYT’s famous tagline says, “all the news that’s fit to print,” or to pixellate, as the case may be).

Another approach commented on in the Inside piece is the one currently pursued by Cheryl Ball, the editor of an online journal on rhetoric and technology called Kairos, and an associate professor of English at Illinois State University. Her journal engages the entire editorial board in a lengthy discussion of every submitted paper, at the end of which an editor is assigned to coach the author on how to revise the manuscript to reflect the consensus of the board. This makes the system much more transparent (the author knows that all editors participated in the discussion, no anonymity on either side) and obviously immensely constructive from the point of view of the author and the community at large. But I seriously doubt this sort of model can be expanded to the whole industry. I edit a small online open access journal in philosophy of science, and even with our low number of yearly submissions it would be impossible to get my editorial board to do what Ball has been able to accomplish with hers. Again, the problem being that there are too many authors out there, and that far too high a proportion of submitted papers is simply not up to even minimum standards, or would require a huge amount of work to get there (not to mention, of course, that — again — editors and reviewers are not paid for this, nor do they get much concrete credit from university administrations for engaging in what they do).

I do not know what the solution is, and I suspect that we will see over the next few years increased experimentation on the part of younger editors to either ameliorate the problems with the current system or to overhaul the thing altogether. Some journals already make the author, not just the reviewers, anonymous, to minimize biases (it is well known, for instance, that women and minorities get fewer papers accepted if the reviewers know their names, and that the effect disappears if authorship is kept anonymous). Others publish all submitted papers that are technically correct — meaning that are written in an intelligible manner and include all the necessary documentation — while leaving to readers to judge the intrinsic value of the authors’ findings and opinions. We certainly are on the cusp of a technologically driven revolution in academic publishing, but just as in the already mentioned cases of book publishing and journalism, it remains to be seen exactly what will be left standing and what will have arisen anew once the storm has passed.

Experimenting in e-Publishing

2012-01-18T09:06:00.004-05:00

As readers of Rationally Speaking may know, there are two collections of essays pertinent to the topics covered by this blog that have been available at the Amazon Kindle store for a while: "Rationally Speaking: Skeptical Essays on Reality as We Think We Know It" includes all the essays I wrote for Rationally Speaking before it was a blog (it started out as a monthly syndicated internet column), while "Thinking About Science: Essays on the Nature of Science: 2003-2008" republishes all my essays in the homonymous Skeptical Inquirer column (still ongoing) during those years.

Since I'm always interested in new frontiers in e-publishing, I have just released both titles at Smashwords, an e-book "aggregator," as they call them these days, i.e. an outlet that allows people to publish and distribute their e-books in a variety of formats. Smashwords will soon send the two titles to the Apple iBook store and other outlets, but in the meantime you can download them directly at the site, in html, java (for browsers), mobi (for Kindle), ePub, PDF, LRF (for Sony Readers), and PDB (for Palm devices).

Enjoy!

p.s.: as soon as I have some time (ah!) I intend to re-release "Tales of the Rational: Skeptical Essays About Nature and Science" in e-format. Stay tuned...

Rationally Speaking Podcast: Donald Prothero on science deniers' playbook

2012-01-17T08:19:00.001-05:00

Guest Donald Prothero joins us to discuss the common tactics and thinking of science deniers and the implications of this assault on science for our future. The denial of scientific realities in issues like global warming, creationism, vaccine safety, and AIDS, is growing in our society. Not only is our acceptance of scientific "inconvenient truths" under attack, but even scientists themselves have been threatened.

Donald R. Prothero is Professor of Geology at Occidental College and Lecturer in Geobiology at the California Institute of Technology. He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of 25 books, over 200 scientific papers and a number of popular books including, most recenly, "Catastrophes!: Earthquakes, Tsunamis, Tornadoes, and Other Earth-Shattering Disasters" and "Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters". He is on the editorial board of Skeptic magazine and has been featured on several television documentaries, including episodes of Paleoworld (BBC), Prehistoric Monsters Revealed (History Channel), Entelodon and Hyaenodon (National Geographic Channel), and Walking with Prehistoric Beasts (BBC).

Jerry Coyne on free will

2012-01-14T07:00:00.000-05:00

30.media.tumblr.com

by Massimo Pigliucci

As readers of this and of my Chicago University colleague Jerry Coyne’s blog know all too well, Jerry and I rarely see eye to eye, and seldom have any compunction in letting the world know about our disagreements. This is yet another example, which actually covers a topic that has been debated recently at Rationally Speaking. The reason I’m taking up free will again is because Jerry recently published an op-ep piece in USA Today confidently assuring his readers that they “don’t really have free will.” I think many of Jerry’s assertions are unfounded, and for interesting reasons.

Jerry starts out by teasing his readers about their alleged choice of reading his editorial (from which, of course, one deduces that he had no choice about writing it either), and continues: “So it is with all of our other choices: not one of them results from a free and conscious decision on our part. There is no freedom of choice, no free will. And those New Year’s resolutions you made? You had no choice about making them, and you’ll have no choice about whether you keep them.” This in philosophy is known as nihilism, a position that is commonly associated with Nietzsche and that has more recently valiantly been defended by Alex Rosenberg (I know, I keep promising to address his latest book, but it’s long, and it’s taking me some time to digest it).

Jerry’s aim is made clear by the following sentence: “The debate about free will, long the purview of philosophers alone, has been given new life by scientists, especially neuroscientists studying how the brain works. And what they’re finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion.” I think that Jerry is wrong on two counts here: first, neurobiology simply cannot settle the question of free will, no matter what the data; second, Jerry focuses on a very small subset of the pertinent neurobiological literature, interpreting it incorrectly.

Before we continue, however, let’s hear Jerry’s definition of free will: “I mean it [free will] simply as the way most people think of it: When faced with two or more alternatives, it’s your ability to freely and consciously choose one, either on the spot or after some deliberation.” He continues: “A practical test of free will would be this: If you were put in the same position twice — if the tape of your life could be rewound to the exact moment when you made a decision, with every circumstance leading up to that moment the same and all the molecules in the universe aligned in the same way — you could have chosen differently.”

As Jerry knows, and immediately admits in the paragraph following this quote, such a test is anything but practical. In fact, it cannot be carried out, ever. Which is why I contend that Jerry and others who push the idea that free will (and consciousness, and moral responsibility) is “an illusion” are mistaken when they think they are doing so on the basis of science. Science, if nothing else, is about empirically testable hypotheses, to which the above scenario certainly does not belong. Rather, Jerry et al. are making a metaphysical argument, an approach with which I’m fine, to a point, as a philosopher, but that is strange coming from people who clearly despise the very idea of metaphysics and scorn anything that cannot be approached by the empirical methods of science.

Knowing that his “practical test” is impossible to carry out, Jerry resorts to two lines of evidence he thinks clinch the case against free will. The first begins with the truism that we are biological organisms made of physical stuff, so that we have to abide by the laws of physics. And these laws, according to Jerry, do not leave room for free will. Of course this conclusion depends on one’s concept of free will, and there are several on offer (more on this below). It also depends on entirely unargued for assumptions, including the following: causal closure (i.e., that the currently known laws of physics encompass the totality of causal relationships in the universe); a working concept of causality (one of the most thorny philosophical concepts ever); physical determinism (which appears to be contradicted by physics itself, particularly quantum mechanics); and the non-existence of true emergent properties (i.e., of emergent behavior that actually is qualitatively novel, and doesn't simply appear to be so because of our epistemic limitations). I have opinions about all four of these points, but I don’t have a knockdown argument concerning any of them. The point is, neither does Jerry.

(Let me make clear parenthetically that I am certainly not in favor of fuzzy / mystical concepts of free will, and that I am as much of a naturalist — in the philosophical sense of the word — as Jerry. I just don’t think any of the above issues has been settled, and since it is Jerry who is making an extraordinary claim — that we are profoundly mistaken in our first person experience about free will, consciousness and morality — it seems fair to point out that he lacks the corresponding extraordinary evidence.)

Jerry’s second line of evidence for the non existence of free will draws not from physics but from neurobiology. Here he comments on recent elaborations of the famous Libet experiments about human decision making (or what cognitive scientists, and an increasing number of philosophers, refer to as volition, to get away from the theologically loaded term “free will”). Libet and others have convincingly shown that when people are asked to signal when exactly they have become aware of making the decision of pushing a button in front of a computer screen, it turns out that the decision had been made hundreds of milliseconds to several seconds before, subconsciously. That is, the brain apparently puts things in motion that will result in the pushing of a button way ahead of us becoming conscious of having made the decision to push the button.

Why this has anything at all to do with free will is a puzzle. Not even Libet himself took his experiments to show that people don’t make conscious decisions, in part because reporting awareness of an urge (in this case, of pushing a button) hardly qualifies as a conscious decision. The latter is the kind of reflective deliberation that Jerry and I engaged in while composing our respective essays, and it is simply not measured by Libet-type experiments. Indeed, it is not surprising at all that we make all sorts of unconscious decisions before we become aware of them, as any baseball batter, or anyone catching a falling object on the fly, will readily testify. Furthermore, as Alfred Mele has argued in his book on the topic, and contrary to Jerry’s take on the neurobiological literature, there is ample empirical evidence that we do engage in conscious thinking (largely catalyzed by the prefrontal cortex), as well as, and in continuous feedback loop with, our subconscious processing of information. (Incidentally, I find it strange when some people argue that “we” are not making decisions if our subconscious is operating, since presumably we all agree that our subconscious is just as defining of “us” as conscious thinking is. Accordingly, “my brain made me do it” is hardly a defense that will fly in a court of law except, and for good reasons, in pathological cases such as behaviors resulting from brain damage.)

To recap so far: I think Jerry’s position on free will is not scientific (it is a metaphysical stance), and his two “lines of evidence” are lacking because of unargued for philosophical assumptions and because of his misreading of the neurobiological literature. But just for the sake of argument let us suspend judgment on all of this and ask Jerry the obvious question: why do we have such a pervasive “illusion” to begin with? Apparently, he knew this was coming, and answered thus in the USA Today article: “where do these illusions of both will and ‘free’ will come from? We’re not sure. I suspect that they’re the products of natural selection, perhaps because our ancestors wouldn’t thrive in small, harmonious groups — the conditions under which we evolved — if they didn’t feel responsible for their actions.”

As far as I can tell there is no empirical evidence whatsoever to support such speculation. To the contrary, we know of plenty of social animal species that seem to thrive very well indeed without requiring the illusion of free will to keep them in line. Certainly social insects don’t need to be fooled that way, and it is hard to imagine even species of social mammals, including most primates, needing to engage in deliberate reasoning before deciding how to behave toward fellow group members.

Jerry cannot resist the temptation of inserting a dig at philosophers toward the end of his essay: “philosophers have concocted ingenious rationalizations for why we nevertheless have free will of a sort. It’s all based on redefining ‘free will’ to mean something else.” There are two problems with this characterization of philosophers’ modus operandi: to begin with, it’s a case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If philosophers didn’t inform their reasoning with the latest science they would be criticized (justly) as being stuck in medieval scholasticism. But when they do take science on board they get accused of “rationalizing.”

In the above comment Jerry also ignores that philosophers have been debating various concepts (not definitions, because they are not ex-cathedra pronouncements) of free will for a long time. Competing approaches to free will have been put forth, among others, by Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, and more recently Daniel Dennett and Harry Frankfurt, to name but a few. It is a profound mischaracterization of the history of philosophy to present various takes on free will as being simply reactive to the latest scientific discoveries. And of course some philosophical accounts of free will are more (and some less) in synch with scientific findings (which, it is worth bearing in mind, are themselves always tentative and sometimes spectacularly overturned). Nothing general about the nature of philosophy follows from that.

By the end of his USA Today essay Jerry finally gets to the crux of the matter: the implications of the alleged lack of free will for religion and morality. On the first count, Jerry claims that the death of free will spells the death of religion, although ironically he then mentions the Calvinist view of pre-determination. In fact, plenty of religious beliefs are compatible with lack of free will, so it seems like religion will survive even this assault (as befits an infinitely malleable tradition of made up stories).

Jerry’s second conclusion is that moral responsibility is therefore also an illusion, and that we should finally face up to this truth. Besides the obvious point that, according to his own view nobody has any choice about whether to face up to anything, what would this mean in practice? Jerry puts it this way: “we should continue to mete out punishments because those are environmental factors that can influence the brains of not only the criminal himself, but of other people as well. Seeing someone put in jail, or being put in jail yourself, can change you in a way that makes it less likely you’ll behave badly in the future.” And he goes on to say: “[we need to contemplate] the notion that things like consciousness, free choice, and even the idea of ‘me’ are but convincing illusions fashioned by natural selection ... With that under our belts, we can go about building a kinder world.”

At this point I’m truly puzzled. How is it possible to argue that we “should” do X in order to achieve Y if, as Jerry’s intellectual kin, Alex Rosenberg, would put it, “the physical facts fix all the facts”? It is hard for me to make sense of a position that denies that we have any choice in any matter, while at the same time advocating that we should or should not do certain things rather than others. How can we have a choice to contemplate (or not) what Jerry is proposing? How can we then decide to build a kinder world? And since morality itself is an illusion, why should we try to build a kinder world anyway? I’m sure I’m missing something, but I would very much like to know what that something is.

In the end, skepticism about free will seems to me to be akin to radical skepticism about reality in general (the idea that all of reality is an illusion, or a computer simulation, or something along those lines): it denies what we all think is self-evident, it cannot be defeated logically (though it is not based on empirical evidence), and it is completely irrelevant to our lives. If it teaches us anything, it is to humble us into contemplating the possibility that we may know (in the case of radical skepticism) or be able to act (in the case of free will skepticism) much less than we often smugly think — and we can all use an occasional lesson in humility. That said, we should then proceed by ignoring the radical skeptic in order to get back to the business of navigating reality, making willful decisions about our lives (including New Year’s resolutions, which actually succeed surprisingly often), and assign moral responsibility to our and other people’s actions.

Michael's Picks

2012-01-13T07:00:00.000-05:00

by Michael De Dora

* State lawmakers set a record in 2011 for the most anti-reproductive rights provisions enacted in a single year, according to a new report from the Guttmacher Institute. Laura Bassett has more on this story.

* Should Christians be exempted from basic educational and professional standards because of their deeply held religious beliefs? That’s the question taken up in a recent article by David Moshman, professor of educational psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

* James Croft says that secularists could be more effective in defending church-state separation if they instead framed such issues as a matter of church-state protection.

* Roman Catholic bishops in Illinois charge that being forced to follow the law while working with taxpayer money limits religious freedom. Susan Jacoby has more on this argument, which is unfortunately becoming popular.

* Many people think that moral beliefs and values cannot or should not be promoted or discredited by the government. Yet Anthony Sheldon, writing in The Guardian, argues that this notion is mistaken.

* Wendy Kaminer discusses a troubling animal rights law that could serve to protect commercial interests and make terrorists out of people who want to voice their concerns.

* Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has gotten a lot of attention for his just-released TED talk, titled “Trust, morality, and oxytocin.” While you can watch the 16-minute lecture here, CNN has now published a short article by Zak on that topic.

* Women in Egypt are fighting back against a vigilante group of ultra-conservative Muslim men who has been harassing retail shops and their customers for “indecency,” according to the news outlet Bikya Masar.

On parapsychology

2012-01-11T12:00:00.000-05:00

www.uc2enter.com

by Massimo Pigliucci

A few weeks ago I published at Rationally Speaking a guest post by my former (undergraduate) student Maaneli Derakhshani, who made a case for the scientific status of parapsychology. Some of my readers criticized the choice as an instance of allowing pseudoscience to be represented in what I hope is a reputable science and philosophy blog. That sentiment is, I think, misguided. If we really pride ourselves on our critical thinking we ought to be able to take other people’s best arguments on board and show if and why they are mistaken. And Maaneli did make a very good argument in defense of parapsychology.

I also think Maaneli, in response to some of the many comments posted, is correct in saying that it took courage for him to “come out” in this manner. As I understand it, he is hoping for a scientific career in theoretical physics, and he rightly argues that writing favorably on behalf of parapsychology is not going to help his chances. I know that I would not hire in my department someone with leanings toward what I consider to be a pseudoscience.

But is parapsychology a pseudoscience, as Maaneli chides me for having opined both in podcasts and in my Nonsense on Stilts book? He thinks not, based on his analysis of a small but persistent literature concerning experiments performed under so-called "psi-conducive" conditions, like the Maimonides dream telepathy and the Ganzfeld (“total field”) experiments.

I am sure I will disappoint both Maaneli and some of my readers who were actually supportive of his analysis, but I will not engage his claims one by one. This is, I assure you, not a cop out, but a reasonable decision based on three considerations. First, other critics of the paranormal have done a much better and more in-depth job at criticizing the experiments produced by Daryl Bem and others (for the most recent example, see this devastating critique of Bem's porn-facilitated clairvoyance experiments, published in Skeptical Inquirer. Additional critical sources are listed at the end of this post). Second, neither Maaneli nor I have access to the raw data or have been in a position to double check in person (or at least try to duplicate) the experimental protocols under discussion. Without that, we are both reduced to trusting the analyses (or in my case, the criticisms) done by others. Third, the question asked by Maaneli is whether and why current parapsychology qualifies as science or should be relegated to pseudoscience, and this issue is broader and more interesting than endless skirmishes about p-values and meta-analyses. I will therefore focus this post solely on Maaneli’s fundamental question.

One argument made by supporters of parapsychology is that there is by now sufficient evidence to accord the discipline scientific status (and, presumably, academic status and funding to its practitioners) because the quality of the marshaled evidence is at least as good as run of the mill evidence published in mainstream psychology journals. Besides the fact that there actually is much reasonable doubt that the latter assertion corresponds to the truth, the argument fails for two reasons. First, one could respond that at best this shows that a lot of psychology is sloppy science. As a formerly practicing scientist (in evolutionary biology) I can assure you that quite a bit of below par science is done (and, unfortunately, published) all the time. An embarrassing number of papers in mainstream science is based on bad experimental procedures, presents woefully inadequate and biased samples, and reports flawed statistical analyses. The reason this isn’t a bigger deal (although it probably got tenure for a number of people who should have dropped out of science in graduate school) is that scientific peer review is an endless process that eventually sifts the few nuggets of gold and simply ignores the sea of useless crap.

Second, as every skeptic knows very well, Hume's dictum reigns (though often in Carl Sagan's paraphrase): extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is true of normal science as well. Nobody bothers to replicate or even critically re-analyze boring results that simply confirm what we already know, only under slightly different circumstances. But try to claim cold fusion, or faster than light particles, and suddenly the standards of proof become much much higher. And so they should, as unfair as the individual scientist may feel about this epistemic heuristic.

Now, parapsychological claims of telepathy, clairvoyance and the like are just about as extraordinary as they come. One can reasonably argue that if confirmed, these claims would overturn physics and biology as we understand them, possibly violating several fundamental laws (vague nods to “quantum entanglement” effects notwithstanding). That being the case, Bem and colleagues simply have to do a hell of a lot better than they have done so far, and my bet is that they simply won’t be able to.

By the way, this isn't a question of effect size, for which several readers have erroneously hammered Maaneli. There are plenty of examples in science, from ecology to quantum physics, where the effect size is very small indeed. But the results are statistically clear, methodologically unimpeachable, and repeatable ad nauseam by a large community of scientists. None of the above is the case for anything that parapsychology has produced so far.

What about the lack of a sound theory? Again, Maaneli is correct in citing examples from the history of science when we didn’t have a theoretical explanation for certain observations, and yet the scientific community has eventually accepted the results and incorporated them into mainstream science. But a closer look at some of these examples is very instructive. Take Wegener’s idea of continental drift, which turned out to be correct, and which was based on initially already strong evidence (much better evidence, I submit, than anything produced in parapsychology). Still, the idea was not accepted immediately, and it took among other things the development of a sound theory to explain the phenomenon before geologists came on board en masse. And so it should be, since science isn’t just a collection of facts, odd or not, it is an attempt to understand those facts and how they fit into everything else we know about how the universe works.

Parapsychology has had more than a century to produce compelling facts and reasonable theories. It has fallen very short on the first count, and embarrassingly so on the second one. Nobody seems to have any idea of what “psi” is and why it works in the way in which it allegedly works. And nobody seems to have any clue at all concerning how “psi” might fit with everything else that psychology, physiology, neurobiology, evolutionary biology, chemistry and physics tell us about human cognitive abilities (again, vague references to quantum mechanics won’t do, despite how easily Deepak Chopra can make them). This is a really tall mountain for parapsychologists to climb, and they seem stuck on the first or second step.

Which brings me to why parapsychology is best thought of as pseudoscience. Karl Popper famously thought that the so-called demarcation problem, finding something that distinguishes science from pseudoscience, had been solved by his own criterion of falsifiability. Not so in modern philosophy of science. Maarten Boudry and I, as I have mentioned before, are finishing up the editing of a new book on the demarcation problem, to be published by Chicago Press. One of the things we learned from the many contributors to the volume is that nobody any longer thinks of science (or pseudoscience) as a simple concept that is amenable to a sharp definition based on a small set of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. But we have also learned that many philosophers think that a hallmark of pseudoscience is the persistence of its practitioners to make grand and revolutionary claims in spite of the equally persisting dearth of compelling evidence (and theory) to back them up. This scenario, I think, fits the situation of parapsychology very well.

However, Maarten and I have also seen many of our colleagues argue — again, correctly, we think — that a pseudoscientific status is historically contingent. That is, something may be confined to pseudoscience for a long time and then emerge triumphantly, or vice versa, may be considered good science for a while, only to be eventually relegated to pseudoscience. Phrenology is an example of the latter, evolutionary biology one of the former (I know, surprising, but see the essay by Michael Ruse that I discussed at RS in the context of a recent book on biology and ideology).

So the verdict is pretty much never final, and good skeptics really ought to keep an open mind. But the more time that passes without significant and widely acknowledged progress, the more one’s skepticism is reasonable and warranted. So here is my suggestion to Maaneli: either shelve this whole thing and concentrate on your budding career as a theoretical physicist, or get your hands dirty and work to produce the kind of evidence (and theory) that really has the potential to shock the scientific world into paying attention. If you don’t mind the advise, however, my bet is that you’ll be far better off taking the first route.

____

Additional critical sources:

Blackmore, S. J. (1980) The extent of selective reporting of ESP ganzfeld studies. European Journal of Parapsychology 3:213–220.

Blackmore, Susan (1987) A Report of a Visit to Carl Sargent’s Laboratory. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. 54:186-198.

Frazier, Kendrick (ed.) (1986) Science Confronts the Paranormal. Prometheus Books.

Hansen, G.P., Utts, J., and Markwick, B. (1992) Critique of the PEAR remote-viewing experiments. Journal of Parapsychology. 56:97-113.

Hansel, C.E.M. (1989) The Search for Psychic Power: ESP and Parapsychology Revisited. Prometheus Books.

Marks, David (2000) The Psychology of the Psychic. Prometheus Books.

Milton, J. and R.Wiseman (1999) Does psi exist? Lack of replication of an anomalous process of information transfer. Psychological Bulletin 125:387-391.

New Rationally Speaking podcast: Joseph Heath on Economics Without Illusions

2012-01-10T10:07:00.002-05:00

Guest Joseph Heath, author of “Economics Without Illusions: Debunking the Myths of Modern Capitalism,” joins us as we turn our skeptical eyes toward the treacherous dual terrain of economics and politics. We discuss the ways in which, with his book, he attempts to raise our economic literacy and empower us with new ideas. In it, he draws on everyday examples to skewer the six favorite economic fallacies of the right, followed by impaling the six favorite fallacies of the left. Heath leaves no sacred cows untipped as he breaks down complex arguments and shows how the world really works.

Joseph Heath is the Director of the Centre for Ethics and Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. In addition to his academic publications, he is the author of other popular books, among them, "The Rebel Sell : Why the Culture Can't Be Jammed" and "Efficient Society: Why Canada is as Close to Utopia as It Gets"

Rationally Speaking encore: How to change a mind

2012-01-09T07:00:00.001-05:00

www.persuasivespeechtopicsguide.com

[Originally published on December 2, 2005]

by Massimo Pigliucci

Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner's Changing Minds deals with that fundamental aspect of the human condition: our willingness (or, more often, unwillingness) to change mind about an issue. As somebody who is a professional educator and spends an inordinate amount of time keeping a blog, I'm keenly interested in Gardner's book. While not earth shattering, Changing Minds provides a series of interesting insights, presented in very readable prose.

Gardner's idea is to examine mind changing at different "scales," from the level of political leaders having to convince a whole nation, to university presidents intent on selling radical reforms to colleagues and students, to the more intimate settings of conversations with friends and loved ones, and finally to changing our own mind. As Gardner points out, these situations require different approaches and display distinct dynamics, chiefly because of the nature of the interaction between the parties.

The basic premise of Gardner's book, however, applies to all levels of analysis: there are specific, recognizable elements that play a role in any successful change of mind. Irritatingly (though Gardner seems to think this is actually a plus), all keywords used in this context begin with "r," which makes it very difficult to r-emember them. Anyhow, here they are:

* Reason: if one wishes to change someone else's mind one has to provide good reasons, obviously. But if that were enough, we wouldn't have creationism around, so read on.

* Research: the best arguments are those complemented by evidence, so presenting data to back one's position up is crucial. (Again, insufficient against pseudoscience and in politics, but still...)

* Resonance: the new view has to resonate psychologically at some level with the intended recipient. This is were things become tricky, because we are moving outside of pure rationalism or empiricism, and into the psychology of human motivations.

* Redescription: a new viewpoint is more likely to be accepted if it is presented in a variety of forms, possibly by a variety of sources. That is why, for example, public education needs to be done on many fronts and by a number of individuals -- the more people trying to communicate the message in different ways, the more likely that it will sink in.

* Rewards: this is the classical behaviorist call for positive reinforcement. A new point of view is more likely to be accepted if one sees some advantages (not necessarily material) to adopting it.

* Real world events: these are external events, usually of large emotional impact, that can reinforce the new point of view. Typically these aren't under the control of either the recipient or the educator (e.g., the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center), but can be powerful in forcing the recipient to reach a "tipping point" and changing her mind.

* Resistances: an effective change of mind happens when most or all of the above are in place, and when there are few sources of resistance to the change, where this resistance can be rooted in material rewards, deep psychological grounds, or just simple inertia.

Of course, Gardner knows -- as Machiavelli masterfully articulated before him -- that all of this is value-neutral. That is, one can use the 7-R framework for good or for bad (indeed, Gardner's book includes clear examples of both), which opens up the Pandora box of the ethical use of education. But that's another story for another time.

Rationally Speaking encore: Does empathy negate physicalism?

2012-01-07T07:00:00.000-05:00

[Originally published on November 1, 2005]

by Massimo Pigliucci

Tough question. It has been posed (and answered in the positive) by Michael Philips in a recent article in Philosophy Now. Let's see what this is about. Empathy, of course, is the ability that all normal human beings (there are some pathological exceptions, which are actually going to be very relevant in a minute) have of, in some sense, being in someone else's metaphorical shoes. Empathy, in other words, is that mental phenomenon that allows us to at least approximately feel the pain, or pleasure, being experienced by someone else, which in turn allows an understanding of other people's emotional situations.

Physicalism, on the other hand, is a philosophical term that indicates a family of theories about the mind-body relationship (for a rather technical summary see here). In particular, physicalism says that the mind in fact is a result of brain activity, excluding the possibility of any form of mind-body dualism. There are several versions of physicalism, but two major ones are the so-called "type identity" and "token identity" theories. Bear with me for a second, this is going to be interesting once we pass the technicalities.

A physicalist identity theory basically says that there is some correspondence between physical and mental states, i.e. that in order to have a given mental state (say, feeling pain) one has to be in a certain brain state, because the brain is the causal factor behind so-called mental events. If one subscribes to a token identity theory, then one is saying that any particular mental state corresponds to (it's identical with) a specific brain state. Only that brain state will cause that particular sensation or feeling. On the other hand, the more flexible type identity theory says that there is in fact a correspondence between brain states and feelings, but that this may be a many-to-one relationship, i.e. there may be several different configurations of a brain (or equivalent structure) that can generate a certain sensation in the subject. Keep this distinction in mind, it will be useful in a bit.

Philips, and other philosophers of mind, argues that physicalism is incompatible with the existence of empathy, because empathy implies the existence of qualia, and qualia cannot be accounted for by physicalism. Yup, we need to take care of another little bit of technical jargon. Qualia are so-called "secondary" properties of objects. Primary properties are independent of observers, for example shape. A box is a box regardless of who observes it, human or machine. Secondary qualities, however, are in some sense "in" the observer, for example in the case of colors. Yes, colors are elicited by the physical characteristics of light waves, but the experience of seeing a color (qualia are experiences) demands the subjective presence of a conscious being actually having the experience. (One can already object to this that, in fact, plenty of living beings -- for example insects -- experience colors in a physiological sense, and yet are not conscious in anything like the sense of the term when applied to human beings, but let that pass for now.)

Next, to the crux of the matter. Philips argues that empathy is made possible by qualia, because empathy is about feeling that we can experience something very much like what somebody else says she is experiencing (e.g. pain in response to a hammer hitting a finger). But how do we know what it's like to experience, say, pain? It's not because of a physicalist description of pain as a function of brain processes, but rather because we have the capability to experience qualia ourselves. In other words, the argument goes, physicalism may be able to tell us what sort of nerves and nerve impulses are involved in the feeling of pain, but that has nothing to do with the subjective experience of pain. So, physicalism cannot explain qualia; but since qualia are real (as demonstrated by the existence of empathy), then physicalism cannot account for a real (and important) mental phenomenon. Ergo, physicalism must be wrong, or at least grossly incomplete.

Philips' article goes into some detail into the possible responses open to a physicalist, and offers of course a series of counter-rebuttals by Philips. The problem is that one of the fundamental (and unspoken) premises of Philips' whole critique is highly questionable. It turns out that his arguments are pretty good against what I referred to above as "token identity" theory, i.e. the strictest variety of physicalism that claims that there is a one-to-one correspondence between brain and mental states. If that were the case, one could argue that a complete knowledge of brain circuitry would have to be sufficient to account for all mental phenomena, including qualia. But it turns out that subjective experiences are in fact difficult to pinpoint on a specific set of nerves and impulses. This isn't really surprising, because we already know that token identity theories must be wrong. It seems clear that different individuals, with different brains, can have apparently very similar qualitative experiences (such as perceiving colors).

But things get a lot more complicated when one moves to the more sophisticated type identity theory. In this case, the claim is simply that there are classes of brain structures and functions (e.g., nerves and nerve impulses) that can generate mental phenomena. But the same mental phenomena could be generated by different structures and functions, even by entirely different materials (which makes artificial intelligence possible, at least in theory), as long as certain properties are maintained by the system. Think of it as the idea that different types of hardware can run the same sort of software with relevantly similar (though not necessarily identical) results. While if token identity were correct there would be only one way to produce a word processor that looks and works like Microsoft Word, with type identity once can run different pieces of software (e.g., Word, OpenOffice, etc.) on different machines (PCs, Apples) and different operating systems (Windows, Linux), and pretty much get the same "qualia" (i.e., the same user interface) from all of them. If that's the case, type identity is compatible with the existence of empathy.

Finally, remember my initial reference to the fact that normal human beings can feel empathy? It turns out that some brain pathologies, such as the destruction of the amygdala, make it impossible for a human to feel empathy, because he himself has lost the ability to have emotions altogether. This and similar nightmarish conditions are described in a wonderful book on the human brain, Phantoms in the Brain, by neurobiologist V.S. Ramachandran. What these findings imply, however, is a pretty powerful blow to non-physicalist theories of emotions and feelings: if qualia aren't the result of the activity of certain brain regions (such as the amygdalas), why on earth would people with damage to those regions not be able to experience qualia? This objection is sometimes referred to in philosophy of mind as the "no ectoplasm" clause: we may not know exactly how the brain produces consciousness, but no brain = no consciousness, precisely as a physicalist theory would predict.

Something to ponder, the next time you'll look at the colors of a beautiful sunset...

Rationally Speaking encore: Why bother?

2012-01-05T07:00:00.000-05:00

petisikotbah.files.wordpress.com

[Originally published on October 31, 2005]

by Massimo Pigliucci

A recent comment on this blog asked the question of why bother having a discourse with people who disagree with you ideologically. This question often comes up as a result of frustration at interacting with people who apparently aren't interested in a dialog, but simply in shouting their opinions past others. Of course, to some extent we are all guilty of this, but the extent does matter, and the intentions with which one enters a public forum (be that a blog, a radio show, or simply a conversation at dinner) matters too.

I have actually written about this before (for example, here), arguing that there are different time-horizons and goals that need to be considered. In the short-term, it is simply not true that our opinions do not influence others, and sometimes even change minds. We rarely get to know this, because the process doesn't have an instantaneous feedback, and the most vocal people in any particular forum tend to be those who are most set in their ideas (which isn't to say that they are necessarily wrong, of course!). But since I began doing my part as what in Europe would be considered a "public intellectual" (i.e., not somebody who stays way up there in the ivory tower, engaging in continuous mental masturbation), about ten years ago, I have gotten plenty of letters and emails from people thanking me for having pointed out things they hadn't thought before, in the process adding to their daily dose of food for thought. That was precisely the point.

In the long run, things do change too, and often dramatically. It may be disheartening to see the rise of the intolerant religious right in the United States during the past few years, but take the really long historical view and you'll immediately appreciate the enormous advances made during the last century (think of the right of women to vote, civil rights legislation, etc.), and beyond (not long ago I would have been burned as an heretic for what I'm writing on this blog).

Where, then does the frustration come from? I suggested in the past that this is the result of what I called the "rationalistic fallacy." This isn't a formal logical fallacy, but rather an assumption -- particularly common among, but not limited to, academics, that all one needs to do to convince other people is to present a cogent argument backed up by evidence. Alas, it isn't that simple, partly because the human brain seems to be hard-wired to jump to conclusions based on little evidence, not to mention of course because of the emotional component attached to much of what is being discussed here (religion, rights, philosophical positions, etc.).

Nonetheless, there is equally good evidence from the cognitive sciences that people do change their minds (I highly recommend a little booklet entitled "Teaching with the Brain in Mind"). How this happens is interesting, and worth learning. For example, people tend to be more responsive to repeated exposure to new ideas, preferably in a variety of settings (lectures, readings) and sources (i.e., various authors, colleagues, friends). Few of us change our minds on the spot or in response to a single well-crafted argument presented by one person. We need to see things from different angles, hear or read them repeated with different flavors, and to give time to our left brain (what neuroscientists call the "interpreter" of our worldview) to digest whatever dissonant information is being presented.

There is one more reason to engage in open discussion: one exposes one's own arguments to the sometime penetrating "peer review" of other people, who may start with different assumptions, reason in a different fashion, and hold onto different sets of priorities. That can do miracles to sharpen our own thinking and make us grow as individuals.

The bottom line is that discussions aren't a waste of time, as frustrating as they sometimes may be. They are an essential component of an open, democratic society, and they beat the crap out of watching mindless tv all night...

Rationally Speaking encore: Wittgenstein vs Freud vs Schopenhauer

2012-01-03T07:00:00.000-05:00

wittgensteinforum.files.wordpress.com

[Originally published on September 22 and 28, 2005]

by Massimo Pigliucci

I'm reading a fairly heavy (though fortunately not very long!) tome by French philosopher Jacque Bouveresse, Wittgenstein Reads Freud: the Myth of the Unconscious, which I picked up during a recent visit to Vienna (I was taking a few hours off and went to see Freud's home out of curiosity). I want to share some interesting notes, as Wittgenstein is always fascinating and yet baffling to me, and actually so is Freud!

Apparently, Witty often referred to himself as a "disciple" of Freud, and clearly admired the latter's intellect. However, beware of a compliment coming from Ludwig! Here are a few comments on psychoanalysis and its inventor, straight from the philosopher's pen:

* "Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. Now any ass has these pictures available to use in 'explaining' symptoms of illness."

* "Freud is constantly claiming to be scientific. But what he gives is speculation -- something prior even to the formation of a hypothesis."

* "Wisdom is something I never would expect from Freud. Cleverness, certainly; but not wisdom."

All of this makes Wittgenstein sound remarkably like his contemporary philosophical colleague, Karl Popper (also a Viennese, incidentally), who criticized psychoanalysis on the ground that it fails to meet Popper's criterion of "falsifiability," which allegedly differentiates science from pseudoscience (contemporary philosophers have moved beyond falsificationism, and admit that the boundary separating good science, bad science, and pseudoscience is somewhat fuzzy). Yet, Witty and Popper were actually often at odds, and they had a famous public dispute during a visit of Popper to Cambridge, where Wittgenstein was working.

Indeed, although I actually agree with the comments quoted above, their origin is to be found in Wittgenstein's (I think) excessive distrust of scientific explanations of human phenomena (such as the workings of the mind). Wittgenstein has made some blunders of his own, as in his criticism of Darwin's theory on grounds similar to his rejection of Freud:

"I have always thought that Darwin was wrong: his theory doesn't account for all this variety of species. It hasn't the necessary multiplicity."

By which he meant that the Darwinian principles of common descent and natural selection are insufficient to account for the variety of forms seen in the biological world. While this is in fact very likely true, it does not imply a rejection of Darwinism, but rather its expansion, building on Darwin's original insight (which is exactly what has happened over the past 150 years in biology).

While still (slowly) reading Bouveresse's book on Wittgenstein Reads Freuds, I got to an interesting bit where Witty is pitted against that compassionate curmudgeon, Arthur Schopenhauer. The battle is played around the difference (if there is any) between a cause and a reason for an action. This, as it happens, has profound consequences for the philosophy of mind, consciousness, and free will. So, read on!

Here is what Wittgenstein says: "The proposition that your action has such and such a cause is a hypothesis. The hypothesis is well-founded if one has had a number of experiences which ... agree in showing that your action is the regular sequel of certain conditions which we then call causes of the action. In order to know the reason which you had for making a certain statement ... no number of agreeing experiences is necessary, and the statement of your reason is not a hypothesis."

OK, Witty is always difficult to read, but it seems that what he is saying is that causes are hypotheses about how events are connected in the world. Reasons, on the other hand, are justifications that we give for certain actions or propositions. Perhaps an example will clarify: if I hit your knee with a small hammer, your leg will move because of a reflex. I.e., the hit, through a series of physical connections, caused the leg to move. However, if I ask you to raise your leg and you do it, your reason for doing so is that I asked you to perform the action. Wittgenstein is saying that reasons aren't causes, they are an altogether different kind of beast. This distinction does have great intuitive appeal, as we all realize that there seem indeed to be a big difference between the two cases concerning your knee just described.

Arthur (Schopenhauer), on the other hand, said about such matters: "Motivation [i.e., reason] is causality seen from within. ... Motivation [is only] causality passing through knowledge."

I'll be darn if this also doesn't make a lot of sense! The idea here is that in fact there is no real distinction between causes and reasons, because the latters are simply an awareness that we have of the causes of certain events or actions. So, for example, when I say that I got up and went to the refrigerator to get me a beer because I was thirsty, I am giving both a reason and a cause: indeed, my reason is a first-person description of the underlying cause (I was thirsty). (Incidentally, current neurobiological research seems to support Schopenhauer's contention.)

Wittgenstein seemed to prefer a distinction between causes and reasons for two, well, reasons! First, he was always distrustful of excessively scientifical or physical explanations of the human condition, especially of mental phenomena. Second, he felt that if one explains actions in terms of causes, then one is committed to an automatic form of determinism, and there goes free will out the window. Consciousness, then, is an after-the-fact illusion, a fiction that allows us to think that "we" make decisions, when in fact it's all a matter of physical causes.

The problem with Witty's position seems to me twofold: first, I don't see why causes have to be deterministic. We know (for example from quantum mechanics) that there is such a thing as probabilistic causality (though that still doesn't rescue free will, since we would at most have a random will). Second, Wittgenstein, like so many anti-physicalists, simply (conveniently) neglects to give an alternative explanation. If reasons are not a particular instance of causes, what are they, exactly? Inquiring minds want to know, and for good reasons.

(By the way, if you are wondering what all of this has to do with Freud, it is because Wittgenstein accused Freud and his disciples of confusing causes and reasons in setting up their psychoanalytical explanations.)

Why New Year's Resolutions Have No Teeth

2012-01-01T14:07:00.008-05:00

by Ian Pollock

Stop me if this seems familiar.

It’s October 11th. You were planning to work out tonight, but now it’s already 8:00 pm. You’re tired from work, and hungry, and suddenly watching a nice quiz show (maybe QI?) seems very appealing. You reason: I can always catch up later. I’ll go for an extra-long run tomorrow. And so you grab a bag of Doritos and start watching.

And you know, it’s funny, but tomorrow... a similar thing happens... and keeps happening until January 1st, when you throw off your wicked ways, turn a new leaf, and renew your Firm Resolution to work out regularly. Which lasts until February, or April if you have strong willpower. This is the age-old problem of akrasia.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that not working out regularly is a mistake, in the abstract. However, what is not so clear is whether your specific decision on the 11th of October was irrational. Arguably, at that moment, you really did value watching TV more than running - that’s why you watched TV (revealed preferences). And you really *could* catch up later. The gotcha, of course, is that you end up making a similar decision every night, which adds up to the annual result of NOT working out regularly.

I think it’s pretty intuitively obvious that on January 1st, considering the year past, if you didn’t exercise regularly despite your intentions, you made some sort of mistake. But what mistake? Your decision of October 11th didn’t feel like a mistake. It didn’t even feel like a rationalization. At that moment, the TV and junk food was absolutely worth it. And by standard, causal decision theory, it wasn’t a mistake.

Causal decision theory is basically equivalent to utility maximization using correct probabilistic reasoning, and is very appealing as a normative model for how to make decisions. Given a set of values, the correct decision at any given time is the one that causes the probability of achieving those values to be maximized.

This model works most of the time. As a fairly trivial example, suppose you are considering whether to play the lottery. Causal decision theory thinks that you should play the lottery if U(lottery) > 0, where U(lottery) = [($ win)*P(win) - ($ loss)*P(loss)]*(utility/money scaling factor). This is entirely sane, and is a good explanation for why playing the lottery is a mistake unless that scaling factor is negative (i.e., unless you like losing money).

In simplified terms, the trouble with causal decision theory is that, on October 11th, the model looks at U(workout today) and U(slack off today), concludes U(workout today) is WAAAY less than U(slack off today), and you open a bag of Doritos and turn on the TV.

This is something of a paradox. How can it be that, considering the year as a whole, workouts are better than slacking, and yet on any individual day of that year, slacking off is better than a workout?

The reason appears to be a phenomenon called hyperbolic discounting, explained in detail here. In essence, humans in general seem to overvalue things happening now, and undervalue things that will happen in the future. For example, getting your oil changed today would be a bit of a pain. But somehow, that bit-of-a-pain-now outweighs the massive pain a few years from now when your car needs major maintenance because you neglected to take care of it. So you don’t change your oil, or at least you have to fight with yourself to do so.

Hyperbolic discounting often expresses itself as a time-dependent preference reversal: exercise-in-the-future is better than chocolate-cake-in-the-future, but chocolate-cake-now is waaay better than exercise-now. Much ink has been spilt over whether, and under what conditions, hyperbolic discounting can be said to be rational, but it appears we are stuck with the psychology behind it in any case.

This is depressing. It means that New Year’s resolutions are basically futile. Exercise sounds great on the 1st, in the abstract, but on any given day in October, Doritos and TV are going to seem soooo much better than exercise.

Good news! There is a hack! Beeminder’s slogan is “bringing long-term consequences near.” The first innovation is a bet. You set a goal (say, 250 half-hour workouts per year) and you give Beeminder your credit card number (yes, I use it, no, I haven’t been robbed). If you fail to achieve your goal, you lose a specified amount (in my case, $30).

The second, most important innovation is to make the bet depend on your behaviour NOW rather than on your reaching a distant future goal. 250 half-hour workouts per year sounds great, but realistically, what you’ll do is slack until November, then try to catch up with a bunch of longer workouts. On Beeminder, you set a pace (in this case, ~5 workouts per week), and if you fall below that pace AT ANY TIME, you lose. You can change the pace, but changes will only take effect a week from when the change is made, so you can’t slack off today by changing the pace. You can use it for a lot of things (weight loss, number of pages written in your novel, time volunteered, etc.).

I have had limited success with this over the medium term, and with similar techniques before I found Beeminder - one of them involving a google docs spreadsheet, a good friend, and some amicable blackmail (I believe Julia has a most amusing anecdote about this sort of technique). It is not a perfect solution to the problem of akrasia, but it really, really helps. The best part about it is that deciding to exercise on any given day ceases to be a big psychological fight with yourself, in which you have to spend a bunch of willpower. You just know you’ll lose $30 if you don’t do it, and the decision magically becomes simple.

Nevertheless, I find it inelegant to *merely* use a hack to prevent behaviour which is patently irrational. If you have a systematizing tendency like me, you want to figure out the general theory that shows akrasia to be irrational, and then make that theory part of your common sense. Also, there are practical problems with the hack. What if, after you’ve committed, you genuinely reconsider whether the goal is worthwhile?

A more general decision theory that solves this sort of problem is already being put forward by two people (that I know of), for reasons that apparently have nothing directly to do with akrasia. Gary Drescher (in Good & Real - which happens to be the best book EVAR) calls his theory “acausal decision theory,” and Eliezer Yudkowsky calls his “timeless decision theory.” In both cases, the theory is motivated mainly by consideration of the prisoner’s dilemma, Newcomb’s problem, and machine ethics (I do so love these intellectual convergences).

The gist of these decision theories may be summarized as follows (though probably not carefully enough for their authors):

When making a decision, act as if you were deciding the output of similar decisions, by similar decision-makers, in similar circumstances.

This looks promising for explaining:
-Why it is rational to vote in an election, even if your vote has extremely low probability of being individually decisive;
-Why it is a mistake to litter in a public park, even though your individual napkin will not noticeable contribute to the amount of garbage there;
-Why consequentialist ethics has a hard time doing away with prima facie deontological concepts like “honour” and “duty” and “oath” and “right;”
and, last but not least,
-Why you were wrong to get out the Doritos instead of working out, on the night of October 11th.

Now, you may have noticed the words “act as if” in the above description of acausal decision theory. They are the great bone of contention for the theory. Why should we “act as if” something is true, when it’s not?

Intuitively, I think there is probably a good answer to that question, although I don’t know exactly what it looks like yet. But for akrasia, there is no need to “act as if” you were deciding the output of similar decisions by similar decision-makers in similar circumstances - you really, obviously are!

It is a truism about human psychology that acting in a particular way on a particular occasion contributes to a general disposition to act in that way. Being surly to the girl behind the Tim Horton’s counter today makes you more likely to be surly to someone else tomorrow, and to become, in time, a generally surly person. We fall into behavioural ruts all too easily.

What this means for akrasia is that, on October 11th when you are deciding whether to run or slack off, you are NOT just deciding what to do on that particular night. You are:

(a) contributing to a general psychological disposition to not exercise (and to ignore difficult long-term goals);

and more controversially,

(b) implicitly deciding that in broadly analogous situations (i.e., similar levels of motivation), the proper course is to not exercise. In other words, you are deciding on a general policy of slacking off whenever you are at least as disinclined to exercise as you are now.

So my tentative take-home lesson is the following:

Decisions are never solitary, one-off events. A decision about a particular action on a particular day (running or not on the 11th of October, given a certain level of motivation) is simultaneously a decision about a general decision policy (running or not, EVER, given a certain level of motivation).

Always make decisions such that you would find it acceptable if all similarly-placed agents (including your future self) made the same decision.

Realistically, don’t rely on the above, theoretical considerations to defeat your own akrasia. If you have a quantifiable goal and you fear you’ll procrastinate on it, just sign up with Beeminder. If the goal is less quantifiable, the Beeminder folks recommend Stickk. Your mileage may vary.

Oh, and I almost forgot. Happy new year, Rationally Speaking readers & bloggers!! Thanks for the warm; stimulating discussion we’ve had and will have!

Rationally Speaking encore: In praise of idleness

2011-12-31T07:00:00.000-05:00

riminiuaar.files.wordpress.com

[Originally published on August 5 & 7, 2005]

by Massimo Pigliucci

I'm reading Bertrand Russell's collection of essays, "In Praise of Idleness," an intriguing idea (the praise, not the collection of essays) for modern Western society, especially the American one, where idleness -- as Russell remarks -- is frowned upon as a waste of "productive" time.

Among the radical ideas Russell puts forth is that we have the technology that would enable us to work about four hour a day, and employ the rest in relaxation and cultural activities, or in volunteer work. But, he quickly points out, we are raised in a society for which something like that would be unthinkable, because the people at the top of the economic ladder have never liked those below to have leisure time, and even less to improve their lot. You never know, educated people might start thinking critically, which may lead to dire consequences for the establishment.

Some of my favorite quotes from the British philosopher, from the first essay of the book (the one that gives it its title):

"I think that there is far too much work done in the world."

"The road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work."

"[Work] is emphatically not one of the ends of human life."

"The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake."

"The notion that the desirable activities are those that bring a profit has made everything topsy-turvy."

Pretty revolutionary stuff, for being written in 1932, eh?

Bertrand Russell, in his collection of essays entitled "In Praise of Idleness," goes on to discuss the role of "useless" knowledge in our society. By this he means knowledge that is valued for its own sake, regardless of any particular practical application (in a way, similar to the way we value art for its own sake, regardless of how much money we may make by selling that Picasso we all have in our attic).

"Learning, in the renaissance, was part of the joie de vivre, just as much as drinking or love-making." Interesting comparisons there, no? Indeed, one can get -- in a metaphorical sense -- inebriated by intellectual pursuits (even drunk, perhaps?), and certainly the sudden joy of discovery can be compared to love-making (though usually the sensation of release isn't quite that overwhelming...).

Russell becomes very worried about the tendency of modern society (he was writing in the 1930s) to reduce the size of its vocabulary, to make language more "practical." One consequence of this, he argues, is the potential loss of literary flourishing and of a sense of style in writing and reading. But of course, as Orwell magisterially pointed out in "1984," a much more dangerous result is the inability of people to think about certain thoughts -- especially those that are dangerous to the establishment -- because of a lack of appropriate words. Words and concepts are closely related, one can hardly have the latter without mastering of the former.

Russell, of course, isn't saying that practical knowledge isn't, well, useful! On the contrary. But there is no need why that has somehow to be seen as opposite to theoretical knowledge: culture isn't a zero sum game, and the more the better.

Most importantly, Russell points out that too much focus on practical results often leads to nervous breakdowns, or at least to unpleasant levels of stress; moreover, lack of culture affects human behavior in a most decidedly negative manner, including that of children. As he puts it: "The bully in a school is seldom a boy whose proficiency in learning is up to the average. When a lynching takes place, the ring-leaders are almost invariably ignorant men."

In the chapter/essay on "The modern Midas," Russell discusses the differences and connections between finance and industry. As he puts it:

"Finance is more powerful than industry when both are independent, but the interests of industry more nearly coincide with those of the community than do the interests of finance."

This is exactly the sort of problem that brought us -- 70 years after Russell wrote -- Enron and the whole Wall Street mess. The idea is that capitalism, if it has to work, has to be based on certain rules ("managed capitalism," they call it in Europe). One of these rules is a tight coupling between investments (capital) and the products of the industry one is investing on. In turn, this means that things like day trading and other short-term "investments" are not investments at all (because there is no time for the industry to actually use that capital and deliver a product), they are speculation. And speculation is gambling pure and simple.

We now live in a society in which, for some bizarre reason, it has become normal to accept the idea that people can "make a kill" on the market and become millionaires overnight. Usually, of course, on the skin of thousands of others who either lose their money or their jobs. This is nonsense on stilts of the highest order.

The solution, of course, is pretty simple: regulate stock trading in a way similar to, say, government bonds: you can't sell before a certain minimum period of time, and if you do you incur a penalty. This sort of measures would reconnect, as Russell puts it, finance and industry, and would greatly benefit the welfare of the majority of people. Alas, the American public has been sold on the idea that anybody can become instantly rich, and this hope dazzles and blinds us into acquiescence to a system that makes most people's lives worse than they could be. Just think of the fact that the richest country in the world (and the self-professed best democracy on the planet) still has the shame of having tens of millions of its citizens and children without health care. But that's another story...

Michael’s Picks

2011-12-30T07:00:00.001-05:00

by Michael De Dora

* Many people ethically equate deliberately causing harm with failing to prevent it. Why? According to new research, it might depend of the degree to which a person engages in conscious reasoning.

* A district judge recently ruled that a fetal personhood ballot measure in Nevada provides “inadequate” information on its potential effects, and must be rewritten before sponsors attempt to collect the signatures needed to get on next year’s ballot.

* Most women who have second-trimester abortions are not “willfully irresponsible,” but instead face challenges that make it tougher to secure an earlier abortion, according to a new study. You can read more about this study on Salon.

* The European Court of Justice recently banned the patenting of inventions involving human embryonic stem cells and characterized research and other procedures using new or previously derived cells as “immoral.” Now, the prominent Alliance of German Scientific Organizations has publicly slammed the court for stepping beyond its bounds.

* Are those who are overweight in that situation because they lack the willpower necessary to keep in shape? Absolutely not, says Zoe Williams in the Guardian.

* A record 64 percent of Americans consider the honesty and ethical standards of members of Congress “low” or “very low,” according to a new survey from Gallup.

* China is instituting moral instruction for its civil servants, and has categorized the training sessions as “highly important,” according to the Chinese newspaper the People’s Daily.

* An old but good one: Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness: “I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.”

Rationally Speaking on (partial) Winter break!

2011-12-29T21:00:00.000-05:00

www.businessweek.com

Dear Readers,

The writers of Rationally Speaking are going to take what I think is a much deserved Winter break for a couple of weeks, as a consequence of which the blog will return with new posts in mid-January.

However, we all know that these days people have an insatiable need for new things to read (who said our is a society devoted to mindless entertainment?), think about, and discuss with like minded as well as not so akin readers. Which is why we are going to follow the lead of television and radio stations across the country and run "encore" features, i.e., previously published posts that may be ready for a fresh look and some more discussion.

Yes, we know that you can easily search the blog's archives, but RS has now published a whopping 853 posts since its inception in August 2005, posts that have been graced with (at last count) 1,072,597 page views resulting in 21,710 comments. It is reasonable to believe that you may have missed something worth checking out again.

So stay tuned, enjoy our re-runs, and look forward to our writers coming back refreshed and ready for more thoughtful commentary on science, philosophy, politics and religion throughout next year.

Jerry Coyne loses his cool, Dawkins his style

2011-12-27T18:56:00.002-05:00

by Massimo Pigliucci

w-uh.com

This is not going to be a post about substance, only about form. Yes, I know, many in the atheist community don’t seem to think that the latter matters. If you are among them, don’t bother to read the rest of this.

As my readers might recall, a few days ago I published a special “Rationally Speaking Picks” with links to several articles critical of Christopher Hitchens, to balance out what I perceived to be a bit too much of a glorification of his persona upon his untimely death.

Apparently, that simple list managed to completely unhinge my colleague Jerry Coyne (as well as Richard Dawkins), in the process precisely making my point that some atheists suffer from hero worship and a selective dearth of critical thinking.

Jerry and I have a long history of mutual criticism, which goes back to our pre-public outreach days, covering a variety of issues in evolutionary biology (species concepts and speciation theory, the status of evolutionary theory, and the like). As readers of this (and his) blog know, we openly take issue with each other’s posts from time to time, and occasionally — and regrettably — the disagreement has gotten personal. It was for the latter reason that at some point I issued a formal apology to Jerry, which he rather ungraciously did not reciprocate.

But his latest post is a rant pure and simple, and has finally closed the book on Jerry Coyne, as far as I am concerned (and pretty much also closed the one on Dawkins too, more on him near the end). I will leave aside, as I said, the substantive content, partly because it is so preposterously an overreaction to what I wrote that it takes care of itself, partly because many of the questions that Jerry asks have actually been answered in the articles I linked to. Instead, here is a taste of what he writes about me:

“I respond briefly: Pigliucci is full of what comes out of the south end of a bull facing north.”

(I appreciate the colorful, if somewhat burlesque-style metaphor. As it turns out, however, his response is anything but brief.)

“Give me a fricking break, Dr.3 Pigliucci!”

(Jerry appears to have a complex of inferiority in my respects, at least as judged by his constant jeering of the fact that I have three PhD’s and he only one. What’s up with that, my friend?)

“Let me dispel your ignorance of his accomplishments by listing the books he wrote.”

(This actually displays Jerry’s inability to read what I wrote, since I did say that Hitchens is going to be remembered as a good writer, as well as an advocate of atheism.)

“I needn’t say more to dispel Pigliucci’s willful ignorance.”

(Or is it Jerry’s willful ignorance? In my brief note accompanying the list of links — which is not a full post — I did acknowledge one of the very things Jerry accuses me of being ignorant of, Hitch’s on the mark criticism of Kissinger.)

“Misogynyist? Does Pigluicci know what that means?”

(Yes, he does, and he knows how to spell it, too. He also knows out to spell both Coyne’s name and his own. But apparently Jerry, in the midst of his rage, was typing far too furiously on his keyboard. Or perhaps I haven’t made it into his user spelling dictionary yet. Odd, given the number of times he mis-writes about me.)

“I find Massimo often wrong in his philosophical positions, including those about scientism, free will, and the way we atheists are supposed to behave.”

(One of those ways includes treating colleagues and fellow atheists with a minimum of respect, even when one disagrees with them. Oh well.)

“And don’t get me started on Massimo’s biology!”

(Please, do! Oh, I forgot, Jerry has already done that, rather gratuitously, in the pages of both Nature and Science magazines. I suppose that was in retaliation for my highly positive review of his Why Evolution is True book. As we all know, no good deed goes unpunished.)

“If I had a choice of having a drink and a conversation with Hitchens or Pigliucci, or having to choose to read an essay written by either Hitchens or Pigliucci, I know exactly what I’d do.”

(And yet, Jerry apparently even reads my lists of links, let alone my essays! And of course with that statement he foreclosed forever the possibility of tasting my killer dirty martinis.)

Finally, we get to Dawkins. Here is his comment on Jerry’s rant, in full:

upload.wikimedia.org

“Bravo Jerry. Hitch wasn’t always right — who is? — but he was a giant, and irreplaceable. As for Pigliucci, who would even bother to replace him?”

Ouch. Not exactly a gentlemanly remark, particularly from a Brit of supposedly high class as Richard Dawkins. (And this, of course, is his second faux pas this year, after the debacle caused by his infamous comment to Rebecca Watson about “Elevatorgate.”)

Look, I have been guilty of my own share of critical and sarcastic comments about both Coyne and Dawkins. But I don’t think anything I wrote has ever (and, I hope, will never) come even close to this debasing level of anger and pettiness. It is a shame, and it only further lowers the level of discourse within our community, inflicting additional damage to the way the outside world perceives us. A sad way to conclude the year, and no particular reason to expect better next time around, I’m afraid.

The goals of atheist activism

2011-12-27T10:00:00.000-05:00

by Massimo Pigliucci

images1.fanpop.com

Even before the recent demise of Christopher Hitchens, and before I had read two recent (and quite opposite, here and here) opinions about this, I was thinking of keyboarding a few words about the goals of atheist activism. So here we go.

The two recent opinions I came across are by Greta Christina over at FreethoughtBlogs, and by Chris Stedman at the HuffPost. They seem to agree that there are two distinct goals of atheist activism, as Christina put it: “For many atheists, the primary goal of atheist activism is to reduce anti-atheist bigotry and discrimination, and to work towards more complete separation of church and state ... For many [other] atheists, our main goal is persuading the world out of religion.” Stedman agrees on the separability of these goals, but says “I maintain significant disagreement with many religious beliefs, but I do not wish to be associated with narrow-minded, dehumanizing generalizations about religious people. I am disappointed that such positions represent atheist activism not only to the majority of our society, but to many of my fellow atheist activists as well.”

Let me make a few points about this debate, and then move on to articulate what I think are four (not one or two) objectives of atheistic activism, and to argue that we should refocus our efforts along more complex and efficacious lines than those pursued by some (but by all means not all) atheist organizations, local and national.

First off, Christina makes an argument at the beginning of her post for in-your-face atheism coupled with a nicer and gentler approach, claiming that this good cop / bad cop strategy “works.” How does she know? To quote: “hey, there’s a reason cops use it!” Interestingly, no source is provided as to the extent to which said technique is in fact used by the police, whether it works (outside of movies), and why it would be appropriate to social discourse, as opposed to dealing with criminals. But okay, let’s get to Christina’s second source of evidence.

That would be that the dual nice/in-your-face approach worked in the past, for instance with the civil rights movement, or concerning gay rights. There are two things I think we should be clear about in this context. First, atheists really ought not to compare themselves to blacks or gays, as it is an insult to people who have experienced real discrimination. Yes, it may not be politically correct to tell your co-workers or family that you are an atheist, and I’m sure some people suffer psychological consequences as a result. But atheists are not being made to sit at the back of buses, hanged from trees, put in prison, or denied voting rights qua atheist. So let’s not make unseemly comparisons.

Moreover, the “bad cops” of the civil and gay rights movements rarely went around insulting the other side, they were simply vocal about their own rights. There is a huge difference between being in-your-face in the sense of taking to the streets and loudly complaining about rights you are unjustly denied and being in-your-face in the more basic sense of hurling insults at other people.

Which reminds me. Many of my fellow atheists are nice and smart people, but there is also a tendency within the community to think that one is automatically smart just for being an atheist, as opposed to all those deluded idiots who believe in things for which there is no evidence. I don’t know about your personal experience, but I can point to a lot of religious people who are a lot smarter — by any reasonable definition of “smart” — than several atheists I have encountered. And the same goes for being ethical (or not). So, let’s tone the self-righteousness down a few notches, it is unbecoming and smells too much of religious bigotry.

Stedman also pushes his argument a bit too far in some respects, I think, but his opening example is one that has made me think a lot about what we are doing and why when I came across it independently from Stedman. He quotes Jon Stewart, not exactly a friend of religious fanaticism or illiberalism, commenting after showing a clip of American Atheists’ President Dave Silverman pulling off yet another of the publicity stunts for which AA is so (in)famous (and for which I openly have criticized them before). Stewart quipped, imitating Silverman: “As President of the American Atheists organization, I promise to make sure that everyone, even those that are indifferent to our cause, will fucking hate us.” Stewart is right, I’m afraid, and I say this as (literally) a card carrying atheist and life member of AA.

Let’s now go back to a broader discussion of our goals as a movement and a community. I actually think we have four of them, logically separable from each other, and which can of course be pursued in parallel and/or be prioritized according to each individual’s or organization’s leanings:

* Separation of Church and State. Because neither we nor a lot of religious believers want to turn the US into a theocracy, or even allow the State to mingle with religion to a significant extent, a combination that has always been pernicious in the past. Here it seems to me that the proven strategy is to build bridges with ecumenical or even individually religious groups with similar interests, following in the steps of Thomas Jefferson, who reassured the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802 that the US Government would keep “a wall of separation between Church & State.”

* Acceptance of atheism. Atheists are still among the most mistrusted groups of people in America, as a consequence of which it is hard to imagine an openly atheist politician (to my knowledge there is only one) and even less a President. Now, if one’s goal is to be accepted (not just tolerated) in a society, one is more likely to achieve that goal by playing social and nice (which does not at all mean to capitulate or compromise on principles), as opposed to constantly jeering or hurling insults at other members of said society. That’s why my friend and Secular Coalition for America founder Herb Silverman often goes to interfaith breakfast meetings wearing his “Friendly Atheist Neighbor” t-shirt.

* Combating dogmatism — even internally! Atheists and freethinkers pride themselves in being free from prejudice and open minded about life, the universe and everything. Which is why our antipathy towards religion is rooted in the latter’s dogmatism. But then we ought to realize that some religions are actually not dogmatic (e.g., there is a long tradition of internal criticism within the Jewish tradition, and one of the least dogmatic religious figures of all time is the Dalai Lama), which means that not all religions are our enemies, or at least not all to the same extent. Moreover, look me in the eye and try to seriously make an argument that you’ve never seen or heard a dogmatic atheist, and we’ll have a good laugh. Let’s start by cleaning our own house, before we self-righteously pretend to (metaphorically) demolish other people’s abodes.

* Elimination (or at least reduction) of irrationalism. In a sense, of course, all religions are irrational, to the extent that they foster beliefs that are not based on evidence, or that in some cases even flatly contradict evidence. But, again, irrationalism comes in a variety of degrees and shapes, and not all of them are equally worthy of counter-efforts or even public scorn. No human being is likely capable of holding completely coherent evidence-based beliefs, so let us be reasonable and cut some slack to the mild offenders while joining forces with them against the really dangerous ones. And let’s not fall into mindless self-praise and consider a profession of atheism as ipso facto evidence for rationalism. I assure you that I know a number of atheists who hold mystical, new agey, political, or even scientific beliefs that are either unfounded or flatly contradict the available evidence.

As you can see, none of the above goals is defined in terms of the abolition of religion per se. The real targets are irrationalism and dogmatism, of which various religious beliefs are only examples, and only to a variety of degrees. And of course atheists can be irrational and dogmatic as well, if atheism is allowed to turn into an ideology to be defended at all costs. If we manage to work (together with as many other reasonable people as possible) toward a world with more critical thinking, less dogmatism, and less irrationality, the problem of religion will take care of itself, since religion is a symptom, not the root, of human evil.

Massimo's Picks, special Hitchens edition

2011-12-25T07:00:00.000-05:00

by Massimo Pigliucci

As you all know, Christopher Hitchens has recently passed away after a valiant (and very public) struggle against cancer. Most of the commentaries and obituaries were positive, and many of my fellow atheists and freethinkers seem to genuinely admire the man. I have always been puzzled by why, exactly, this is so.

Yes, he was an atheist. Yes, he wrote eloquently. But that's about it. He was also personally abusive (particularly, it appears, toward fellow writers), misogynist, obnoxiously in your face about his beliefs (or lack thereof), and spectacularly inconsistent (and incredibly often wrong) about his political positions.

So here is my admittedly contrarian collection of commentaries on Hitch, in the hope that we can come up with a more balanced view of the man and begin a thoughtful discussion about just how much good or bad he has done to atheism, freethought, and political discourse.

* Regarding Christopher, by Katha Pollitt (The Nation)

* When Hitch was wrong he was disastrously wrong, by Alex Pareene (Salon)

* The other Christopher Hitchens, by Kevin Drum (Mother Jones)

* Christopher Hitchens and the protocol for public figure deaths, by Glenn Greenwald (Salon)

* More Paranoid Fantasies on the Right... or Why Christopher Hitchens Needs to Drink Less, by Brian Leiter (Leiter Reports)

* Christopher Hitchens’ unforgivable mistake, by John Cook (Gawker)

Scientism as Scientistic Belief

2011-12-23T07:00:00.000-05:00

by Paul M. Paolini

www.devincontext.com

[This is a guest post from Paul Paolini, an independent writer with an interest in philosophy living in Berkeley, Calif.]

Scientism is generally taken to be something along the lines of a way of thinking in which the virtues, scope or benefits of science are exaggerated or extended to the point of cultishness, ideology or fanaticism. My aim in this essay is to make this general idea more precise, or, to put it another way, to explain how charging someone with scientism can be a meaningful criticism.

One way we might try to characterize scientism is in terms of belief in certain propositions relating to science. In particular, scientism might be defined as belief in propositions that take certain extreme pro-science positions (i.e., positions that evaluate science favorably), such as:

- Observation is the only source of genuine knowledge.
- Eventually, all fields of knowledge will be sciences.
- Human progress and scientific progress are identical.
- One day all humankind will hold the scientific worldview and no other.
- The question of how we should live can and should be answered by science.

But there is a problem with this. If we were to identify scientism with belief in such propositions, then the charge of scientism would merely be the charge of having certain beliefs that are false, and what it is that is supposed to be wrong with having such beliefs, beyond falsity, is left unspecified. To put this another way, identifying scientism with certain beliefs renders the charge of scientism merely of the form: such-and-such is believed and such-and-such is false — which gives no indication of the significance of using the word ‘scientism’ to begin with.

At this point we might be tempted to consider an inquiry into what is wrong with holding relevant propositions and revising our account of scientism accordingly. However, this too goes in the wrong direction. The reason is that there is nothing inherently wrong with holding relevant propositions, beyond possible falsity. Any one of them could be arrived at by a reasonable, truth-devoted thinker who has no special pre-existing enthusiasm for science. The thinker may be wrong in her belief, but even so her belief does not entail anything that could be considered scientism in any sense. This suggests that scientism does not reside in the content of relevant beliefs but elsewhere.

Where? My view is that if scientism does not reside in the content of certain beliefs then it must reside in reasoning that relates to a certain class of beliefs. In particular, I believe that scientism, rather than adherence to specific pro-science beliefs, is a kind of flawed reasoning that relates to pro-science beliefs as a class. This flawed reasoning consists generally, I think, in unjustified inferences from pro-science beliefs to beliefs in general. To be more precise, if this view is correct then the “enthusiasm” of scientism is manifested not by extremeness of positions about science but in a lack of rigor in reasoning about the significance of science.

We may sharpen this account with the notion of a scientistic belief; here I use the word ‘scientistic’ as simply an adjectival form of the noun ‘scientism.’ We shall say that a belief is scientistic just in case it is falsely justified by a pro-science belief; that is, if a belief appeals to a pro-science belief that does not in fact warrant it, then that belief is scientistic. Note that pro-science beliefs may themselves be scientistic, though they need not be. Also note that any belief that is justified by a scientistic belief is thereby also scientistic, even if the relation of justification connecting the two beliefs is sound. This means that a scientistic belief’s false justification can be mediated by other scientistic beliefs.

How about some examples of what might be called scientistic inferences? Below, while the premises are pro-science beliefs that may or may not be scientistic, the conclusions are scientistic beliefs that may or may not be overtly pro-science.

[Premise] Science is the greatest authority on human knowledge.
[Conclusion] If science says that consciousness does not exist, non-scientists should simply accept it.

[P] Science has been far more successful than the humanities in improving human life.
[C] Resources should be directed away from the humanities toward science.

[P] Science provides the truth about reality while religions do not.
[C] The scientific worldview should be preferred to any religious worldview.

In conclusion, what I like about this view of scientism as the phenomenon of scientistic belief, beyond its seeming to be a view that works, is that it divests the act of charging someone with scientism of anti-science connotations, renders the charge of scientism neutral on substantive debate regarding the merits of science — and questions of substantive truth generally — and clarifies the charge of scientism as a relatively simple and objective charge of flawed reasoning.

—

Other RS posts on similar topics:

* Engineers vs intellectuals? How Timothy Ferris gets it spectacularly wrong.

* On the difference between science and philosophy.

* Why we don’t need transhumanism.

Massimo's Picks

2011-12-22T07:00:00.000-05:00

by Massimo Pigliucci

* Are definitions of art stupid? If so, how can you call yourself an artist without being stupid?

* What is college for?

* Isn't logic great?

* Jesus gives advice to the Denver Broncos...

* Some indication that religion being more about socializing than belief may be a myth.

* Simon Blackburn on Hume and bondage...

* Faux News declares war on the communist Muppets.

* How doctors die. A sobering look at how the pros face the end of their life.

* Flying Spaghetti monster statue installed on Tennessee Courthouse lawn. His noodly appendages will be pleased.

* So, Plato and a platypus walk into a bar... With a nod to Groucho Marx.

* How to spend more psychological time with the good parts of your life, sort of like the Tralfamadorians.

* Philosophy for everyone, in Europe. When in the US?

* What does it mean to be human? Good questions, several answers.

Newt, anti-intellectualism, and family values

2011-12-20T07:00:00.000-05:00

by Massimo Pigliucci

www.fredhystere.com

The consensus outside of the Republican party is that the GOP — broadly speaking and with the due exceptions — has become a party of anti-intellectuals in thrall to the religious Right. Chris Mooney, for one, has devoted quite a bit of effort to documenting the Republican mindset, first in his The Republican War on Science, and now with the forthcoming The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Don’t Believe in Science (or Many Other Inconvenient Truths).

That the GOP base is obsessed with its own peculiar definition of “family values” is also well known. They — allegedly — care a lot about the right of fertilized eggs, as well as the “sanctity” of family and marriage. But, peculiarly, other obviously relevant issues often don’t blip on their moral radar, for instance war, access to health care, or poverty.

Whence, then, Newt Gingrich? The former Speaker of the House is currently the frontrunner in the Republican group of Presidential hopefuls and — bearing in mind the caveat that predictions in politics are usually as good as those of psychics — appears to have a very good shot at facing Obama in the general elections, but it’s not clear why.

The Newt question has been asked recently in the New York Times by Frank Bruni: “How does an ostentatious know-it-all fare so well in a party supposedly hostile to intellectuals and intellectualism?” How indeed. Well, I have a theory.

First, let us refresh our memories with a sliver of the ample record on Newt’s deeds and misdeeds. The guy, you will recall, led the Republican charge to impeach then President Clinton for lying about an affair with a much younger intern — at the same time that Newt was having his own affair with a much younger intern (though, to his credit, he later made her his third wife, which in turn reminds us of the ugly episode of Newt serving divorce papers to his first wife while she was in the hospital with cancer. Compassionate conservatism!).

Gingrich also thought, at some point, that global warming is real, though he has conveniently flip-flopped on the issue recently. He also supported a provision in the Obama stimulus package that promoted the use of electronic health care records, since apparently big government is good when it comes to benefiting clients for which he was consulting, like Allscripts and Microsoft. Newt was also positively fuming at the big government bailout of Freddie Mac, one of the two giant federally-sponsored mortgage companies — conveniently neglecting to note that he made $1.6 million to $1.8 million as a “historian consultant” of big Freddie.

I could go on, but I think I have established that Newt is not: a) anti-science (unless it’s convenient for him); b) a particularly family-value oriented guy; c) an enemy of big government (at least when it comes to him making profit from bloated bureaucracy). So why is he the current darling of the anti-science, get the government out of my Medicare, family values above all, base of the GOP? Because that base isn’t really about any of those things. It is a hate group that relishes a confrontational son of a bitch who can stick it to whoever they delude themselves is the anti-Christ of the moment.

This isn’t cheap demonizing of one’s opponent at all costs. There used to be a time when I would have gladly had a conversation with Republican politicians, or with a Republican friend (I still have some of the latter). We would have disagreed on many issues, but there would have been a sense that we were talking to each other, and that political compromise was possible on a number of issues (as indeed has been the case on and off throughout the history of the American Congress — just think of the fact that Nixon and Reagan would look like liberals by the standards of today’s right wingers).

But these days the Republican base (and therefore the politicians they elect) is simply not interested in dialog or compromise. They are not even particularly interested in their own self-avowed values. They just want to kick Obama (or any Democrat, for that matter, but particularly the Black-ish Barack Hussein Obama) out of the White House. That’s the beginning and the end of their political wishes. Consequently, they simply want a confrontation, they want to punch the other guy in the stomach, at least metaphorically (well, many of them do show up armed at politically rallies, so who knows). They even relish their own candidates engaging in an unusually high number of unusually bloody debates, because they enjoy the spectacle of kicking an opponent — any opponent — in the teeth.

That is also why Faux News is so popular, and why its abrasive, ultra-partisan approach has rubbed off on other networks and has turned political analyses into shouting matches. Fox isn’t just partisan, it has no sense of coherence whatsoever, as demonstrated over and over by Jon Stewart, whose comedy for a while has often consisted simply of showing a clip of someone saying something on Fox, immediately followed by another clip of the same person arguing exactly the opposite — the only thing in common between the two occasions being that the commentator in question was attacking the Democrats for either X or ~X, depending on the specifics of the moment.

Some are now anticipating with gusto the stark contrast that we might see during the general campaign, when a notoriously introspective and calm Obama might face off with an abrasive and aggressive Gingrich. It will make for good spectacle, but it is really a sorry commentary on just how low the self-professed best democracy in the world has sunk.

There are ways out of this situation, of course, but none of them is a quick fix, or particularly likely to happen. To begin with, we could have some meaningful election financing law passed, so that our politicians aren’t going to be picked from the ranks of millionaires (the entire US Senate and many Representatives) or beholden to billionaires and their corporations. Or perhaps cultural and demographic shifts may finally relegate the moral majority to permanent immoral minority status, as evidenced from nationwide trends on issues ranging from the death penalty to gay rights — all moving in a progressive direction. Or maybe we could finally have a viable third party whose candidates can get on the ballot in all 50 states. Someone is trying for the 2012 cycle, though frankly the idea of a “moderate” party that strikes a middle way between completely crazy (the current GOP) and sold out to Wall Street (the current Dems) isn’t exactly one to get excited about. But hey baby, small steps first...

New Rationally Speaking podcast: neurobabble

2011-12-19T08:37:00.000-05:00

The media is increasingly bombarding us with reports of advances in neuroscience which claim all sorts of amazing feats, like allowing us to read our thoughts and intentions. It sounds like neurobabble. Most of these reports though are either based on bad science, reach false conclusion, or are based on conceptual misunderstanding of how our psychology works. To be fair, much of this is manufactured by the popular media but, unfortunately, some of it comes from the neuroscience community itself. So, what information can we really get from fMRIs? As with the misunderstanding of what genes are (like whether there is a God or a conservative gene), are there really parts of the brain dedicated to categories of thoughts like some of these reports claim? And, perhaps more importantly, what are the ethical implications of this neurobabble, should we arrest people who we can tell, based on this research, will be committing a crime?

An alternative take on ESP

2011-12-17T07:00:00.001-05:00

By Maaneli Derakhshani

3.bp.blogspot.com

[Note: this is a guest post by Maaneli Derakhshani, a graduate student studying theoretical physics at Clemson University, a past volunteer for the Centers for Inquiry in New York and Long Island, a current member of the Secular Student Alliance of Clemson University and the Clemson Philosophical Society, and a former undergraduate student of Massimo’s. We invite readers to apply their critical thinking skills to respond to Maaneli’s challenge. Have fun!]

My purpose in this essay is to address some claims Massimo has made over the years about parapsychology (the scientific discipline that studies claims of extrasensory perception, or ESP, psychokinesis, and survival of consciousness after bodily death), and to show why I think the scientific evidence for ESP (e.g. telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition) is more plentiful than he seems to believe.

On many past occasions, I have heard Massimo publicly claim that ESP has been refuted, such as in a Skeptiko podcast interview last year in which he said “... research on the paranormal has been done for almost a century. We have done plenty of experiments, say on telepathy or clairvoyance or things like that, and we know it doesn’t work.” And in his recent book, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk, Massimo even implies that parapsychology is a pseudoscience on par with astrology.

It would be reasonable to expect, especially from someone as learned as Massimo, that these bold claims about research on telepathy and clairvoyance, and the status of parapsychology as a discipline, were derived from a thorough assessment of the parapsychology literature (a literature which includes informed skeptical criticisms of parapsychology experiments). However, in my assessment of the parapsychology literature, I have been unable to find an evidenced basis for Massimo’s claims. Not only that, my study of the literature has turned up evidence that strongly supports a conclusion contrary to Massimo’s. Here’s why.

In parapsychology, the three research paradigms considered to provide some of the best evidence for ESP are (a) the Maimonides and subsequent dream telepathy/clairvoyance/precognition experiments, (b) the SRI, SAIC, and PEAR remote viewing experiments, and (c) the Ganzfeld experiments. Here I’ll limit myself to discussing (c) only, and refer the interested reader to this recent anthology which overviews the evidence from (a) and (b).

Within parapsychology, the Ganzfeld experiments have probably been the most widely used to test for the possibility of telepathy, clairvoyance, and to some extent precognition. For the unfamiliar reader, a concise account of the Ganzfeld procedure can be read here. The main point I want to make about the Ganzfeld experiments is that, since 1985, there have been 8 independent, published meta-analyses of Ganzfeld experiments; and with the exception of the 1999 meta-analysis by Julie Milton and Richard Wiseman, which was shown by statistician Jessica Utts and acknowledged by Wiseman (personal correspondence, July 2011) to have used a flawed estimate of the overall effect size and p-value of the combined results, all of them have shown statistically highly significant effects with a replication rate well above what’s expected by chance. The literature also shows rather convincingly, in my view, that the leading Ganzfeld critic, Ray Hyman, has been unable to account for these highly significant effects by prosaic means like publication bias, optional stopping, inadequate randomization of targets, sensory leakage, cheating, decline effect, etc. On this last point, I recommend reading Bem and Honorton’s 1994 paper, Bem’s reply to Hyman in 1994, and Storm and co.’s reply to Hyman in 2010.

As an example of the strength of the statistical evidence, let’s look at the most recent Ganzfeld meta-analysis by parapsychologist Patrizio Tressoldi, who applies a frequentist and Bayesian statistical analysis to 108 Ganzfeld experiments from 1974–2008. All these experiments were screened for adequate methodological quality and have an overall hit rate of 31.5% in 4,196 trials, instead of the 25% hit rate expected by chance. Moreover, using the conservative file-drawer estimate of Darlington/Hayes, the lower bound on the number of unreported experiments needed to nullify this overall hit rate is 357, which is considered implausible by Darlington/Hayes’ criterion.

For the frequentist analysis, Tressoldi applied two standard meta-analytic models, namely, a ‘fixed-effects’ model (which assumes a constant true effect size across all experiments) and a ‘random-effects’ model (which assumes a variable true effect size across all experiments). Whereas a standard deviation from the mean of only ~1.6 is needed for the results of a meta-analysis to achieve statistical significance, the fixed-effects model yields an overall effect that’s significant by more than 19 standard deviations from the mean effect of zero, while the random-effects model yields an overall effect more than 6 standard deviations from the mean. The corresponding odds against chance for the fixed-effects model is off the charts, and for the more conservative random-effects model is greater than a billion to 1.

For the Bayesian analysis (which I know Massimo believes is more reliable and valid than the classical approach), Tressoldi follows Rouder and co. in considering two hypotheses. The first is the null hypothesis that the true effect size is zero for all experiments, and the second is the ESP hypothesis that the true effect size is constant and positive across all experiments. He then finds that the ratio of the prior probability of the ESP hypothesis to the prior probability of the null hypothesis, each conditioned on the combined Ganzfeld data, yields a ‘Bayes factor’ of 18,886,051 (or the number of times the latter probability divides into the former probability). So, for a skeptical person who gives prior odds of, say, 1,000,000:1 against ESP, they should update their beliefs by a factor of 18,886,051 in favor of ESP. In other words, if we divide 1,000,000:1 by 18,886,051 we obtain posterior odds of about 0.053:1, or equivalently, 19:1 in favor of ESP. Interestingly, according to Utts, Ray Hyman told her personally that he would put prior odds of about 1,000:1 against ESP being real. For the Ganzfeld Bayes factor calculated by Tressoldi, this would mean that Hyman’s posterior odds should be 18,868:1 in favor of ESP.

And Tressoldi’s Bayesian analysis is not the only one. In the Ganzfeld meta-analysis by Utts and co., a Bayesian approach is also used. Their approach differs from Tressoldi’s in that they assume the true ESP effect size to be variable across experiments, which is the more common assumption in Bayesian statistics. They consider three priors labeled “psi-skeptic,” “open-minded,” and “psi-believer,” each corresponding to a guess about the most likely median Ganzfeld hit-rate. Then they examine the extent to which the combined empirical results of 56 procedurally standard Ganzfeld experiments shift each prior median hit rate to posterior median hit rates above chance. What they find is that the shift depends strongly on how wide one’s subjectively decided uncertainty is around each prior median.

In sum, I don’t see how to escape the conclusion that a classical statistical analysis of the Ganzfeld data gives strong evidence for ESP, judging by the standards of evidence commonly accepted by the social and behavioral sciences. And using Bayesian analysis, we’ve seen that one approach shows overwhelmingly strong evidence for ESP, while another shows that the strength of the evidence depends strongly on the uncertainty of one’s prior belief about the possibility of ESP.

Given this evidence from the Ganzfeld alone, it is difficult for me to see on what basis Massimo claims that “... we have done plenty of experiments, say on telepathy or clairvoyance or things like that, and we know it doesn’t work.” And to the best of my knowledge, he has never tried to justify his assertion.
Correspondingly, I don’t see an evidenced basis for Massimo’s characterization of parapsychology as ‘pseudoscience.’ In Nonsense, Massimo says, “lack of progress, i.e., lack of cumulative results over time, is one of the distinctive features of pseudoscience.” But with the example of the Ganzfeld, it seems indisputable to me that there are cumulative results in parapsychology, and that those results provide evidential support for the ESP hypothesis.

Finally, it is noteworthy that the prominent CSI Fellow, psychologist, and self-described parapsychologist, Richard Wiseman, has previously stated that "I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven, but begs the question: do we need higher standards of evidence when we study the paranormal? I think we do.”

Wiseman later clarified his comment: “That’s a slight misquote because I was using the term in more of a general sense of ESP. That is, I was not talking about remote viewing per se, but rather Ganzfeld, etc. as well. I think that they do meet the usual standards for a normal claim but are not convincing enough for an extraordinary claim.”

Even granting Wiseman’s insistence on higher standards of evidence for extraordinary claims, I wonder what Massimo thinks of Wiseman’s assertion that the scientific evidence for ESP is decisively in favor of it by the standards of “normal” scientific claims. Surely Massimo would agree that if Wiseman’s assertion is true, then this is characteristic not of pseudoscience but of science.

Michael’s Picks

2011-12-16T07:00:00.000-05:00

by Michael De Dora

* A record 64 percent of Americans consider the honesty and ethical standards of members of Congress “low” or “very low,” according to a new survey from Gallup.

* William Saletan, journalist and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War, recently participated in a public dialogue with Ann Furedi, the chief executive of British Pregnancy Advisory Service, on the role of fetal development in the abortion debate. You can read Furedi’s remarks here, and Saletan’s follow-up essay here. Or you can watch video of the event here.

* While it might seem like common sense to most people that fertilized eggs are not persons, such thinking has important implications for the logic of the abortion debate, according to philosopher Gary Gutting.

* What drives your moral thinking? Surely you’ve thought this over, and perhaps even wrote or spoken about it. But now Robert Aunger has come up with an extensive survey that he claims accurately measures what makes you moral.

* Jim Schutze in the Dallas Observer defends legislating morality with an example I would have never thought of: laws that require dog owners to pick up after their dogs. Take a look.

* “Do we want our professional football players to be single-minded destroyers ... or do we want a little humanity to mask the stench of our weekly bloodlettings?” Stefan Fatsis discusses on Slate.

* A new study shows that laws legalizing medical marijuana have resulted in a nearly nine percent drop in traffic deaths and a five percent reduction in beer sales. Brian Palmer talks about the study’s implications.

The entanglement between biology and ideology

2011-12-14T11:22:00.000-05:00

by Massimo Pigliucci

[Note: this is an extract from a forthcoming review of Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins, ed. by D.R. Alexander and R.L. Numbers. University of Chicago Press, 2010. The full article will be published in Science & Education.]

Science has always strived for objectivity, for a “view from nowhere” that is not marred by ideology or personal preferences. That is a lofty ideal toward which perhaps it makes sense to strive, but it is hardly the reality. This collection of thirteen essays assembled by Denis R. Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers ought to give much pause to scientists and the public at large, though historians, sociologists and philosophers of science will hardly be surprised by the material covered here.

As a matter of historical record, the sciences have always been involved in ideological disputes, sometimes battling against anti-scientific ideologies (as with today’s creationism) or being used for nefarious ideological purposes themselves (as with the infamous episode of eugenics in early 20th century America). Peter Harrison, in his essay on the cultural authority of natural history in early modern Europe, makes the point very clearly that advocates of the emerging sciences defended their novel, anti-Aristotelian approach in part on the basis that it was more conducive to a traditional humanistic education. For instance, insect metamorphosis was interpreted as analogical to the Christian belief of a resurrection of the body after death. And the ideological entanglement wasn’t only with religion, but extended to politics as well. As Harrison points out, Milton declared that the organization of ant colonies was a naturalistic sanction of parliamentary democracy! Of course, that game can be played by both sides, so it is not surprising that later in the same century the Whig John Edwards — who supported the monarchy of William and Mary — used bee colonies as indicative of the goodness of female monarchy (it is not clear where one could find William’s alter ego among bees, but never mind the details).

Eugenics is, of course, the historian and philosopher of science’s favorite whipping boy when it comes to warning about the perils of entanglement between science and ideology. It is therefore no surprise to see here a contribution by Edward Larson on biology and the emergence of the Anglo-American eugenics movement. What is surprising is to be reminded of both the damage perpetrated and the high level of endorsements gathered by the eugenic movement in the UK and the United States.

I wonder how many contemporary biologists realize, for instance, that the 1933 Nazi Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Progeny was modeled on a eugenic law that forced sterilization of the feeble minded passed in California. Or that eugenic statutes remained on the book in the United States until the 1960s, by which time more than 63,000 Americans had been forcibly sterilized. And the list of prominent biologists endorsing and sometimes vociferously defending eugenics reads like a who’s who of early 20th century biology. It includes August Weismann, Karl Pearson, William Bateson, Hugo de Vries, Thomas Hunt Morgan, Ronald Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane, and Sewall Wright, among others. It that doesn’t shake your confidence in scientists’ ideological neutrality I don’t know what will. Of course, politicians promptly followed suite, with Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Calvin Coolidge all endorsing eugenic measures.

Michael Ruse, whose writings seem to appear in every noteworthy collection of philosophical essays, contributed a provocative entry on evolution and the idea of social progress. These days it is highly unfashionable among evolutionary biologists to talk about progress, except in the factually obvious sense that the biosphere has become more complicated through time (which Stephen Gould famously attributed to a simple “left wall” effect: if you start simple, the only way you can possible go is toward complex). But it wasn’t like that until relatively recently.

As is well known, evolutionary ideas were the buzz well before Charles Darwin — from Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia (1794–1796) to the anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844, actually written by Scottish journalist Robert Chambers). What is less well known is that pre-Darwinian evolutionists were considered a bunch of cranks and their ideas pseudoscientific. (Ruse notices that the concept of pseudoscience within this context is not an anachronism: it was used by physiologist Francois Magendie in 1843, and anti-pseudoscience investigation goes back at least to 1784, when King Louis XVI of France convened a special team that included Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier to investigate — and debunk — the then popular “mesmerism.”)

It is hard to think of evolution as a pseudoscientific concept, but as Ruse aptly puts it: “Given [the] sense of opprobrium felt toward evolutionary thinking, the best term to use to refer to such thinking before Darwin is ‘pseudo-science.’ This captures both the odor of fanaticism about the supporters and about the critics, and the stench of non-respectability, relished by supporters and hated by critics.”

After Darwin (and Wallace) cleared things up and made evolution a respectable scientific concept, the situation became interesting again during the early 20th century, when a number of biologists were working to come up with what is now known as the Modern Synthesis, the standard model of evolutionary biology. A strange thing happened, following Ruse’s reconstruction of the thinking and writing of the architects of the Synthesis. On the one hand, pretty much all of them were ardent believers in the idea of progress: Fisher thought that God had created organisms progressively through natural selection (a line of thinking that led him to support the eugenic movement, to avoid the decline of the human race); Dobzhansky was an enthusiastic supporter of the idea of progress (again informed by his religious beliefs); and Ruse describes Simpson as “fanatic” about both biological and cultural progress. On the other hand, none of this shows up in any of these people’s technical writings: it’s all confined to their essays for the general public. Moreover, the only architect of the Synthesis that did incorporate the notion of progress in his technical book, Julian Huxley, was shunned, harshly criticized, and penalized in terms of his scientific career (grants denied, negation of the editorship of a new journal on evolution). What was going on?

As Ruse provocatively puts it: “They had all taken in the message that successful science, mature science, epistemic science, professional science, is culture-value free,” which means that they couldn’t risk injecting what they must at some level have perceived as ideology — their belief in progress — into their science, at least not in front of their peers. But it was okay to wax poetic about progress with the general public, thereby indirectly giving the impression that progress and evolutionary biology went hand in hand. It sounds a lot like the increasingly annoying tendency of some contemporary physicists to write about the compatibility of science and religion, and sometimes even more or less explicitly endorse some version of intelligent design (usually in the guise of the anthropic principle) — in their non-technical writings only, of course. As a bonus, contemporary scientists can have a shot at the hefty Templeton Prize, which was not established when Dobzhansky, Simpson and Fisher were writing.

The message of the Alexander-Numbers book should be loud and clear: science has always been, and very likely always will be, entangled with ideology. This is because science, as Helen Longino put it in her Science as Social Knowledge, science is an irreducibly social activity, and as such it reflects the many, not always positive, ways in which people interact. Science of course is also a pursuit of knowledge, and knowledge is power, according to Francis Bacon, and therefore not too far removed from politics and ideology. Actually, that famous Baconian phrase happens to fit very well with this discussion, as the original sentence, in Latin, was “scientia potestas est” (found in the Meditations, 1597). Problem is, Bacon wrote that within the context of a discussion of heresies denying the power of God, so that some commentators actually think that it should be translated as “knowledge is His power.” Science and religion, deeply entangled right in the writings of the man who is credited for having laid out the basis of the modern scientific method by rejecting the Aristotelian approach.

You don’t really exist, do you?

2011-12-10T07:00:00.000-05:00

by Massimo Pigliucci

www.universaltheory.org

For some time I have been noticing the emergence of a strange trinity of beliefs among my fellow skeptics and freethinkers: an increasing number of them, it seems, don’t believe that they can make decisions (the free will debate), don’t believe that they have moral responsibility (because they don’t have free will, or because morality is relative — take your pick), and they don’t even believe that they exist as conscious beings because, you know, consciousness is an illusion.

As I have argued recently, there are sensible ways to understand human volition (a much less metaphysically loaded and more sensible term than free will) within a lawful universe (Sean Carroll agrees and, interestingly, so does my sometime opponent Eliezer Yudkowsky). I also devoted an entire series on this blog to a better understanding of what morality is, how it works, and why it ain’t relative (within the domain of social beings capable of self-reflection). Let’s talk about consciousness then.

The oft-heard claim that consciousness is an illusion is an extraordinary one, as it relegates to an entirely epiphenomenal status what is arguably the most distinctive characteristic of human beings, the very thing that seems to shape and give meaning to our lives, and presumably one of the major outcome of millions of years of evolution pushing for a larger brain equipped with powerful frontal lobes capable to carry out reasoning and deliberation.

Still, if science tells us that consciousness is an illusion, we must bow to that pronouncement and move on (though we apparently cannot escape the illusion, partly because we have no free will). But what is the extraordinary evidence for this extraordinary claim? To begin with, there are studies of (very few) “split brain” patients which seem to indicate that the two hemispheres of the brain — once separated — display independent consciousness (under experimental circumstances), to the point that they may even try to make the left and right sides of the body act antagonistically to each other.

But there are a couple of obvious issues here that block an easy jump from observations on those patients to grand conclusions about the illusoriness of consciousness. First off, the two hemispheres are still conscious, so at best we have evidence that consciousness is divisible, not that it is an illusion (and that subdivision presumably can proceed no further than n=2). Second, these are highly pathological situations, and though they certainly tell us something interesting about the functioning of the brain, they are informative mostly about what happens when the brain does not function. As a crude analogy, imagine sawing a car in two, noticing that the front wheels now spin independently of the rear wheels, and concluding that the synchronous rotation of the wheels in the intact car is an “illusion.” Not a good inference, is it?

Let’s pursue this illusion thing a bit further. Sometimes people also argue that physics tells us that the way we perceive the world is also an illusion. After all, apparently solid objects like tables are made of quarks and the forces that bind them together, and since that’s the fundamental level of reality (well, unless you accept string theory) then clearly our senses are mistaken.

But our senses are not mistaken at all, they simply function at the (biologically) appropriate level of perception of reality. We are macroscopic objects and need to navigate the world as such. It would be highly inconvenient if we could somehow perceive quantum level phenomena directly, and in a very strong sense the solidity of a table is not an illusion at all. It is rather an emergent property of matter that our evolved senses exploit to allow us to sit down and have a nice meal at that table without worrying about the zillions of subnuclear interactions going on about it all the time.

What about the neurobiological research that seems to show quite conclusively that consciousness is just a post-facto add-on to our decision making? Don’t we know that “we” don’t actually make our decisions, that it’s all going on subconsciously?

To begin with, I find it bizarre to talk as if unconscious thinking isn’t part of what “we” do. Who else is doing it? “We” are made of our conscious and unconscious processing of information, of our bodies, and of our interactions with the social and physical world. That’s who “we” are, and to limit the definition of “we” to just the conscious part is misguided.

Moreover, a closer look at the evidence does not bear out the increasingly persistent myth that “it’s all unconscious anyway.” Here very interesting work has been done by Alfred Mele at Florida State University. In his Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will, Mele critically examines claims to the effect that, for instance, our brains make decisions before we become conscious of them, or that intentions don’t play a role in producing actions. He finds the evidence for such extraordinary claims extraordinarily deficient and — to the contrary — lines up evidence from neurobiology for the conclusion that consciousness plays a major role in (some, most certainly not all) of our decisions, particularly when it comes to the sort of decisions we normally do attribute to conscious deliberation (like whether to change career, say, not just when to push a button on a computer screen, a la Libet experiments).

One more thing strikes me as strange from the point of view of the “consciousness is an illusion” school of thought. Its supporters have no account of why this illusion would evolve. If we take seriously the commonsensical idea that consciousness aids deliberative reasoning, then we see that it has a (important) biological function. But if it is just an illusion, what’s it for? Now, as a biologist I am perfectly aware that sometimes in evolution shit just happens (“spandrels,” as Stephen Gould and Richard Lewontin referred to structures that seem adaptive but are in fact byproducts of evolution). But if a large amount of metabolic energy used up by the brain goes into maintaining the illusion of consciousness surely one wants an answer to the question of why did natural selection bring this situation about or — if consciousness is a spandrel — why does it persist in the face of what should be strong selection against it. We know that when organisms don’t need complex structures/functions natural selection quickly eliminates them (for instance, in the case of eyes for cave animals).

It won’t do to claim that the illusion of consciousness is there because that way we feel in control and suffer less psychological stress. First, this is clearly an ad hoc and hard to test hypothesis (the evolutionary part of it, not the psychological: we do know that people become stressed by perceived lack of control). Second, the problem is only removed by one step: why would we evolve a psychological system that causes stress when we perceive a loss of control? Most other animal species seem to get along in life just well without these psychological mechanisms, so clearly something is missing from the “illusion” account.

Seems to me, therefore, that the increasingly fashionable idea that consciousness is an illusion is both too quick and not actually supported by a careful reading of the neurobiological literature, and skeptics and freethinkers would do well to pause and reflect on it before continuing to spread it. Of course that assumes that you can reflect on things in a way that is conducive to decisions implementing what your conscious will wants to do.

Academic posturing behind the scenes

2011-12-08T07:00:00.001-05:00

by Massimo Pigliucci

mexiconuevo.files.wordpress.com

As I mentioned earlier, Maarten Boudry and I are in the process of putting together an edited book on the philosophy of pseudoscience for Chicago Press. We invited a number of philosophers, skeptics, historians, and sociologists of science to contribute to the volume, the first comprehensive re-analysis of what Popper famously dubbed the “demarcation problem” (what distinguishes science from pseudoscience) in a number of years.

It has been much fun, and we have learned a lot from a number of colleagues who submitted chapters for the book. Except that we also got embroiled in a several months long controversy of which you will never hear, because it will not make it into the light of academic publishing. I’m going to tell you about it anyway, because it is an instructive “behind the scenes” look at what, sometimes, goes on in the academy.

A couple of disclaimers first. Naturally, this is my version of the story, and I recognize that I am biased in this regard. Nevertheless, this is my blog, so that’s the version you get. Moreover, I will not disclose the names of the two colleagues involved in the controversy, and I will make as few references as possible to the specifics, because I am not interested in smearing individuals but rather in having a discussion about the internal workings of academic scholarship. I will refer to the two colleagues in question as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, just so that we can keep their different actions and reactions straight in our minds in the course of the narrative.

The story begins when Maarten and I got the first draft of both Tweedledum’s and Tweedledee’s chapters. Upon reading them, the reviewers thought Tweedledum’s was marginally acceptable, while Tweedledee’s was highly problematic. The problem arose from the fact that Tweedledee’s entire argument reduced to the idea that it is not at all clear why “serious” parapsychological research doesn’t get nearly as much respect in the scientific community as “clearly” questionable speculations on, say, string theory.

We (and the reviewers) couldn’t believe our eyes. What serious research on parapsychology? Yes, from time to time a psychologist or other holder of a PhD publishes a paper claiming marginally statistically significant results purporting to demonstrate telepathy, clairvoyance and the like. But typically, said papers are quickly debunked on the grounds of sloppy experimental design, bad statistical analyses, and sometimes simple fraud. String theory, on the other hand, as empirically directly untested as it remains, is a sophisticated mathematical theory built on more than a century of previous successful theories (quantum mechanics and general relativity in particular), not to mention numerous highly replicable experimental results.

At any rate, we wrote to Tweedledum notifying him of the acceptance of his paper and — separately — to Tweedledee saying that we were sorry but we couldn’t accept his contribution. We included in the letter the detailed comments of two reviewers, in case he decided to take their criticisms into consideration and submit a modified paper for publication somewhere else. Notice that this is, of course, standard procedure: just because one gets invited to contribute to a book or special issue of a scholarly journal there is no implicit guarantee that one’s work will be accepted. Peer review is still needed, or the academy would become a chummy club where everyone publishes his own friends’ papers.

Imagine therefore Maarten’s and my surprise when we get a response from Tweedledum (not Tweedledee) saying that he would withdraw his (accepted) chapter unless we reconsidered our decision not to publish Tweedledee’s contribution. Moreover, Tweedledum also proposed that he and Tweedledee get to decide to whom to send their papers for review, and that they be allowed to write a special introductory section of the book to explain the difference between their “approach” and everyone else’s.

Nonsense, we responded. This amounts to blackmail and to an attempt to wrestle editorial control for a section of the book. Unacceptable. But the dialog continued, mediated by our patient and highly professional editor at the Press. After several weeks, we agreed to consider a revised version of Tweedledee’s paper in which he would do his best to respond to the reviewers’ comments. (Remember, Tweedledum’s chapter had been accepted.)

That was far from the end of it. We got the new version of Tweedledee’s paper (which was barely improved, but still, the guy made an effort) and what should have been only a slightly edited version of Tweedledum’s contribution. Instead, we discovered that Tweedledum’s chapter now featured a lengthy “appendix” which basically functioned as the editorial introduction which had already been rejected, and which included direct attacks on one of the editors’ (me) point of view. What the hell?

The next step was for us to accept Tweedledee’s resubmission (as I said, the guy tried, and it would have been good to include significantly divergent perspectives in the volume), and tell Tweedledum that his originally paper was accepted, sans the appendix.

At which point Tweedledum decided to withdraw his chapter (which, remember, had been accepted from the beginning!) because he just couldn’t live without the polemical appendix. Throughout, he continued to copy Tweedledee on all the correspondence, even though Maarten and I kept trying to treat them as separate individuals, rather than as academic siamese twins.

This left Tweedledee in the very uncomfortable position of having his (initially rejected) paper accepted because of Tweedledum’s interceding, at the same time that Tweedledum had withdrawn from the project! What to do? Naturally, after more than one agonizing week of pondering the dilemma, Tweedledee also withdrew, thus bringing the whole indecorous affair to completion.

I don’t know how often this sort of thing happens in academia. I have enough experience as both a professional scientist and philosopher to have witnessed or heard of many bizarre occurrences, and I am sensitive enough to sociology and psychology of science to know perfectly well that academics are human beings characterized by all the foibles of ordinary human beings. Still, it was highly disturbing to see the whole thing unfold before my very eyes and clearly see it spinning out of control despite what I thought were our best efforts. (I must acknowledge that the tone of some of my emails to Tweedledum and Tweedledee became far from friendly, but the facts are as I reported them above.)

Helen Longino famously wrote that science works in part because it is a social activity where people are free (and, indeed, encouraged) to criticize each other’s works. This is true for scholarship in general, including in philosophy, sociology, history and the like. Criticism includes the idea that papers may be rejected if reviewers or editors don’t think they pass the bar. Reviewers and editors can be wrong, which is why it is good to have many outlets for academic publishing. But when one begins to throw one’s weight around to force things through, we have a breakdown of the basic academic social contract, and the whole affair begins to look a lot more like politics and ideology than an open and frank exchange of ideas. It is only because of the professionalism of our editor at Chicago Press, and because I’m not a young untenured professor, that things went the way they did. The bottom line: reader beware, caveat emptor!

Why skeptics should embrace political advocacy — and how they can do it

2011-12-06T14:00:00.001-05:00

by Michael De Dora

general-history.com

In my nearly three years working in the skeptic community, I have learned many important things. I’ve been taught how science works, and how to spot pseudoscience. I’ve discovered how we fool ourselves into believing we’ve seen ghosts, aliens, and other scary monsters that likely don’t exist. And I’ve found out how psychics, mediums and others prey upon other humans for monetary gain. I’ve also realized that skeptics, like most human beings, love their community. Conferences, pub meetings, blogs, and podcasts: these represent comfortable places where most members are relatively sane and rational, and inquiry into almost any subject is welcomed.

Yet, often ignored or forgotten in the fray of social discussion on science denialism and hucksterism, and community building, is that skepticism also deserves a voice in public policy debates. Secularists have recognized this, and founded organizations like Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, and the Secular Coalition in order to pair with more socially focused groups. So far, skeptics have not.

In my view, skepticism, like secular thinking, should not be limited to the social. It should also be engaged in the political. This essay will attempt to outline why I believe this, and propose both issues and methods that would help skeptics get more involved in the political process.

There are several reasons why many skeptics are not as engaged in political advocacy as much as I think they ought to be. Here are three of the most common:

1. Politics concerns values, which are not amenable to empirical inquiry or rational discussion.

2. Politics demands political party affiliation.

3. Politics is irrational and messy. The system is broken.

As a result of these objections — and, to be sure, skimpy funding — there are few dedicated skeptical lobby groups, or skeptic organizations that lobby on traditionally skeptic issues.
And, without an organized skeptical-political movement, there are few skeptics who get involved in the political process.

I think the three objections above are mistaken, and that they have negative consequences. Here are my brief rebuttals:

1. Skepticism might mostly be about applying science to problems concerning, say, pseudoscience and health, but science itself does rely upon values. These values include, at the least: methodological naturalism, evidence and testability, and logical coherence.

Furthermore, while values might not be amenable to empirical study, they are and should be subject to another thing skeptics value: rational examination. This is not to say reason is all-powerful. But reason can help us evaluate our values and help us assess whether we have properly thought them out. It is also not to say that skepticism should critically examine all values. Rather, my point is that skeptics should not avoid debates just because in some way they include talk of values.

2. Admittedly, much of politics is battles between political parties and factions, such as Republicans, Democrats, Greens, and independents. Yet one need not fit into, or adopt, any of the aforementioned parties to be engaged in the political process.

Indeed, I believe skepticism is by definition non-partisan, and therefore it is unnecessary to consider which political party to lean toward. This is because skepticism is a method, not a position. As such, I think skeptics will be most successful politically if they can manage to focus on applying the method to specific political problems within the domain of skepticism, several of which I will propose below.

3. Politics is certainly often irrational and messy, but it is not necessarily irrational and messy. There are always chances to inject a sliver of rationality into an irrational system. The question is whether you think this is worthwhile.

Moreover, while our political system might appear to be broken, one of the few ways to actually effect change — and perhaps even fix the system — is to work within it. I value conversations on how to make change outside of the current system, or to create a better one. But while having that conversation, we should realize change is being made within the current system. We can either let it happen without resistance, or we can put our chips on the table and work to defend our worldview.

Two questions now remain: which political issues should skeptics concern themselves with? And how should they get involved?

A couple of issues immediately come to mind: evolution in public schools and climate change. Leaving these important but well-worn issues aside for a moment, I propose there are at least three other topics that skeptics could readily concern themselves with:

-- Defunding and/or dismantling the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). Since 1992, NCCAM (previously the Office of Alternative Medicine) has been awarded $2 billion for research, and currently has an annual budget of $134 million. Yet nearly twenty years of study have shown that most alternative medicine “cures” work no better than placebos. As David Gorski writes on Science-Based Medicine, NCCAM should be defunded or abolished, and any valuable parts should be folded into the National Institutes for Health (NIH).

-- Health coverage for alternative medicine practices that have been proven ineffective. Again, most well-known alternative medicine practices have been shown to be unsuccessful as medical cures. Yet lawmakers continue to push for their coverage under health care plans. From Derek Araujo last year:

“Congressional allies of the so-called ‘complementary and alternative medicine’ industry successfully introduced language in health care reform legislation requiring insurers to cover any state-licensed health care providers — including, of course, complementary and alternative medicine practitioners. Language prohibiting ‘discrimination’ against any state-licensed practitioners survived in the Affordable Care Act President Obama signed into law on March 23, 2010.”

-- Government-mandated vaccines and religious exemptions.
In all 50 U.S. states, children are required to be properly immunized before attending school. However, in addition to medical exemptions offered in each state, 48 states allow for religious exemptions, while 20 states allow for personal belief exemptions for daycare and school (source). Unfortunately, this has recently become a more popular trend, leading to greater danger of a serious outbreaks.

These three issues all: stem from historically skeptical subjects; concern some talk of values, but mostly are about science; do not demand party affiliation; and might actually be winnable.

How can skeptics go about getting involved in these issues?

The first step is to merely pay attention and get informed. Take a second and click over to any number of web sites and blogs that carry position papers, reports, and news analysis. Some suggestions: the Center for Inquiry’s (CFI) Office of Public Policy, National Center for Science Education (NCSE), the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the National Council Against Health Fraud, Science-Based Medicine, QuackWatch, and even SkepChick.

The second, and perhaps more important step, is to actually make your voice heard. Even without dedicated skeptic lobby organizations, armed with information, you can and should write and call your lawmakers. Sign up to receive action alerts from organizations such as CFI-OPP, NCSE, and USC, and you’ll soon start receiving emails that will allow you to easily message your representatives on issues relating to science and skepticism. It takes only a couple of minutes for you to fill out an action alert and send it along to a lawmaker, who is — contra to what many think — almost certainly paying attention (perhaps not to the unique content in each message, but certainly to the number of messages they receive). Or, if you feel so compelled, write a letter to your representative (though be aware that due to restrictive security measures, there’s a good chance your letter will be delayed several months, or might never even reach its intended audience). Or pick up a phone and let your representative know you care about a certain issue and are paying attention to his or her actions.

More broadly, attend local hearings and public forums and voice your opinion. Share action alerts and other links to Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and whatever other social networks you use. Write letters to the editor. Comment on blog posts and online news articles. Do whatever you can to spread the message.

You might think that all of this is relatively inconsequential, but that is not true. Politicians essentially care about two things: money and votes. We might not have the money, but we do represent votes. The more that elected officials hear from us — whether by action alert, letter, phone call, or other means — the more they will have to consider our points of view. And the more that others see that you are engaged, the more likely they will be to get involved and engaged as well. Which means that politicians might have to consider our viewpoints sooner than they thought.

Perhaps more importantly, writing a letter, placing a phone call, sharing a link, or penning a letter to the editor takes very little of your time, and there is no guarantee your fellow skeptics will take up the cause. If you don’t do it, no one else might do it either. And that would be a shame, because a moment of your time could make a difference.

——

Note: this essay is adapted from a talk I gave at SkeptiCamp NYC on Saturday, Dec. 3. I will let you know if video surfaces.

Further note: I think the word “skeptic” could be replaced with many other labels. We could all probably be more engaged in the political process anyway. But this talk was tailored specifically for SkeptiCamp, so there you have it.

New podcast episode: Genie Scott on denialism of climate change and evolution

2011-12-05T07:00:00.000-05:00

Our guest Eugenie C. Scott joins us to talk about a new initiative of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) to tackle denialism of global warming. Both evolution and global warming are “controversial issues” in the public sphere, but are not controversial in the world of science. There is some overlap between the two issues, but far more people are climate change deniers than evolution deniers. What is interesting to skeptics, however, is the similarity in the techniques that are used by both camps to promote their views. The scientific issues are presented as “not being settled,” or that there is considerable debate among scientists over the validity of claims.

Evolution and global warming opponents also demonize the opposition by accusing them of fraud or other wrong-doing. Denialists in both camps practice “anomaly mongering,” in which a small detail seemingly incompatible with either evolution or global warming is considered to undermine either evolution or climate science. Although in both cases, reputable, established science is under attack for ideological reasons, the underlying ideology differs: for creationism, the ideology of course is religious; for global warming, the ideology is political and/or economic.

Dr. Eugenie C. Scott is Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, and sits on the Board of Advisors for the New York City Skeptics. She has written extensively on the evolution-creationism controversy and is past president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Scott is the 2010 recipient of the National Academy of Science's Public Welfare Medal. She is the author of "Evolution vs Creationism" and co-editor, with Glenn Branch, of "Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools."

A handy dandy guide for the skeptic of determinism

2011-12-03T07:00:00.001-05:00

by Massimo Pigliucci

www.desktopclass.com

Lately I hear the word “determinism” being thrown around like a trump card for all sorts of arguments, most obviously the recent discussions of free will that we have had on this blog. Moreover, as I already mentioned in passing, I am reading a new book by Alex Rosenberg that feels a lot like Dawkins on steroids (if you can imagine that), a huge portion of which is based on the assumption — which the author thinks he can derive from established and certainly unchangeable physics — of, you guessed it, determinism!

I got so sick of the smug attitudes that Rosenberg, Coyne, Harris and others derive from their acceptance of determinism — obviously without having looked much into the issue — that I delved into the topic a bit more in depth myself. As a result, I’ve become agnostic about determinism, and I highly recommend the same position to anyone seriously interested in these topics (as opposed to anyone using his bad understanding of physics and philosophy to score rhetorical points).

A good starting point from which to get a grip on the nuances and complexities of discussions concerning determinism is a very nicely written article by Carl Hoefer in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, as well as several of the primary sources cited there, particularly John Earman's Primer on Determinism.

So, here are some of the somewhat surprising things you’ll learn from Hoefer’s article that you may want to raise the next time “determinism!” is hurled at you in the midst of a philosophical discussion:

* The philosophical roots of the notion of determinism are to be found in Leibniz’s (now largely discredited) principle of sufficient reason, though modern discussions of it can be recast avoiding Leibniz.

* Predictability is an issue entirely separate from determinism, since we can have deterministic (chaotic) systems that are for all effective purposes unpredictable, and (possibly, more on this in a moment) stochastic (quantum) systems that are nonetheless predictable to a very high degree of accuracy.

* As John Earman said (in the above mentioned book), when people talk about causal determinism they often “seek to explain a vague concept — determinism — in terms of a truly obscure one — causation.” And good luck with both. (See Bertrand Russell’s well known critique of the notion of causation, published in 1912: Russell, B., “On the Notion of Cause,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 13: 1–26.)

* Believers in determinism frequently cite the notion of laws of nature as if it were uncontroversial, but this is far from being the case. Talk of nature’s laws is metaphorical, and many philosophers simply take “laws of nature” to be our best assessment of regularities in the history of the universe, regularities that for all we know could be contingent, or have a limited domain of application. There are also philosophers who think that laws of nature are, as Hoefer puts it, ontologically derivative, with actual physical events playing the role of brute facts that make laws (as opposed to the other way around). Moreover, some philosophers (Nancy Cartwright and Bas van Fraassen, for instance) hold to the position that laws of nature simply do not exist. I am agnostic on this point, but again the issue is far from settled, and if you believe in laws of nature you do need to come up with an account of their ontology (and if you are not a theist, obviously you can’t avail yourself of a law giver).

* Because of chaos, it may very well be impossible on empirical grounds to establish whether the universe is deterministic or not, which would clearly take the debate out of science altogether, pace Rosenberg. Hoefer cites a 1993 paper by Suppes which concludes: “There are processes which can equally well be analyzed as deterministic systems of classical mechanics or as indeterministic semi-Markov processes, no matter how many observations are made ... Deterministic metaphysicians can comfortably hold to their view knowing they cannot be empirically refuted, but so can indeterministic ones as well.” Oops.

* Contra popular misconceptions, current theories of physics do not settle the question of determinism at all. As it turns out, even classical mechanics is compatible with indeterminism, in a variety of technical ways explained by Hoefer and the references he cites. Special relativity is most friendly to determinism, but we know it’s incomplete. General relativity is — on the contrary — very friendly to indeterminism (did you know that? I didn’t. It has to do with the existence of so-called naked singularities). As for quantum mechanics, the well known standard Copenhagen interpretation of it leans toward indeterminism, while the empirically equivalent Bohm interpretation is deterministic. We don’t know which is correct, and in fact we know that both quantum mechanics and general relativity are incorrect (or at the least incomplete).

* Not even future theories of physics are likely to settle the issue. Again, Hoefer: “first, we may have difficulty establishing whether the Final Theory is deterministic or not — depending on whether the theory comes loaded with unsolved interpretational or mathematical puzzles. Second, we may have reason to worry that the Final Theory, if indeterministic, has an empirically equivalent yet deterministic rival.”

* And one final point: particularly when it comes to discussions of free will, we keep hearing that the latter is impossible because in a deterministic universe the past determines the future. But as Hoefer points out (and he has expanded on this in a 2002 paper: Hoefer, C., “Freedom From the Inside Out,” in Time, Reality and Experience, C. Callender (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 201–222), the “laws” of physics treat time as symmetrical, which means that the present and the future “fix” the past just in the same way in which the past “fixes” the present and the future. No particular area of the time axis has priority over the others. Chew on that for a while.

The next time someone confidently says that this or that “surely” follows from the “fact” that science has now established the notion of determinism, go over the above list (or better, Hoefer’s original article) and use it to punch a nice hole in their inflated metaphysical balloon. And please, let me know what happens.

Michael’s Picks

2011-12-02T07:00:00.001-05:00

by Michael De Dora

* Oxford University philosopher Will Crouch is advising ethically concerned young people to consider careers in banking. Here's why.

* Will Obama cave to religious lobbying over new birth control rules? I doubt it, but here’s one way to make sure he doesn’t.

* In a ruling that has far-reaching implications, a federal judge this week rejected a $285 million settlement between Citigroup and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

* Jim Holt pens an in-depth review of Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.

* Is willpower an illusion? Greg Walton and Carol Dweck, writing in the New York Times, explain why they don’t think so.

* Raymond Tallis has an intriguing review of two new books on cognition: Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter, by Terrence Deacon, and Who’s in Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain by Michael S. Gazzaniga.

* Foreign Policy releases its list of the top 100 global thinkers.

* Marcelo Gleiser writes that TV’s Dr. House is “the perfect model of the ultimate empiricist, an illustration of how scientific methods are applied in most labs and departments around the world.”

How rationality can make your life more awesome

2011-11-30T07:00:00.000-05:00

by Julia Galef

www.racingducks.com

Sheer intellectual curiosity was what first drew me to rationality (by which I mean, essentially, the study of how to view the world as accurately as possible). I still enjoy rationality as an end in itself, but it didn’t take me long to realize that it’s also a powerful tool for achieving pretty much anything else you care about. Below, a survey of some of the ways that rationality can make your life more awesome:

Rationality alerts you when you have a false belief that’s making you worse off.

You’ve undoubtedly got beliefs about yourself — about what kind of job would be fulfilling for you, for example, or about what kind of person would be a good match for you. You’ve also got beliefs about the world — say, about what it’s like to be rich, or about “what men want” or “what women want.” And you’ve probably internalized some fundamental maxims, such as: When it’s true love, you’ll know. You should always follow your dreams. Natural things are better. Promiscuity reduces your worth as a person.

Those beliefs shape your decisions about your career, what to do when you’re sick, what kind of people you decide to pursue romantically and how you pursue them, how much effort you should be putting into making yourself richer, or more attractive, or more skilled (and skilled in what?), more accommodating, more aggressive, and so on.

But where did these beliefs come from? The startling truth is that many of our beliefs became lodged in our psyches rather haphazardly. We’ve read them, or heard them, or picked them up from books or TV or movies, or perhaps we generalized from one or two real-life examples.

Rationality trains you to notice your beliefs, many of which you may not even be consciously aware of, and ask yourself: where did those beliefs come from, and do I have good reason to think they’re accurate? How would I know if they’re false? Have I considered any other, alternative hypotheses?

Rationality helps you get the information you need.

Sometimes you need to figure out the answer to a question in order to make an important decision about, say, your health, or your career, or the causes that matter to you. Studying rationality reveals that some ways of investigating those questions are much more likely to yield the truth than others. Just a few examples:

“How should I run my business?” If you’re looking to launch or manage a company, you’ll have a huge leg up over your competition if you’re able to rationally determine how well your product works, or whether it meets a need, or what marketing strategies are effective.

“What career should I go into?” Before committing yourself to a career path, you’ll probably want to learn about the experiences of people working in that field. But a rationalist also knows to ask herself, “Is my sample biased?” If you’re focused on a few famous success stories from the field, that doesn’t tell you very much about what a typical job is like, or what your odds are of making it in that field.

It’s also an unfortunate truth that not every field uses reliable methods, and so not every field produces true or useful work. If that matters to you, you’ll need the tools of rationality to evaluate the fields you’re considering working in. Fields whose methods are controversial include psychotherapy, nutrition science, economics, sociology, consulting, string theory, and alternative medicine.

“How can I help the world?” Many people invest huge amounts of money, time, and effort in causes they care about. But if you want to ensure that your investment makes a difference, you need to be able to evaluate the relevant evidence. How serious of a problem is, say, climate change, or animal welfare, or globalization? How effective is lobbying, or marching, or boycotting? How far do your contributions go at charity X versus charity Y?

Rationality shows you how to evaluate advice.

 Learning about rationality, and how widespread irrationality is, sparks an important realization: you can’t assume other people have good reasons for the things they believe. And that means you need to know how to evaluate other people’s opinions, not just based on how plausible their opinions seem, but based on the reliability of the methods they used to form those opinions.

So when you get business advice, you need to ask yourself: What evidence does she have for that advice, and are her circumstances relevant enough to mine? The same is true when a friend swears by some particular remedy for acne, or migraines, or cancer. Is he repeating a recommendation made by multiple doctors? Or did he try it once and get better? What kind of evidence is reliable?

In many cases, people can’t articulate exactly how they’ve arrived at a particular belief; it’s just the product of various experiences they’ve had and things they’ve heard or read. But once you’ve studied rationality, you’ll recognize the signs of people who are more likely to have accurate beliefs: People who adjust their level of confidence to the evidence for a claim; people who actually change their minds when presented with new evidence; people who seem interested in getting the right answer rather than in defending their own egos.

Rationality saves you from bad decisions.

Knowing about the heuristics your brain uses and how they can go wrong means you can escape some very common, and often very serious, decision-making traps.

For example, people often stick with their original career path or business plan for years after the evidence has made clear that it was a mistake, because they don’t want their previous investment to be wasted. That’s thanks to the sunk cost fallacy. Relatedly, people often allow cognitive dissonance to convince them that things aren’t so bad, because the prospect of changing course is too upsetting.

And in many major life decisions, such as choosing a career, people envision one way things could play out (“I’m going to run my own lab, and live in a big city…”) — but they don’t spend much time thinking about how probable that outcome is, or what the other probable outcomes are. The narrative fallacy is that situations imagined in high detail seem more plausible, regardless of how probable they actually are.

Rationality trains you to step back from your emotions so that they don’t cloud your judgment.

Depression, anxiety, anger, envy, and other unpleasant and self-destructive emotions tend to be fueled by what cognitive therapy calls “cognitive distortions,” irrationalities in your thinking such as jumping to conclusions based on limited evidence; focusing selectively on negatives; all-or-nothing thinking; and blaming yourself, or someone else, without reason.

Rationality breaks your habit of automatically trusting your instinctive, emotional judgments, encouraging you instead to notice the beliefs underlying your emotions and ask yourself whether those beliefs are justified.

It also trains you to notice when your beliefs about the world are being colored by what you want, or don’t want, to be true. Beliefs about your own abilities, about the motives of other people, about the likely consequences of your behavior, about what happens after you die, can be emotionally fraught. But a solid training in rationality keeps you from flinching away from the truth — about your situation, or yourself — when learning the truth can help you change it.

The difference between rationality and rational self-interest

2011-11-28T07:00:00.001-05:00

by Massimo Pigliucci

media.photobucket.com

Far too often in the course of discussions on this blog or with friends I encounter a fundamental confusion: people using the word “rational” (or “irrational”) as if there were only one clear meaning of it, from which their own position follows logically (or, alternatively, other people’s position is therefore deemed illogical). Not so.

The ancient Greeks had already made a distinction between “theoria” (theoretical reason) and “praxis” (practical reason), the first one being the sort of reasoning that is supposed to reflect a point of view from nowhere, as the phrase goes, while the second one is a type of instrumental rationality deployed in the pursuit of specific ends. (Yes, modern philosophy and cognitive science have respectively argued and shown convincingly that human beings can hardly access a view from nowhere, but it is an ideal, meaning that in some cases we want to transcend as much as possible our foibles and specific issues to look at the world as broadly as is feasible for us.)

While all systems of logic do need starting assumptions (or axioms, as they are called in math), and no interestingly complex individual system can be completely justified from within itself, the aims and assumptions of theoretical and practical reason are nonetheless clearly distinct. Theoretical reason is what we deploy when we wish to arrive at general principles of logic that apply regardless of the circumstances (e.g., the principle of non-contradiction), while the practical reason tells us what we need to do in order to maximize a specified utility function.

Of course, much of the confusion I referred to above comes in when I have discussions with libertarian-oriented people, who never fail to bring in rational self-interest, or the principle of rational egoism, as a trump card. We don’t need to get (again) into Rand-style pseudophilosophy here, as rational egoism was seriously discussed (and criticized) by Henry Sidgwick in his The Methods of Ethics already in 1907. One of the things that is often confused by libertarian/objectivists is that there is a fundamental distinction between rational egoism (a type of reasoning) and ethical egoism (an ethical position). One can readily agree that rational egoism is a particular kind of instrumental rationality (i.e., it isn’t “irrational”) without having to concede that it is ethical (I certainly don’t).

Indeed, this distinction between the (instrumental) logic and the ethics of one’s actions is one of the issues that makes economics such a fascinating field. Pace the most scientistically inclined of my readers and commenters, as this is one area where we clearly see the difference between facts and values. (Yes, I am aware of Quine’s denial of that distinction, I think that Quine is over-interpreted and over-rated in this respect. At best, he was able to argue that the difference isn’t always sharp, not that it doesn’t exist.)

I think of economics as a type of (soft) social science, not as quackery, despite the fact that much nonsense is being sold to us all in its name by a variety of pundits and experts. I mean that there are facts about economies that we can’t (or shouldn’t, at any rate) ignore, regardless of our values about fairness, distribution of wealth, etc. But it is also obvious that what is “rational” in economics does not depend only on those facts, it greatly depends on one’s values and how the latter determine one’s priorities. So, for instance, it may very well be that laissez-faire capitalism is the best way to maximize distribution of goods (I am not conceding the point, I am assuming it for the sake of argument), but even so we could (should, really) decide that other criteria need to be counted into the equation too, and sometimes may even override the goal of maximization of distribution (or even, gulp!, of maximization of shareholders’ profits). Criteria such as fair access to resources (like education and health care), safety, environmental impact, and so forth are among those that might be considered.

So, one cannot simply assume without argument that rational self-interest is equivalent to rationality tout court. Firstly, because it is a particular type of instrumental rationality whose assumptions may (should) be questioned. Secondly, because there are other uses of instrumental rationality available (such as maximizing societal benefit, enhancement of human flourishing, etc.). Thirdly, because it isn’t the type of general rationality that seeks principles independent of particular points of view (i.e., it is a type of praxis, not theoria).

Let me take up another example, which concerns issues that have arisen during the (ongoing) preparation of a collection of essays on the philosophy of pseudoscience that Maarten Boudry and I are putting together for the University of Chicago Press. It hinges on the following question: can we reasonably (ah!) say that it is rational to align one’s beliefs with the available evidence (a la Bayes theorem and Hume’s dictum)? Most skeptics would say hell yes, and repeat the Hume-inspired Sagan mantra: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Yes, but that is true from the point of view of theoretical reason. Cognitive science has begun to show that human beings apparently need to believe, at least some of the time, in things for which there is no evidence (or which are, in fact, contradicted by the evidence). Optimists — which can be defined as people who disregard some of the negative facts about their own abilities or the state of the world — apparently live longer and happier lives than pessimists (who actually tend to be realists, i.e., they come closer to aligning their beliefs to the available evidence). So from the point of view of practical reason, it may be argued that it is actually rational for people not to behave too strictly as Bayesian estimators, theoria be damned.

The upshot is that we skeptics are perfectly justified in telling someone who believes in, say, astrology, that he is theoretically irrational, but not necessarily instrumentally so. Then again, things get complicated by the fact that if the person in question starts acting on the basis of his false beliefs in situations where his health is at risk (say, by going for homeopathic “remedies” instead of proven medical procedures) then we can justifiably say that he is behaving irrationally both from the point of view of theoria and of praxis — at least assuming that he actually values his life over his temporary psychological satisfaction.

So, the next time you are about to hurl the “that’s irrational” judgment at someone, stop and think in what sense you mean it, and consider whether it actually applies to the situation at hand. It may save you some grief and frustration, and who knows, you may even get your point of view across in a less threatening manner. Assuming that’s of concern to you, of course.

Free will roundtable

2011-11-25T09:01:00.001-05:00

by Massimo Pigliucci

it.toonpool.com

Recently, I have hosted a roundtable discussion on the science and philosophy of free will (full video here), where the panelists were Hakwan Lau from Columbia University, Alfred Mele from Florida State University, Jesse Prinz, a colleague of mine at the City University of New York, and Adina Roskies from Dartmouth College. The idea was to have a serious discussion about the various concepts of free will, as well as what exactly neuroscience can tell us about them. (I will not address the simplistic take that has predictably been featured on the topic by the usual suspects, among whom are Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne. There are only so many times when I feel like pointing out that someone ought to read the relevant literature before pontificating ex-cathedra.) I should also point the interested reader to a recent article in the New York Times, by Eddy Nahmias who (pace Coyne) actually provides a nuanced and intelligent brief discussion of the topic. For a more in-depth look, check out Roskies’ “How does neuroscience affect our conception of volition?” published last year in the Annual Review of Neuroscience — in my opinion one of the best papers on free will of the last decade.

Perhaps surprisingly, there was quite a bit of agreement among panelists on several contentious points concerning discussions of free will. Here is a partial list:

* Neuroscience cannot actually establish the truth of determinism. At best, that’s an area of competence of physics.

* Libet’s classical experiments have done close to zero to show that we do not make conscious decisions. Indeed, good neurobiological evidence shows that conscious deliberation plays a primary role in some of our decision making processes.

* fMRI data are interesting, but they can only indirectly provide clues to discriminate among different hypotheses concerning human volition (a much better term than the hopelessly marred “free will”).

* Nobody any longer seriously defends a notion of free will that relies on dualism or, a fortiori, even more metaphysically suspect concepts like souls. (Well, okay, some theologians do, but then again, astrologers still defend the idea of cosmic influences on our personality...)

Let’s take a brief look at some of the above claims, starting with the issue of determinism. The best that neuroscience can do is to show that behavior X is neurally correlated with activity in brain structure Y. This has precisely nothing to do with determinism because non-deterministic effects could be present at much more physically fundamental levels than those dealt with by neuroscience and never show up on the neuroscientist’s radar. That’s why determinism is really an issue for physics. And let’s clear the air about oft-repeated claim (most recently by Alex Rosenberg, in an awful book that I’m currently reviewing for The Philosopher Magazine) that physics has shown determinism to be true. Au contraire, mon ami, physics has, once and probably for all, shown determinism to be wrong, via of course quantum mechanics. Before the good reader’s ire leads him straight to the comments section of this post, let me be clear that I know perfectly well that random quantum events do not rescue naive conceptions of free will (because randomness is not at all the same thing as deliberative decision making). But the fact remains that the best of modern physics shows us that determinism is not of this world — you are free (so to speak) to draw your own metaphysical conclusions from that bit of science, as long as you keep in mind that it ain’t neuro-science.

What about Libet’s experiments? You know, the one showing that people make unconscious decisions about when to push a button hundreds of milliseconds (according to more recent evidence, even several seconds) before they become aware of having made the decision? I always thought this was a strange way to attack either free will or consciousness, and my panelists readily agreed. First off, Libet-type experiments are conducted by telling subjects to push a button when “they feel the urge rising.” This is hardly the sort of deliberative reflection we associate with human volition, so it’s not testing anything like “free will.” Second, it would be truly surprising if a lot of decisions were not actually made by our unconscious. Indeed, we know this is the case, for instance for all automated tasks (driving a car, hitting a baseball), and we know why: conscious reflection would be too slow in most of those cases, sometimes potentially costing us our lives. Third, it is simply bizarre to think of my unconscious decisions as “not really mine.” Whose are they, then? “I” am not just the conscious processing of information and awareness of that processing, “I” am also my distributed cognition at all levels of my nervous system, including unconscious processing of information. If you disagree, this means that most of the times you are not actually driving your car, your inner zombie is (did he also decide where to go?).

Now to the much talked about fMRI data. Let’s set aside the well acknowledged (by neuroscientists) fact that this is still a very blunt instrument, that it doesn’t really measure brain activity (only oxygen consumption by brain cells, used as a proxy for brain activity), and that it is still next to impossible to carry out the scans in real time (those beautiful pictures of brains “doing” this or that are actually sophisticated statistical composites of various individuals) and in realistic situations. At the moment, all that an fMRI scan can establish is that there is a correlation between activity X and oxygen consumption by brain area Y. That’s it. While this is much better than we could do until a few years ago, and while Lau at the roundtable cautiously explained how this sort of information may help us discriminate among some functional hypotheses, it is a far cry from the sort of claims that are made these days on the basis of fMRI research.

To begin with, of course, just remember the old mantra: correlation is not causation. Correlations may be spurious or the result of a third, as yet unmeasured process, that is affecting both correlates. Moreover, even if we could establish causality, this would constitute only a very partial explanation for whatever it is that is going on. Take, for instance, the much talked about fMRI of people immersed in deep prayer. They do show that certain areas of the brain are preferentially involved in that activity. But then again, how could it be otherwise? Everything we think or do has to pass through some sort of neural signal after all. What the fMRI cannot tell us is whether, say, the mental state induced by deep prayer (or meditation) indicates a reduced proprioception (which would explain in entirely materialistic terms the sense of expanded consciousness and detachment from one’s own body that sometimes accompany the experience), or the fact that subjects are actually accessing a non-material realm, just as they claim they are, based on their phenomenological experience. Indeed, it isn’t even clear what sort of evidence could discriminate between the two “hypotheses” (just for the record, yes, I do think the second possibility doesn’t have a prayer — ah! — of being true).

Finally, from the bulleted list above, if no serious philosopher or neuroscientist defends a notion of free will that relies on dualism of any sort, what kind of notion is then being defended? As Roskies puts it in her paper linked above, we are really talking about human volition, of which there are several types, each likely to end up requiring its own neural machinery, and carrying its own philosophical implications. Her list includes (apologies for the extended quotations, but she really did put it pretty darn well):

* Volition as initiation. “The will is thought to be critical in endogenously generated or self-initiated actions, as opposed to exogenously triggered actions, like reflexes or simple stimulus-response associations.” This is the sort of thing that Libet-type experiments address, and as we have seen, this type of volition is likely to be unconscious.

* Volition as intention. “Intentions are representational states that bridge the gap between deliberation and action. Arguably, intentions can be conscious or unconscious. Moreover, there may be different types of intention involved in different levels of planning for action.”

* Volition as decision making. “In one prevalent view, the paradigmatic exercise of the will lies in our ability to choose what course of action to take, rather than to initiate or represent future action. Many philosophers have located freedom of the will in the ability to choose freely [note: this doesn’t mean “a-causally”] which intentions to form. Decision often precedes intention and initiation.”

* Volition as executive control. “The control aspect of volition is the notion that higher-order cortical regions can influence the execution of action by lower regions. This may take several forms. For example, one conception is that volition involves the conscious selection of action.”

* Volition as feeling. “The experience of willing is an aspect of a multifaceted volitional capacity. ... There are at least two phenomenological aspects of agency: the awareness of an intention or urge to act that we identify as prior to the action, and the post hoc feeling that an action taken was one’s own.” This is probably the sort of volition that the Sam Harris, Jerry Coyne and Alex Rosenbergs of the world think of when they say that free will is an illusion. Incidentally, they don’t seem to have a clue as to why nature would endow us with such an illusion.

I hope the above is enough to whet your appetite. Go check the video (reach for a beer before you start, it lasts one and a half hours), and especially some of the papers and books written by our panelists.

p.s.: Thanks to Michael De Dora for organizing the panel discussion, and to the Center for Inquiry for editing and posting the video.

Podcast Teasers: Joseph Heath on Economics Without Illusions and the debate over naturalism

2011-11-23T07:01:00.000-05:00

by Massimo Pigliucci

Our next guest for the Rationally Speaking podcast will be Joseph Heath, author of “Economics Without Illusions: Debunking the Myths of Modern Capitalism,” which means that Julia and I are going to turn our skeptical eyes toward the treacherous dual terrain of economics and politics. You can guess where we’ll be going by perusing the book’s description:

Every day economic claims are used by the media or in conversation to support social and political positions. Those on the left tend to distrust economists, seeing them as friends of the right. There is something to this, since professional economists are almost all keen supporters of the free market. Yet while factions on the right naturally embrace economists, they also tend to overestimate the effect of their support on free-market policies. The result is widespread confusion. In fact, virtually all commonly held beliefs about economics — whether espoused by political activists, politicians, journalists or taxpayers — are just plain wrong.

Joseph Heath wants to raise our economic literacy and empower us with new ideas. In Economics Without Illusions, he draws on everyday examples to skewer the six favorite economic fallacies of the right, followed by impaling the six favorite fallacies of the left. Heath leaves no sacred cows untipped as he breaks down complex arguments and shows how the world really works.

As for our second topic, we’ll take on naturalism and his (reasonable) critics. The starting point for the discussion is a recent exchange in the New York Times between Alex Rosenberg and William Egginton. As it happens, I’m also reviewing (and, so far, not liking at all) Rosenberg’s new book, The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions. Much to talk about, I’m sure.

New Rationally Speaking podcast: philosophical counseling

2011-11-22T07:01:00.001-05:00

Our guest Lou Marinoff joins us to discuss philosophical counseling, a recent trend to use philosophy as a type of talk therapy. Now, despite the provocative title of his best-selling book, “Plato, Not Prozac!: Applying Eternal Wisdom to Everyday Problems,” the idea is actually not to replace psychiatric medications with chats about the ancient Greeks. Rather, as he puts it in the introduction to the volume, you should take your medications if you really need them, but once your brain is back to a normal functionality you will likely still be faced with the same existential problems that plague most human beings. And that’s where philosophy might help.

Lou Marinoff is the Chair of the Department of Philosophy at The City College of New York and a founder of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association. His other books include "The Middle Way: Finding Happiness in a World of Extremes" and "Therapy for the Sane."

One more take on the role of intuition in philosophy

2011-11-20T09:01:00.003-05:00

by Massimo Pigliucci

www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton

Julia — over at her Measure of Doubt blog — has reopened our discussion concerning the use and misuse of intuition in philosophy, which originally started in an episode of the Rationally Speaking podcast (the first two rounds of our discussion after that can be found here and here). Since I chided her for cherry picking examples in her critique, this time she relies on a (as yet unpublished, but available as an online preview) paper by J.R. and J.R.C. Kuntz, to appear in the Review of Philosophical Psychology. (Wow, a whole journal devoted to that? At any rate, here is the link to the article, since Julia provided her readers only with access to the abstract. You will need academic library access if you don't want to purchase the paper.)

I will first stake out my own view about the role of intuitions in philosophy, then briefly comment on Julia’s post, and finally go into some details in the Kuntz’s paper, which is characterized by modest results and a number of methodological flaws (but which nonetheless does manage to make a couple of good points to which philosophers should pay attention).

As the Kuntz’s make clear, intuitions can play two distinct roles in philosophy (or, for that matter, in anything else, including science): one in what philosophers of science call the context of discovery — providing the starting point from which logic (or empirical evidence, in the case of science) take off — and one in the context of justification, i.e., as data used to test hypotheses. The former is not only perfectly justified, but in fact inevitable. Galileo’s and Einstein’s thought experiments began as intuitions, and so does much valuable research in science and scholarship in philosophy. Hilary Putnam’s famous thought experiment about a twin earth can be used as a good exercise to make explicit, and if necessary to criticize, reject or modify, our thinking about language and its referents. However, intuitions cannot and should not be used as data to test hypotheses or draw conclusions, because they are not epistemically reliable — hence the silliness of David Chalmers’ zombies, which tells us precisely nothing about consciousness, as I have argued before.

There is a second important distinction that needs to be made when talking about the role of intuitions in any specialized field, since failing to acknowledge its import makes for some unnecessary confusion in both Julia’s essay and the Kuntz’s paper. I am referring to the distinction between the intuitions of professionals and those of lay “folks” (to use the Kuntz’s terminology). Pace much (again, in my opinion, hyped) clamor about experimental philosophy (an oxymoron actually referring to psychological research on concepts relevant to philosophy), it matters exactly zero what folk intuitions about free will, twin earths, Chinese rooms and the like are, just as it matters zero what folk intuitions about logic, mathematics, physics or the game of chess are to the practices in those fields. As for the intuitions of experts, there is plenty of cognitive science literature (developed from studying chess players, math teachers and nurses, among others) showing that intuitions in one’s domain of expertise become increasingly reliable the longer one has been practicing in that domain. (Interestingly, it takes several thousands of hours of practice to develop intuitive skills equivalent to those of a good chess player, and thousands more to achieve equivalency with a grand master.)

Now back to Julia’s essay. Despite my warning about cherry picking, she does it again right at the beginning, mentioning Chalmers’ zombies and a pretty risible claim by G.E. Moore about the desirability of a clean over a dirty planet even if there were nobody around to enjoy the landscape. By the same token, I could easily compile a large list of blunders by scientists and declare the whole enterprise in deep trouble (actually, someone has already done the compiling, see this delightful book about science’s greatest mistakes).

Julia then cites one of the major findings of the paper, that 51% of the philosophers sampled by the Kuntzs (see below for methodological issues) think that intuitions are useful in philosophical justification. She however waits until the very end of her essay to mention that a whopping 83% of respondents thought that intuitions are useful in discovery (not justification) and does not report at all that 70% of philosophers think that intuitions are not essential to justification. Julia, however, does acknowledge that philosophers of science seem to be particularly skeptical of the role of intuition in the context of justification. Kudos to ourselves, my dear colleagues.

Okay, to the meat of the matter now: the Kuntz’s paper itself. Other than the findings already mentioned, the most visible result is that philosophers seem to prefer two of the seven accounts of intuitions that were provided to them by the researchers, while they largely dislike two more. He are the Kuntz’s seven conceptions of intuitions, as presented in their survey:

1) Judgment that is not made on the basis of some kind of observable and explicit reasoning process.

2) An intellectual happening whereby it seems that something is the case without arising from reasoning, or sensorial perceiving, or remembering.

3) A propositional attitude that is held with some degree of conviction, and solely on the basis of one’s understanding of the proposition in question, not on the basis of some belief.

4) An intellectual act whereby one is thinking occurrently [sic] of the abstract proposition that p and, merely on the basis of understanding it, believes that p.

5) An intellectual state made up of (1) the consideration whether p and (2) positive phenomenological qualities that count as evidence for p; together constituting prima facie reason to believe that p.

6) The formation of a belief by unclouded mental attention to its contents, in a way that is so easy and yielding a belief that is so definite as to leave no room for doubt regarding its veracity.

7) An intellectual happening that serves as evidence for the situation at hand’s instantiation of some concept.

A majority of respondents liked (1) and (2) and dislike (6) and (7) which, despite some quibbling on the part of the Kuntz’s, actually indicates that philosophers tend to have somewhat consistent views of what intuitions are. However, the problem here is that it is not at all clear how, at a conceptually deep level, these ideas of intuition are in fact different from each other (they are certainly not identical, but several could be taken to be overlapping, and indeed even almost identical once the complex and sometimes obfuscatory language is stripped away).

So far, the results of the study aren’t that bad for philosophers: a majority, especially of philosophers of science, thinks that intuitions are useful in discovery more than justification, and there is some agreement about what intuitions actually are (though I’d be curious to see what one would find by asking scientists about the type of intuitions that inform their discovery phase). The real problems with the paper are methodological.

To begin with, this was a voluntary online survey. Bad idea. The sample (which isn’t that large to begin with, only 282 people) is very likely to be self-selected in terms of interest in the topic and other criteria (such as level of online activity, which is still relatively low in the humanities, especially among older faculty) and areas of expertise within philosophy (the Kuntz’s do address the latter problem, but claim that their sample is not likely to be biased based, unfortunately, on yet another online survey, and one conducted by a philosopher — Chalmers — not a social scientist!).

Moreover, we discover that an (unreported) number of participants had not actually finished their PhD, raising the question of the extent to which this is in fact a survey of professionals (see my comment above about how many thousands of hours are necessary to develop expert intuitions). To complicate things further, some sub-areas of Philosophy included in the analysis were barely represented at all (e.g., aesthetic, n=3; postmodernism, n=2; education, n=3; feminism, n=1; philosophy of literature, n=1; philosophy of mathematics, n=5; Philosophy of religion, n=4; law, n=3; and so on).

The descriptive statistics of the survey are not problematic (they simply report the rankings of the various options by participants, broken down by categories such as gender, geographical area, subfield of interest, etc.). But then we get to the bivariate correlations among variables (measured as Spearman’s non parametric rho), such as the relationship between the importance attributed to intuition and the preference for one or another of the seven types of intuitions from the menu described above. While all correlations discussed by the Kuntz’s are statistically significant (as much as I personally put little faith in p-value based statistics), the effect sizes seem pretty tiny. A good number of the coefficients are in the 0.15-0.20 range, indicating very weak correlations. It would have been nice to know what the percentage of explained variance of one variable by the other was, the so-called coefficient of determination, but that’s not available because the Kuntz’s didn’t do a parametric analysis, which is necessary to estimate these coefficients.

Then again, didn’t they? Toward the end of the results section they mention an analysis of variance, which is a parametric procedure. So, then, were the data approximately normally distributed, so that ANOVAs were possible? But if so, why use Spearman’s rho for the correlations, since non parametric statistics are known to be less powerful and ought not to be deployed if the data even approximately satisfy parametric assumptions? And why don’t the authors report the results of the ANOVAs in a table, instead of simply briefly summarizing their results verbally?

In the end, I don’t think we’ve learned much from the Kuntz’s paper about philosophers and intuitions, other than being reminded of the valuable conceptual point that everybody interested in either using or studying intuitions ought to make very clear the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. And the paper certainly lends very little support to Julia’s sweeping critique of "philosophers" for using an epistemically unreliable method.

Here, I am with Henri Poincaré (quoted by the Kuntz’s) when he wrote back in 1908 that “It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.” Which is true also for formal logic and math. Substitute “empirical evidence’ for “logic” in the quote, and you get science.

Michael's Picks

2011-11-16T21:25:00.000-05:00

by Michael De Dora

* Should we ban cigarettes? That’s what Robert Proctor argues in his forthcoming book Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition. You can read more about the case against cigarettes in this recent article by Peter Singer.

* The nonprofit research organization Public Religion Research Institute has released the 2011 American Values Survey, which gauges Americans’ beliefs on religion, values, and politics.

* The Catholic Church is now framing its fight against reproductive rights and marriage equality as a matter of “religious liberty.”

* Mississippi residents have rejected a constitutional amendment to change the legal definition of personhood to include fertilized human eggs. Yet let us not forget that there is still only one abortion clinic in the entire state.

* On a similar note, here is a comprehensive map of the world’s abortion laws, compiled by the Center for Reproductive Rights.

* Jonah Lehrer synthesizes a couple scientific studies that suggest humans are happier when wealth is more equally distributed rather than less equally distributed.

* A panel of experts commissioned by the Royal Society of Canada has concluded that assisted suicide should be legal in the country.

City University of New York to turn into a glorified high school

2011-11-14T07:00:00.000-05:00

by Massimo Pigliucci

[Apologies to my readers for the seemingly parochial topic of this post, but in fact what you are about to read is part of a national trend toward dismantling liberal arts education, in the apparent conviction that our society doesn’t need intelligent and critically thinking citizens, but simply workers who are trained to do whatever the market and the reigning plutocracy bids them to do. Much more about the trend and its dangers can be found, among many other places, here, here, here, here, and here.]

City University of New York’s Chancellor Matthew Goldstein is about to turn the prestigious system of senior and community colleges into a glorified high school. And few people seem to even want to try to stop him. This is bizarre, as Goldstein is a CUNY graduate himself and has been credited with major accomplishments since he took the lead at CUNY in 1999 (e.g., he raised admission standards, created the William E. Macaulay Honors College, and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism).

Goldstein has recently begun what is known as the “Pathways to Degree Completion” initiative, which is being quickly rammed down the throats of the faculty members at all CUNY Colleges, in blatant disregard of faculty governance, interfering with curricula and the structure of majors, and possibly resulting in the elimination or great reduction of entire departments, mostly in the humanities (beginning with foreign languages, arts, assorted studies programs, history, and philosophy). The science and math requirements also are being reduced to ridiculous minimum common denominator standards, all in the name of increasing the graduation rate and decreasing the time to graduation of CUNY students — apparently the only currencies understood by the inept (to say the least) State legislators up in Albany.

According to CUNY’s central administration official mantra, Pathways is “designed to create a curricular structure that will streamline transfers and enhance the quality of general education across the University.” In reality, it will do little in the way of the first goal, and achieve exactly the opposite as far as the second goal is concerned. The centerpiece of this stunning coup that Goldstein and his associates are perpetrating on a system of 23 campuses serving 480,000 students is a reduction of the General Education requirements from above 50 credits (out of 120 necessary for graduation) — which is typical across CUNY’s senior colleges — to 30. Because, you know, our students already have far too much general education.

More specifically, Pathways is about to force the Colleges to adopt a common “required core” of 7 credits in English composition, 4 in mathematical and quantitative reasoning and 4 in life and physical sciences, accompanied by a “flexible core” of 15 credits distributed among very rigidly defined areas that include “world cultures,” “US experience and its diversity,” “creative expression,” and “individual and society.” This sounds good only until you realize that the individual Colleges are already requiring all of the above and then some, and that the core structures will severely limit the flexibility of the Colleges to establish their own curricula.

One of the major positive features of CUNY is that it is a system, where a student can go from community college to 4-yr college to Masters to PhD for comparatively little money and getting a pretty darn good education. Within the system, the individual colleges operate as quasi-independent laboratories of higher education, constantly trying different things, competing for admissions, and cross-fertilizing each other through a variety of instruments, including the inter-college disciplinary councils. Goldstein’s idea is not only a solution in search of a problem, it will essentially destroy what makes CUNY such an extraordinary place for both faculty and students.

The Chancellor and his hand-picked, faculty governance independent “task force” are moving at great speed, for instance allowing only two weeks to the Colleges to respond to the Pathways proposal (and, rumors have it, being prepared to reject pretty much any substantive counterproposal they may receive). By comparison, Harvard took two years to develop its GenEd curriculum...

Of course, there has been some resistance to this egregious abuse of power. The cross-CUNY Councils of a number of disciplines have met and asked the administration to reconsider. The Philosophy Council, on which I serve, for instance, has passed a resolution where it “urges the Board of Trustees to defer action on the current proposed framework and undertake to address the problems of degree completion and course transfer through a careful and consultative process that is better suited to the complexity of the issues, and in keeping with the principles of faculty governance.” We received no answer at all.

Hunter College, one of the most prestigious institutions within CUNY passed the following resolution, back in October:

“We, the undersigned Chairs and Program Directors of the Hunter College School of Arts and Sciences, oppose the process and implications of the Pathways Project proposal. While we all recognize the need to address the issue of student transfer policies, this proposal as it is being implemented will reduce the overall quality of a CUNY education and will erase the unique identity of its individual colleges. It lowers the standards of science and mathematics programs at a time when the U.S. is falling behind in these areas. It dilutes the rich liberal arts offerings of our college. Furthermore, in an increasingly globalized world, we do not see how CUNY can justify eliminating foreign language requirements and imposing curriculum changes that would undermine the value of pluralism and diversity. By undermining the expertise of CUNY faculty and our right to determine curricula, the Pathways Project will erode the national reputation of the university. Our goal is to offer the highest quality education to all of our students, not just the fastest and easiest path to a degree.”

As far as I know, this also was met with stone silence. Various bodies at the College of Staten Island have also issued anti-Pathways resolutions. Here is the one passed by the College’s General Education Committee (approved with no dissenting votes):

“The breakneck pace of the deadline Pathways imposes on CUNY Colleges and the Colleges' governance committees makes it impossible for such a radical change of our general education program to be given proper analysis and evaluation. Despite its best efforts, the General Education Committee has not been able to give due consideration to even this first stage of the Pathways master plan under this kind of pressure. The timetable would oblige the General Education Committee to overstep its bounds of authority by having it make major curricular decisions without guidance from the Departments, Curriculum Committees, and the Faculty Senate. We have been made aware that the student government and a growing majority of departments have made known their opposition to Pathways on pedagogical, social, legal, and ethical grounds in formal resolutions. For these reasons, the General Education Committee of the College of Staten Island believes the Pathways Proposal should not be implemented unless it is ratified by all of the CUNY Colleges in accordance with their governance procedures on curricular change.”

Again, nothing happened in response. The latest to act has been Queens College, whose Senate passed the following strongly worded resolution (just before releasing this I found out that Lehman College's Senate also approved a very similar document):

“Whereas the problem of improved student transfer facilitation, for which we recognize a need, can be addressed without the imposition of a standardized new curriculum on the colleges of the City University and

Whereas the Pathways initiative has shown a disregard for the legally defined and traditional rights of faculty governance over curriculum and

Whereas the imposition of a curriculum by a board of trustees, contrary to the national best practices of curricular reform, will make CUNY an outlier in the educational community, and so will erode the national reputation of the university and

Whereas Pathways would substantially cut the general education curriculum and devalue our students' education and the reputation of Queens College and the City University of New York and

Whereas Pathways undermines the College's stated goal in the strategic plan of ;advancing the schools academic programs; and

Whereas Pathways threatens to make the College less able to recruit and retain outstanding scholars due to its devaluing of the curriculum and undermining of shared governance and

Whereas the disregard shown to the faculty in the Pathways planning process undermines the College's stated goal of; building a culture of community;

Therefore the Academic Senate of Queens College concludes that the Pathways to Degree Completion Initiative cannot be redeemed by minor changes to its individual components and rejects Pathways on pedagogical, intellectual, and legal grounds.”

Despite these and other voices of dissent (including Brooklyn College), what is stunning is the inaction or complete silence by two other outlets that should obviously be deeply involved or interested: the faculty union and the local press.

PSC-CUNY (the Professional Staff Congress) has vaguely motioned toward the idea that what Goldstein & co. are doing (and the Board of Trustees has recklessly and hastily approved) may be in violation of faculty governance (you think?) and that the union will consider the possibility of legal action (consider? Why didn’t they file a suit immediately to stop the darn thing in its ill conceived tracks?).

What about the press? Ah, there too the silence is almost complete, and thereby all the more infuriating. WNYC, the local NPR affiliate, has a single entry on the matter, penned by education reporter Beth Fertig back in May (!!). It’s a good piece, but there has been no follow up since. As for the New York Times, I seem to remember something appearing during the spring, but I’ll be darned if I can find it on their web site, regardless of which combination of “CUNY,” “controversy,” “curriculum,” “transfer students” and “Pathways” I put in. Now, how is it possible that the leading newspaper and the leading radio news station in the city have been almost completely ignoring a huge controversy that is about to wreck New York’s largest institution of higher education, and which is going to impact, as I said, almost half a million New Yorkers and their families? If I were a bit paranoid I’d suspect political collusion, but it is as likely to be sheer indifference or incompetence.

So, dear readers, since few seem to want to do something about this mess, perhaps you can help stopping this train wreck of a reform by forwarding this post, or better yet by writing a brief note, directly to the people who ought to be interested and pay attention:

* Chancellor Goldstein.
* CUNY’s Board of Trustees.
* The University Faculty Senate.
* CUNY’s Union.
* The New York Times “news tips.”
* WNYC education reporter, Beth Fertig.

And whoever else you may think appropriate. Thank you.

Massimo's Picks

2011-11-11T08:35:00.000-05:00

by Massimo Pigliucci

* "If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you're likely to go to prison. If born to a rich family, you're likely to go to business school."

* Three types of libertarianism, and the objections that can be raised against them.

* Could it be that Americans are smarter and more fair minded than the GOP assumes? Oh my spaghetti monster!

* The sort of movie about Wall Street you really don't want to miss.

* The perfect example of what is wrong with mixing financial interests and political power...

* Post hoc ergo propter hoc, Tim Minchin style.

* Quote of the Day: "Those who believe in telekinesis, raise my hand." -Kurt Vonnegut

* Conservative politics and authoritarian personality.

* Thank evolution for giving us birds...

* New paper in Philosophy & Theory in Biology: Lamarckism ascending!

* The vacuity and ignorance of Alvin Plantinga.

* Jon Stewart takes on the idiotic "In God We Trust" vote in Congress.

* Insanity, defined: parents infecting their children on purpose, to develop natural immunities.

The Templeton Foundation

2011-11-09T09:01:00.002-05:00

by Massimo Pigliucci

A few weeks ago I got an email from my book agent. She had been approached by an editor at a well known academic publishing house with a project she thought I would be interested in. Sometime later I met with the editor in question, a genial person with whom I clearly had quite a few interests in common. Nonetheless, a few days later I decided to turn down the offer and pursue other projects. The reason: the book, which would have been part of a series, was going to be produced as a joint venture by the academic press in question and the John Templeton Foundation.

A few nights later I was having dinner after an event in New York where I moderated a panel discussion with four colleagues. Over drinks someone asked me about my Templeton-related decision and I explained my motivations. Turns out three of my four colleagues (two philosophers and a scientist) were funded by Templeton, which frankly has only strengthened my resolve to buck the trend and remain unassociated with that outlet.

The JTF was established by Sir John Templeton to “support science, invest in the big questions,” which sounds great unless you know who Templeton was and what he was up to. Sir John was born in Winchester, Tennessee (he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1987 because of his philanthropy), was a Yale graduate, a Rhodes Scholar, and made his money by investing in the stock market beginning in 1938, and eventually by managing other people’s money through mutual funds, starting in 1958. The Templeton Prize, which is financially heftier than the Nobel, was established in 1972 to further scientific and other advances “in the spiritual domain,” whatever that means.

The first recipient of the Templeton was Mother Theresa, the most recent one Martin J. Rees, the Astronomer Royal. For some time I have been disturbed by JTF’s activities because they smack of ideological interference with research and scholarship, essentially buying credibility for the Foundation by giving large amounts of money to scientists, philosophers, and other scholars in an environment in which funding for research is increasingly scarce and competitive. Of course, the idea of wealthy and not exactly pure-minded patrons supporting the sciences and the humanities isn’t new at all, going back to the very beginning of civilization, both eastern and western. But that doesn’t mean we have to like it.

In thinking over my agent’s proposal I went to the JTF web site and poked around their “testimonials.” What I found was disturbing to say the least. There are five sections of short videos with various people telling us why JTF efforts are so important. The first one, on “Science and the Big Questions” is pretty plain and I found little to object to, except for the occasional popping up of strange words when it comes to a scientific vocabulary, like mentions of research on “virtue.” It also features Martin Nowak of Harvard regretting that most biologists find it “distasteful” to talk to theologians (they should). And then we find Charles Townes (UC-Berkeley) making the tired distinction between sciences dealing with facts (true) and religions dealing with meaning (on what basis, one might ask?), from which he comes pretty close to suggesting some sort of intelligent design at work. Okay, I guess I did have some problem with that section after all.

The second video concerns “character development,” which early on features David Myers (Hope College) talking about Templeton’s desire that science could eventually study and validate the “laws of life” (uh?) underlying good living, which led JTF to fund research on “forgiveness” (clearly a heavily Christian-influenced concept seldom found in the scientific vocabulary, until Templeton started giving out grants to study it). Following that, we have an appearance by David Blankenhorn, of the Institute for American Values, a neo-conservative think tank, naturally advocating rather vague “changes in public policies” stemming from JTF’s funded research.

It is only natural, then, that the third introductory video displayed on the Foundation’s entry page concerns “freedom and free enterprise,” and just from the title the savvy reader can tell where this is going. It opens with — and mostly features throughout — Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute (another conservative think tank), who delivers some bullshit about the morality of the free enterprise system, and who manages to belittle international aid to reduce poverty.

The fourth video is about genius, targeting young people with exceptional talents. I have no objection to that, though it seems to me that the problem the world has is not that geniuses don’t get a chance, it’s that too many people are functionally illiterate and incapable of critical thinking. Putting emphasis on the first rather than the latter problem will push society into an even greater divide between the elite few on one side and the large masses on the other — not a good trend for democracies and open societies.

The last video is not ready yet. It’s supposed to be about genetics, and the site says only that “the Foundation takes a particular interest in how major advances in genetics might serve to empower individuals, leading to spiritually beneficial social and cultural changes.” Sounds a bit Brave New Worldish to me, but at this point I may have developed Templeton-induced paranoia.

In short, my reason for declining the book project is that I simply don’t like having my name associated with right wing and/or libertarian organizations like the JTF, the American Enterprise Institute or the Institute for American Values. But the dinner conversation with my colleagues gave me also an informal opportunity to find out why others don’t seem to be as bothered by the idea of getting money from the JTF. Broadly speaking, and based of course on my extremely limited sample (augmented, however, by similar conversations I’ve had over the past several years), there seem to be three reasons (or rationalizations, depending on how you look at it) for why scholars take JTF money:

* “I’m independent anyway.” The first response is that there is a distinction between the agenda of the funding source and what one does as an independent scholar. This is certainly true, and I was assured (and have no reason to doubt) that Templeton would have had no editorial say whatsoever in what I would have written in my book. Then again, research into the practice of science does show that the source of one’s money makes a difference (often unconsciously) on the outcome. The case in point is that of medical research that is much more likely to find a given drug effective if the researchers received funding from the pharmaceutical industry rather than from government agencies. At the very least one ought to be aware of the danger and not just dismiss the possibility out of hand. (This, of course, is a separate point from the one I made above concerning one’s name lending credibility to an institution whose ideological positions one may not share.)

* “It’s the same with the federal government.” NIH, NSF and other governmental agencies also have agendas, the argument goes, because the federal government has an agenda, and these days that agenda is significantly tilted toward an anti-science, pro-religion trajectory, largely because of the influence of Congressional Republicans. I find this argument rather specious. I am not aware of any evidence of this sort of influence in the pattern of NSF funding (with which I am most familiar), and that’s probably because there are many layers between Congressional Republicans and, say NSF or NIH officers, and because the funding process is entirely handled by professional scientists. Of course, one could very reasonably question funding amounts and priorities at the level of the entire federal research budget, and that discussion would indeed be political and ideological. But at the very least we are talking about a government of elected officials, not a private outlet that is free to push whatever agenda it wishes to push. There is also, of course, the question of whether a scientist should accept money from specific federal agencies whose goals may be ethically questionable, such as the Department of Defense. And indeed I am sympathetic toward scientists who do reject such funding, and somewhat critical of those who accept it.

* “Someone else would do it anyway.” This is the ethically most naive response I have encountered. First, this may not be true, as Templeton has gained influence and credibility precisely because a good number of legitimate scientists and other scholars have accepted their money. The Discovery Institute (the Intelligent Design “think” tank based in Seattle), on the contrary, has not succeeded in part because legitimate scientists have ostracized them. Second, one’s integrity is not helped, nor is one’s ethical responsibility diminished, by the thought that someone else would have stepped in and gotten the money, so we might as well. If we adopted that sort of standard, all kinds of unethical behavior would become acceptable on pragmatic grounds, the academic version of realpolitik.

There was one more thing I was curious about concerning Templeton and how it manages to get the attention of prominent scientists and other academic outlets, so I asked the editor at the press that will produce the new book series: why exactly do you guys need the JTF, particularly as you have an excellent reputation and the JTF people will have no editorial input into the series? Answer: because Templeton has money, and money buys publicity, and publicity sells books. There is capitalism at work, my friends.

Ethical Pluralism: the ugly theory that could

2011-11-07T09:01:00.001-05:00

by Ian Pollock

socialmediaworld.com

Warning: this post is long, and assumes basic knowledge of ethical philosophy 101 — you need to know and care what deontology, consequentialism and virtue ethics are, and have a basic grasp of the arguments for & against all three. In other words, this is a post for ethics geeks.

“In practice, virtually everyone seems to judge a large matter of principle to be more important than a small one of pragmatics, and vice versa — everyone except philosophers, that is.”
(Gary Drescher, Good and Real)

We like systems of thought, and we like them elegant and simple. This applies as much to ethics as to any other topic, and leads us to prefer simple ethical theories to complex ones. However, it may be that ethics (bound up in messy, evolved human preferences) is one place to expect complications in abundance. It may be that no simple principle can capture the whole of our ethical lives.

Let me see if I can make this more plausible. I will be talking in terms of the “big three” ethical theories — consequentialism, virtue ethics and deontology, because most ethical statements humans make seem to be grounded in thinking that comes from one of those three broad areas, though only a minority are aware of the vocabulary itself. (As an aside, I am also studiously ignoring a large portion of what some consider morality — what Jonathan Haidt labels “purity” concerns.)

First, I wish to establish a “bare minimum” — that consequences, virtues and justice do matter, at least whenever all other things are equal. In other words, for example, a consequentialist is also a deontologist in the sense that, given identical consequences, they’ll usually choose the same thing a deontologist would. Consider the following scenarios:

Scenario #1: You are considering donating with a limited budget to various charitable causes. Eventually the field is narrowed to two charities. According to an independent organization evaluating charities’ effectiveness, one saves approximately one life per $600, the other, one life per $2,000 dollars.

Solution: Choose the more effective charity.

Lesson: At least ceteris paribus, numbers matter in making moral decisions.

Scenario #2: A front-end car collision has occurred, and the two drivers involved are both bleeding profusely. You witnessed the accident and are the only one on the scene. The first driver caused the accident and appears to be drunk; the second was not at fault. You know you need to apply pressure to the wounds to stem the bleeding, but can only do this for one person at a time.

Solution: Prioritize the person who does not appear to have caused the accident due to their own negligence.

Lesson: At least ceteris paribus, an agent should consider questions of virtue and character in making moral decisions.

Scenario #3: Suppose (counterfactually!) that after decades of debate about capital punishment, it was finally determined by statisticians that, in terms of lives saved, the practice is a wash. In other words, without capital punishment, N innocent people per year per capita die (killed due to the lack of strong deterrent for murderers); while with capital punishment, N innocent people per year per capita die (killed due to wrongful convictions). It is in your power to either continue or abolish the practice. Knock-on effects on society are otherwise negligible.

Solution: Abolish capital punishment.

Lesson: At least ceteris paribus, an agent should personally respect the autonomy and rights of individuals in making moral decisions. It is better to allow an injustice (a murder by someone else) than to perpetrate one (a wrongful execution).

What I hope these scenarios establish is that, no matter how we may differ in which principles (utility, virtue, justice) we take to be overriding, the other principles have (and should have) some prima facie sway in our moral considerations if all other things are equal. If we can get ethical discourse to the point where we are talking not about whether, but about to what extent numbers should trump matters of principle and of character, and vice versa, we shall have made some strides toward a more plausible moral theory — plausible, that is, to people who don’t want to push fat people in front of buses, or tell an axe-murderer exactly where to find (and kill) their friend for fear of lying, or rubber-stamp whatever their society tells them the good life consists in.

Of course, if I am (for example) a consequentialist who uses virtue as a mere tie-breaker in unusual situations, that is not much of a rapprochement. However, let me see if I can carry the stronger claim that no matter which of the three approaches you consider most important, the other two have to have more than only a tie-breaker status. To carry this claim, I have to show that for each of the three approaches, the other two can sometimes override it in principle. This means I will need six counterexamples.

Let us start by undermining the exclusively consequentialist approach.

Counterexample #1 (utility vs character): Julia has mentioned, in a previous post that is one of my favorite on Rationally Speaking, the appalling phenomenon of “crush” videos — in which people derive sexual pleasure from videos of nonhuman animals being stomped to death by scantily clad women. Suppose that the practice of making these videos were now outlawed, but the videos themselves remained. Would it be ethical to watch them if one enjoyed it enough? At first glance, utilitarianism would seem to say it was mandatory — a straightforward net positive with no drawbacks. But most people would say no, it’s not ethical. You can call your enjoyment of such material “utility” if you like, but that enjoyment seems simply unworthy of being valued as a moral end. Damn you and damn your utility — you’re a nasty, twisted person.

Counterexample #2 (utility vs justice): Suppose you are the sheriff of a small town, in which a murder has been committed by a member of a hated minority. You have absolutely no leads, and if somebody is not punished, the townspeople might riot and do violence to random members of the minority. If you jail an innocent person, they will probably be placated. Should you do so? Utilitarianism again returns a straightforward answer of “Yes” here, at least if the risk of violence is high enough. Now in truth, situations like this are very difficult, but most of us feel that there is something appropriate and noble about a law enforcer having an absolute (or close to absolute) prohibition on committing injustice in the service of some good consequence — “fiat justitia ruat caelum.” Maybe the sheriff should scapegoat somebody if the situation is extreme enough and the numbers stack up disproportionately enough — but not at the drop of the hat, as soon as the consequentialist calculus returns even slightly higher utility for scapegoating. This holds even if we caveat that nobody will ever know what the sheriff did.

So much for utility as the sole principle. What about virtue? Counterexamples here are of a somewhat different sort owing to the rather different question virtue ethicists answer: not “what shall I do?” but “what kind of person shall I be?” However, it is worth noting that even a virtue ethicist will eventually have to make particular decisions, and we can still judge them on those decisions.

Counterexample #3 (character vs utility): Sally is a highly intelligent person with a college education in law, who displays gentleness and wisdom in her dealings with others. When she was a young person her father died of an extremely rare disease; she now spends much of her time at a non-profit, attempting to secure funding for the study of that disease by canvassing door to door. Her friends and family love her and find her optimism infectious.

Now, there is much to admire in Sally. She is a thoroughly decent person who is committed to philanthropy, in a world where most are not. However, it is a sad fact that her philanthropic efforts are mostly wasted. She is too concerned about a disease which does not affect many people — much better to focus on common causes of death and suffering. She is also ignoring the law of comparative advantage — her time is replaceable by people with less marketable skills, so it would be much more effective for her to land a well-paying law job and fund other people to perform charitable work. The sad thing is that a person of average income who gives maybe 0.1% of their disposable income to an effective charity and uses the other 99.9% to, I don’t know, buy caviar or something, may do more good in the world than someone who is totally committed to altruism as a way of life, but hasn’t bothered with the numbers.

So, the point here is that a person can be off the charts in all or most of Aristotle’s virtues, and yet still be outdone in improving the world by a grumpy rationalist willing to give a few highly leveraged bucks here and there. Stated more generally, good character is no guarantee that one’s life will have an especially good impact. Or if we wish to reverse it, a very consequentially bad life may not be traceable to bad character.

Counterexample #4 (character vs justice): Here counterexamples spring to mind so readily as to be practically truisms. Thomas Jefferson, an admirable man in so many ways, used slavery to support himself and his family. Most of the great people of bygone times, despite their high personal virtue, were out-and-out racists, homophobes and misogynists. The point is similar to the above counterexample #3 — good character is no guarantee of just conduct, for although the case for (say) women’s rights in terms of justice is a slam dunk, few of even the very best people of bygone times endorsed such a notion. People of otherwise good character seem only to be just to the extent that they have been taught to be, and rarely otherwise. In practice, thinking of morality solely in terms of a virtuous character ends up fetishizing personality, and even a good personality can countenance barbarous things.

What of deontology, then? What of justice?

Counterexample #5 (justice vs utility): All-out nuclear war threatens between Examplestan and the Gedanken Republic. The Republic demands amnesty for three terrorists who blew up an Examplestani post office several years ago. They say that this must occur as a gesture of good faith before they will come to the negotiating table at all. Should Examplestan consider this possibility? The answer seems to be yes — justice is extremely important, but we really don’t want the heavens to fall in that particular way. Sometimes you have to just set aside a matter of principle and take out your goddam calculator.

Counterexample #6 (justice vs character): Meet Fred. Fred has the nearly irresistible urge to torture people, but because he knows that this urge is not universalizable and that he is therefore duty-bound not to do so, he refrains with great difficulty from torturing people. Meanwhile, the idea of torturing people has never even occurred to Penelope, and it wouldn’t tempt her in the slightest if it did. Kant famously argued that the first case shows moral virtue, while the second shows a “mere” disposition. But this seems clearly wrong. For one thing, because a disposition does seem to be morally laudable — it’s just better not to want to torture people than to studiously refrain.

Now, these counterexamples are full of holes, complications and potential objections, but before you make an objection, please ask yourself seriously whether you’re rationalizing. For example, if I recall correctly, Kant was against cruelty to nonhuman animals (despite their not being “rational”) — but only because he bought into the empirical claim that cruelty to animals would eventually lead to violence against humans. Frankly, Immanuel, I call shenanigans. It’s true that violence against animals may lead to later human-on-human cruelty, but that is not what is wrong with torturing a rattlesnake. So when you come up with a clever objection to my counterexample to your-favored-approach, ask yourself if the objection really works in the least convenient possible world.

Now let me see if I can be more constructive.

I used to be a flat-out consequentialist, and in many ways I still consider myself one. I think an ethical theory that fails to relate to what, y’know, actually happens in the world, is essentially meaningless or worse. That said, I now consider consequentialism to be correct in principle, but also an incomplete practical methodology for dealing with ethical questions.

In this respect, it is a similar idea to reductionism. Yes, reductionism is entirely correct; yes, the basic units of physical reality (quarks and leptons?) are probably the only ontologically fundamental constituents of our universe; but no, particle physics is not good research methodology for studying the mating habits of penguins.

Likewise, there are some decisions (like not eating factory-farmed meat and eggs) that are slam-dunks on purely consequentialist grounds. But many others, such as how to train oneself to stand up to human evil instead of sliding into apathy, are much better conceived in terms of the conceptually higher-level ideas one finds in virtue ethics. Moreover, if consequentialist reasoning fails to take into account the undeniable... utility of certain close-to-absolute prohibitions, promises, commitments and concepts of honor and justice, what we end up with is a world where people make decisions that are locally consequentially optimal but globally hideous — consider the tragedy of the commons (I shall have much more to say about this particular issue in future posts).

Consequentialists have long argued that objections to their view end up confirming it — for example, the fact that you wouldn’t want to live in a world in which sheriffs were willing to scapegoat people, shows that that world has lower utility, so that the theory is saved. I think this is half-true, and rather hand-wavy. It shows that we have reasons for endorsing some deontological and virtue-ethical ideas on broadly consequentialist grounds, but it does not show that the consequentialist theory as stated really works as a guide to practice, unless we want to install a thousand ugly caveats into the theory. Sure, humans are made of quarks, but don’t throw out your psychology textbook in favour of physics alone!

So I think that in order to actually make your way in this world as an agent who is sincerely attempting to do the right thing, you’re going to have to use the vocabulary and concepts of consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics, or your understanding will be impoverished. Exactly how they need to be traded off against each other is a subject for much further thought, assuming these ideas have merit.

In the comments to Julia’s article mentioned above, jcm christened this view as “Ethical Heterodoxy” or “Ethical Pluralism.” Let the critique begin!

New Rationally Speaking podcast: SETI

2011-11-07T06:58:00.000-05:00

Is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, solid science, pseudoscience, or something else, as Massimo argues in his book "Nonsense on Stilts"?

What are the theoretical foundations and empirical evidence that justify a multi-decade research program, and what are its chances of succeeding? Have we learned anything thanks to SETI?

Also, if the universe is infinite, what problems does this pose for utilitarian ethics?

Michael's Picks

2011-11-04T08:45:00.000-04:00

by Michael De Dora

* Do whales deserve rights? That’s what People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) charges in its latest lawsuit.

* Deborah Nelson just finished a one-year investigation into Ringling Bros.’ treatment of its animals, and the resulting article paints an ugly picture.

* Some research apparently suggests that moral philosophers are not morally better than socially comparable non-ethicists.

* Neuroscientists who gave rats a marijuana-like compound, put them in a maze and measured their brain waves, found unusually chaotic communication between brain regions linked to memory formation and complex behaviors.

* The White House has provided a disappointing response to the recent petitions to remove “In God We Trust” from U.S. currency and take “Under God” out the Pledge of Allegiance.

* A private university in Georgia is forcing its roughly 278 employees to sign a statement that rejects pre-marital sex, homosexuality, and drinking in public — or risk termination.

* Andrew Cohen discusses what George Washington believed about the Constitution in The Atlantic.

* Laura Bassett details the forces behind the current campaign against reproductive rights.

Some of Massimo's all time favs

2011-11-01T10:12:00.000-04:00

by Massimo Pigliucci

techliberation.com

I was recently in Oslo, visiting the Center for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis and giving a public talk before the local Skeptics in the Pub. One of the colleagues I talked to while I was there asked me for a short list of unusual papers I thought would be a good idea to read. So I went home and generated three such lists, reflecting my main interests these days: Skepticism, Philosophy, and Science.

The entries are below, with links whenever possible (sometimes to the full article, often to abstracts). The lists are very obviously neither a complete (far from it, focusing mostly on the past few years) nor a balanced survey. Rather, they are entries that I "flagged" as worth remembering in my personal database. Still, they may be of interest, and I'd like to hear from our readers their thoughts about my suggestions, as well as suggestions of their own. So, here we go (within each group, entries are arranged from the most recent to the oldest paper, they do not include books, and some are articles instead of technical papers):

Skepticism:

2007. H.H. Ehrsson. The experimental induction of out of body experiences. Science 317:1048.
2005. J.P.A. Ioannidis. Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Medicine 2:e124.
2002. A. Caso. Three skeptics' debate tools examined. Skeptical Inquirer, Jan/Feb:37-41. (This is the only one I couldn't find online, even on SI's own web site!)

Philosophy:

2011. I. Douven. Abduction (Inference to the Best Explanation). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
2011. C. Chatam. 10 Important Differences Between Brains and Computers. ScienceBlogs.
2010. A.L. Roskies. How does neuroscience affect our conception of volition? Annual Review of Neuroscience 33:109-130.
2009. J. Kaplan. The paradox of stasis and the nature of explanations in evolutionary biology. Philosophy of Science 76:797-808.
2008. D.J. Glass & N. Hall. A brief history of the hypothesis. Cell 134:378-381.
2005. N. Shackel. The vacuity of postmodernist methodology. Metaphilosophy 36:295-320.
2005. Judge Jones. Tammy Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District. United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania.
2004. H. Chang. Complementary Science: History and Philosophy of Science as a Continuation of Science by Other Means. Pp. 235-250 in: Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress. Oxford University Press. (Link is to a magazine article that summarizes the chapter.)
2002. J. Kaplan. Historical evidence and human adaptations. Philosophy of Science 69:S294-S304.
2002. C. Cleland. Methodological and Epistemic Differences between Historical Science and Experimental Science. Philosophy of Science 69:474-496.
2001. S. Okasha. Hume and induction. The Philosophical Quarterly 51:307-327.
2000. M. Gill. Hume and human nature. Hume Studies 26:87-108.
2000. B. Forrest. Methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism: clarifying the connection. Philo 3:7-29.
1997. S. Haack. Vulgar Rortyism. New Criterion.
1996. A. Sokal. A physicist experiments with cultural studies. Lingua Franca, May/Jun.
1992. R. Thom. Leaving Mathematics for Philosophy. Symposium on the Current State and Prospect of Mathematics, Barcelona, June 1991.
1987. J.H. Sobel. On the evidence of testimony for miracles: a bayesian interpretation of David Hume's analysis. The Philosophical Quarterly 37:166-187.
1984. R. Ariew. The Duhem Thesis. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 35:313-325.
1964. R. Hofstadter. The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Harper's Magazine, Nov:77-86.
1890. T.C. Chamberlin. The method of multiple working hypotheses. Science 15:92-96.

Science:

2011. R. Woods et al. Second order selection for evolvability in a large Escherichia coli population. Science 331:1433-1436.
2011. N. Shea et al. Three epigenetic information channels and their different roles in evolution. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, doi: 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2011.02235.x.
2011. D.G. Blanchflower & A.J. Oswald. International happiness. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 16668.
2010. L. Damisch et al. Keep your fingers crossed! How superstition improves performance. Psychological Science.
2009. I. Pyysiainen & M. Hauser. The origins of religion: evolved adaptation or by-product? Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
2009. J. Couzin. Friendship as a health factor. Science 323:454-457.
2008. J.A. Whitson & A.D. Galinsky. Lacking control increases illusory pattern perception. Science 322:115-117.
2008. D. Jablonski. Species selection: Theory and data. Annual Review of Ecology Evolution and Systematics 39:501-524.
2008. E. Jablonka & G. Raz. Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance: Prevalence, mechanisms, and implications for the study of heredity. Quarterly Review of Biology 84:131-176.
2007. K. Sand-Jensen. How to write consistently boring scientific literature. Oikos, doi: 10.1111/j.2007.0030-1299.15674.x
2007. R. Bukowski et al. Predictions of the properties of water from first principles. Science 315:1249-1252.
2005. M.J. West-Eberhard. Phenotypic accommodation adaptive innovation due to developmental plasticity. Journal of Experimental Zoology 304B:610-618.
1996. G.P. Wagner & L. Altenberg. Complex Adaptations and the Evolution of Evolvability. Evolution 50:967-976.
1995. C. Wedekind et al. Mhc dependent mate preferences in humans. Proceedings of the Royal Society Biological Sciences 260:245-249.
1994. J. Cohen. The earth is round (p<.05). American Psychologist 49:997-1003.
1992. S.A. Frank & M. Slatkin. Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 7:92-95.
1991. P. Alberch. From genes to phenotype dynamical systems and evolvability. Genetica 84:5-11.
1987. L.V. Hedges. How hard is hard science, how soft is soft science? American Psychologist 42:443-455.
1979. S.J. Gould & R.C. Lewontin. The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B205:581-598.
1974. R.C. Lewontin. The analysis of variance and the analysis of causes. American Journal of Human Genetics 26:400-411.
1958. R.M. Cooper & J.P. Zubek. Effects of enriched and restricted early environments on the learning ability of bright and dull rats. Canadian Journal of Psychology 12:159-164.

The beauty of the Daleks

2011-10-28T09:45:00.000-04:00

by Massimo Pigliucci

RS collaborator Tunc Iyriboz, having a friendly chat
with a Dalek at New York ComicCon 2011

As I mentioned before, I’m making my way through the delightful (if somewhat redundant, in places) Doctor Who and Philosophy: Bigger on the Inside. This time I have been intrigued by chapter 27, penned by Clive Cazeaux and entitled “Beauty is not in the eye-stalk of the beholder.” The chapter is about aesthetics, and the author begins by admitting that he finds the Daleks beautiful. So do I.

Before we get to the meat (or, as the case may be, the metal) of the matter I need to explain who the Daleks are, for those poor souls who have not actually watched the good Doctor battling them. The Daleks are an ancient race of aliens that was once proud and hopeful, just like humans. But an all-out nuclear war with their neighbors, the Thals, changed both their external form and their character (via radiation-induced mutations). They are now entirely emotionless creatures, shaped like an octopus and encased in a metallic armor, whose only purpose is to “ex-ter-mi-nate” anything that is not a Dalek. We encounter them for the first time in 1963 (you may remember, that was the peak of the Cold War here on earth), and have been (briefly) seen last in the season finale of the 2011 series, “The wedding of River Song.” I’m sure they’ll be back for more.

In his essay, Cazeaux explores what it could possibly mean to find a Dalek beautiful (to a human being), and in so doing takes his reader through a panoply of philosophical understandings of beauty, from the “it’s just in the eye of the beholder” view (which is actually historically very recent) through Pythagoras’ and Plato’s idea that beauty was respectively the reflection of universal harmonies or of immutable Forms, and proceeding by way of Kant’s and Hegel’s takes on aesthetics.

Cazeaux is careful in distinguishing between “beauty in art” and “beauty in nature,” and he tells us that when he thinks the Daleks are beautiful he is speaking not from within, but from without the Doctor Who universe — in modern aesthetic parlance he is referring to the Daleks as beauty in art. Now, according to Kant, perception of beauty in nature is “higher” than perception of beauty in art, because he related aesthetics to our awareness of how our minds fit with reality (i.e., nature). Hegel held to pretty much the opposite position, getting his starting point by his contention that there is no distinction between the world and mind (he was an idealist). For him beauty in art was superior because it involves the perception of ideas, not of simple matter.

Problem is, I’m no idealist, so Hegel resonates very little with me. As for Kant, he certainly had a point about our perception of beauty having to do with how we relate to nature (and, therefore, of artistic beauty being derivative, though I wouldn’t use the term “lower”), particularly because aesthetic perception surely has to do with the way our brains work (and evolved).

Still, I was more interested in Cazeaux’s discussion of the concept of beauty for the ancient Greeks, and particularly for Plato. In this case, to find something beautiful means to be fascinated by that something as an object that one engages with (remember, again, that we are outside the Whoverse, or we would most definitely not find the idea of engaging the Daleks particularly appealing). But of course for the Greeks beauty was opposed to monstrosity, and it is much easier to think of the Daleks as monsters than as things of beauty. Cazeaux here cites the 13th century thinker Alexander of Hales, according to whom monstrosity is indeed opposite to beauty, but it is a necessary condition for the latter — just like according to some theologians evil is necessary in order to have good.

Again, though, while I find the Greek notion of the relationship between beauty and monstrosity pretty sensible, it is hard to imagine why one needs the latter in order to appreciate the former (for reasons similar to why the above mentioned theological defense against the problem of evil also fails to convince). Besides, the Daleks would definitely qualify as monsters in this case, and it wouldn’t make much sense for Cazeaux and me to say that we find them beautiful.

Cazeaux mentions what to me sounds like the best answer, but dismisses it as untenable. According to the formalism school in aesthetics, judgments of beauty refer only to the form of something, quite independently of its function. The Daleks, therefore, can be beautiful because of their smooth metal construction (and, in the latest versions, splendid colors), quite independently of the fact that they are out to get people for no particularly good reason. (Incidentally, apparently formalism is actually traceable to Kant.) Indeed, Cazeaux mentions an observation made by Adrian Wiltshire a few years ago, according to whom the Daleks look a lot like the flying city designed by the Russian Constructivist Georgii Krutikov back in 1928. I guess I better look up constructivism.

Cazeaux doesn’t like the formalist approach because it is a way to deny the nature of the Daleks: they become like sculptures, devoid of all their characteristics as monsters. (I find that to be in contradiction to his suggestion of examining the issue from outside the Whoverse, but okay.) Still, he doesn’t really give his readers a more palatable alternative, leaving us with the puzzling question of why people like him and me can find the Daleks to be beautiful. I’d like an evolutionary psychologist to give this one a try, just to be able to make fun of their just-so stories. Seriously, though, to say that beauty is “subjective” (in the eye of the beholder, and so on) doesn’t really solve anything, it simply acknowledges variation about aesthetic judgment without really telling us what the latter consists of. We clearly do find some things beautiful and others ugly, and this is by far not limited to the sort of objects that made a difference for our survival and reproduction in the past. I suspect aesthetics is eventually going to be a major area of development of a more complex theory of human nature, one that takes seriously both our biological roots and our unique ability to evolve culturally. But for now the question then remains: why, exactly, are the Daleks beautiful?

Michael's Picks

2011-10-26T09:01:00.001-04:00

by Michael De Dora

* After the death of a 2-year-old Chinese girl who was run over by a car twice and then ignored by 18 passers-by, Chinese lawmakers are debating a law to punish passers-by who do not help people in obvious trouble.

* I recently argued on this blog that morality both can and should be legislated. Turns out the editorial staff at The Memphis Flyer agree. It also turns out that Andrew Sullivan was paying attention.

* Does state-mandated sexual education undermine parental rights? That’s what religious believers argue.

* Support for use of the death penalty on persons convicted of murder has hit a 39-year low in the U.S. after dropping from 64 to 61 percent, according to a new Gallup survey.

* How about this for a new blog: Occupy Philosophy, devoted to philosophical discourse on the Occupy movement.

* The number of four-year philosophy graduates has grown 46 percent in the last decade, surpassing the growth rates of programs such as psychology and history.

* We’re in the worst economy since the Great Depression, and what are Republicans doing? Cutting programs Americans desperately need to get through it, says Robert Reich.

* If you haven’t heard the story of Christopher Hitchens and Mason Crumpacker, click here right now.

The Varieties of Skepticism

2011-10-24T07:07:00.000-04:00

All of us who are involved in the skeptics movement are regularly confronted with one of two reactions when revealing ourselves as skeptics: either that we are cynics or that, like the classic skeptics, we don't believe that anything is knowable.

In this episode, Massimo and Julia take us trough the history of skepticism. From its roots in ancient Greece, to Descartes, the last rationalist, to David Hume, the father of modern skepticism, and to today's skeptic movement. Also, is anything really knowable? How do we know that we really exist and are not residents of a cosmic holodeck?

Engineers vs intellectuals? How Timothy Ferris gets it spectacularly wrong

2011-10-23T12:45:00.000-04:00

by Massimo Pigliucci

Timothy Ferris is a writer over at Wired magazine, and his byline boasts that he has been “called the best science writer in the English language” as well as “the best science writer of his generation.” Perhaps, though such virtuosity was hardly on display in a recent piece Ferris penned (okay, keyboarded) entitled “The world of the intellectual vs the world of the engineer.” It is a quasi incoherent rant about the evils of intellectualisms and the virtues of applied science. Ferris writes, I would argue as an intellectual, in one of the most intellectual of contemporary publications, about how the battle between intellectualism and science-engineering has been waged since the beginning of the printing press. The results are in - science/engineering won hands down - time to close the curtain on intellectualism.

Ferris engages in such a stereotypical piece of anti-intellectualism that Richard Hofstadter (the sociologist who authored the classic Anti-intellectualism in American Life) could have used him as a poster boy. Hofstadter defined anti-intellectualism as “a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life.” Indeed, Hofstadter even identified the precise category of anti-intellectualism to which Ferris’ rant belongs: instrumentalism, or the idea that only practical knowledge matters and should be cultivated. In America, the attitude traces its roots to the robber barons of the 19th century, as exemplified by the attitude of Andrew Carnegie about classical studies: a waste of “precious years trying to extract education from an ignorant past.” Of course this is the same Andrew Carnegie who established a university in Pittsburgh, donated money to public libraries, and founded the prestigious Carnegie Hall in New York City — all bastions of intellectualism of a high caliber.

But back to Ferris. He makes his case by cherry picking examples, distorting history, and simply ignoring what is not convenient for his thesis. We discover that Rousseau, one of the most influential philosophers of modern times (particularly when it comes to his analysis of the social contract, as well as his writings on education) was less than useless because, ahem, Robespierre, Hitler and the anti-vaccination crusaders are his “disciples.” You know a guy is short on arguments when he has to invoke Hitler to make his point, and that happens shortly after the beginning of Ferris’ “essay” (I use the term loosely because Ferris probably wouldn’t want his writing style to be compared to that of the inventor of the form, the French intellectual Michel de Montaigne). Things go rapidly down the drain from there.

Ferris’ complaint is becoming standard fare among scientistically inclined people: all the good stuff about modern society has been delivered to us on a silver plate courtesy of science and engineering (health care, mobile phones), while all the useless and even pernicious theories (Freudianism, Marxism) have come from armchair intellectuals. Time to throw the bums out and embrace our only savior, let’s close down humanities departments and give cart blanche to the scientists to help us achieve paradise on earth.

For Ferris, intellectuals only churn up destructive ideologies (communism, fascism), and he doesn’t forget to bring up the postmodernists, who hypocritically dismiss science as just another social construction while happily typing away their nonsense on the latest Apple computer.

Except, of course, that five minute of serious reflection should have made Ferris realize that he created a straw man with precious little correspondence to reality. To begin with, capitalism and democracies are also the result of “armchair speculations” by intellectuals, from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill, not to mention the founding fathers of the United States of America. And part of the reason science is so well regarded these days is because of the preparatory groundwork work laid out by the intellectuals of the French Enlightenment, including some of Rousseau’s strongest critics, like Voltaire. While science has without a doubt made our lives more comfortable and last significantly longer, it has had relatively little directly to do with the development of the above mentioned ideas, which are the true backbone of the progressive society that Ferris praises so much.

Moreover, science itself has been the handmaiden and enabler of much pernicious ideology, beginning with the technological efficiency with which fascism and communism were able to kill tens of millions of people during the 20th century. Science is a tool in the hands of human beings, and it is our thinking about values that determines whether that tool is going to be employed to save millions of lives from smallpox or to weaponize the very same disease into a lethal carrier of death. And where are those values going to come from, if not through reasoned, “intellectual” reflection about what we care about and what we ought to do (or, perhaps more importantly, not do)?

I am certainly no friend of postmodernism, but even that somewhat misguided enterprise should not be dismissed out of hand. True, postmodern critics of science as a way of knowing do make fools of themselves, and they should rightly be chastised for that (though, let’s also remember plenty of instances in which scientists have said really silly things, as in the case of the astronomer who in 1957 predicted with confidence that humanity will never be able to put an artificial satellite in orbit around earth — a few months later Sputnik went up). But postmodern critique of power structures, both within science and in society at large, is spot on. Only a naive outsider could possibly imagine that the hall of science departments — where I have spent a good chunk of my life — are idyllic havens devoted to the search for truth. Yes, truth is being sought, but petty vendettas, systematic gender and ethnic discrimination, power plays, vanity plays, and other wasteful or destructive behaviors go on all the time, just as in any other human social activity.

No, Mr. Ferris, it is only in the misguided minds of anti-intellectuals like you that there would be a war going on between C.P. Snow’s two cultures, and it is your destructive type of anti-intellectualism that risks undermining our best efforts to build a better society. To put it as Kant (another giant of intellectualism) did, “Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.” And he wasn’t talking just about scientific theories.

What to make of the “European problem”

2011-10-21T09:01:00.002-04:00

by Massimo Pigliucci

There has been much talk of late about the “failure” of the European system, with predictable and hardly repressed glee on the part of libertarians and right wingers alike to the effect that the financial turmoil across the Pond clearly and finally shows that the social-democratic approach to capitalism is bound to fail. Actually, that is precisely not the lesson to be learned from what has been happening lately. In fact, quite the opposite.

To begin with, of course, even if the European system is in trouble (and it surely is), there ain’t much to snicker about on this side of the Pond either. The US financial-political system is still going through a quasi-depression from which it is hard to see when it will recover, and as recently as three years ago it single handedly caused a worldwide financial collapse from which the rest of the planet is still reeling. So, please, my American friends, stop the patting of your own backs, because it is richly underserved.

Moreover, while in terms of the UN’s Human Development Index, the US ranks a (healthy, to be sure) #6, this is below Australia, Norway, Netherlands, Ireland and Canada (3 out of 6 of which are European countries), and slightly above New Zealand, Finland, Iceland, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Denmark, France, Sweden, and Spain (all except the first, European countries, though not all part of the EU). In terms of income equality (measured for instance by the Gini coefficient), the lowest disparity is found in Denmark, Japan, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Norway, Slovakia, Bosnia, Hungary, Finland, Ukraine, Germany, Slovenia, Croatia, Austria and Bulgaria (again, all European, except for the second one), while you have to go all the way down to #72 — right between Turkmenistan and Turkey — to find the good old US of A. Not much to brag about.

Anyway, back to the European crisis. It is most certainly not caused by “socialism,” partly because no EU country is purely socialistic, as difficult as this is for much of the American public to understand. European countries all have variants of the same system that the US has adopted (pace much right wing rhetoric): a social-democracy where a capitalistic system is kept in check by regulations and where there is a number of social nets in place.

No, the reason why Europe is in trouble is because it is not politically integrated. Europeans have known this for a long time, of course, but it is becoming painfully clear that one cannot have a common currency if there isn’t also a common economic policy, and one cannot have the latter without political integration. Of course, the creation of the Euro zone back in 1999 was supposed to be an important step toward political integration within the EU, a project that goes back at least to Giuseppe Mazzini’s “Giovine Europa” (link in Italian) movement established in 1834.

But two things happened: too many countries joined the EU too quickly, suddenly bringing in too much political and cultural disagreement (not to mention economic difficulties), largely from Eastern Europe. And the European Parliament has simply never been given sufficient supra-national authority to be able to establish coherent lines of political and economic action. In other words, Europe risks failure not because “the European way” doesn’t work, but because the European way hasn’t been pursued far enough quickly enough. The choice the EU countries now face is either to reverse what they have done over the past dozen years and go back to a loosely integrated EU, or to accelerate things forward as they should have done when Mazzini first envisioned it. I hope for the latter, but I fear the former.

This insanity of having a Union without sufficient integration is, of course, not limited to Europe alone. Look no further than the United States, where citizen’s quality of life, economic and job prospects, education, health care and the like are dramatically different depending on whether one happens to live in Alabama or Massachusetts, to take just two of the obvious examples. Indeed, it is often the case that you hear that the State of, say, Alabama, competes with the state of, say, Georgia, to lure business away, and does so by loosening regulations and/or by giving said business even more tax breaks than it already enjoys. This idiotic internecine game can only have one outcome: a rush to the lowest possible denominator in terms of business taxes, environmental and labor regulations, workers’ compensations, and the like. Everybody loses except large corporations that can play States against each other for their own greed.

Of course, in the US this situation is somewhat mitigated by the presence of a Federal government with much stronger powers than the European Parliament (which is, of course, precisely what Republicans — in the pockets of big industry — desperately want to weaken). And that is what both the US and Europe can learn from all this: on the one hand, America’s fixation with “States' rights” is quaint and little more than an excuse to cave in to the demands of large corporations, leading to gross inequality for American citizens who happen to live in different states; on the other hand, Europe’s inability to make the final leap into full integration is exactly what has caused the current debacle to begin with. If only we truly had the United States of America and the United States of Europe both American and European citizens would be much better off.