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THE SPLINTERED MIND: WHAT SCHOOLS HAVE THE MOST RACIALLY University of Alabama in Huntsville (4/95) 4. University of Nevada-Reno (4/126) 5. California State University-Long Beach (8/262) Given the small numbers, extending beyond the top five probably doesn't make sense. The 9th and 10th ranked campuses only graduated 2 THE SPLINTERED MIND: APPLYING TO PHD PROGRAMS IN It is extremely difficult to gain admittance to the most elite philosophy PhD programs if you aren't from an elite university or liberal arts college. On the other hand, mid-ranked PhD programs like UCR admit students from a wide range of undergraduate institutions. The top 1-2 philosophy majors at U.C. Riverside every year have GPAsaround 3.9.
THE SPLINTERED MIND: AARON JAMES'S THEORY OF ASSHOLES The nature and management of assholes -- or as I generally prefer to say, jerks-- deserves far more attention than it has received thus far in moral psychology.Thus, I commend to your attention Aaron James's recent book Assholes: A Theory.. James defines an asshole as follows. THE SPLINTERED MIND: THE ODDS OF GETTING THREE CONSECUTIVE Summing up these three paths: .000003 + .000006 + .000202 = .000211. In other words, the chance of three wars in a row is 0.0211% or 1 in 4739. Now for some leftover turkey. As it happens we were playing the variant game Modern War -- which is much THE SPLINTERED MIND: DO ETHICS CLASSES INFLUENCE STUDENTS Julia Riber Pitt said. For me, it wasn't too much ethics courses, but rather discussions on the topic with my friends outside of class. Of course, the courses I took in college as a philosophy undergrad did help to some degree, since most of them clarified certain concepts. APPLYING TO PHILOSOPHY PH.D. PROGRAMS, PART I: SHOULD YOU Anonymous said Eric, Does the data you have present not scream at you that something, somewhere, is going horribly wrong? It almost knocked me down. If philosophy graduate programs were genuine competitive businesses, they would go down in flames -- imagine a skill-intensive company where 50% of its new hires quit before they finished training, or before they finished their first big project. THE SPLINTERED MINDBRYAN VAN NORDENJUSTIN TIWALDMANUEL VARGASJONATHAN ICHIKAWACARRIE FIGDOR Just out at The Philosophers' Magazine!. This is part of an special issue on diversity in philosophy at TPM, also with contributions by Simon Fokt, Helen Beebee, Zahra Thani, Shen-li Liao, Ian James Kidd, and Rochelle Duford.. In our contribution to the issue, Liam Kofi Bright, Carolyn Dicey Jennings, Morgan Thompson, Eric Winsberg, and I looked systematically at data on racial/ethnic and THE SPLINTERED MIND: THE 295 MOST-CITED CONTEMPORARY My son David Schwitzgebel is back in town with new mad computer skills, so I thought I'd have him update his 2014 scrape of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy bibliographies. Below are the 295 most-cited authors (including only authors born 1900 or later). THE SPLINTERED MIND: HOW TO PUBLISH A BOOK IN PHILOSOPHY A couple of weeks ago, I signed my fourth book contract (working title, The Weirdness of the World, Princeton University Press). I thought I'd share my impressions on book publishing in academic philosophy since I haven't seen any good, detailed how-to guides (and to help others avoid my mistakes). THE SPLINTERED MIND: TWO KINDS OF ETHICAL THINKING? The two kinds of ethical thinking that Sigrist identifies are ends of a continuum that we all regularly traverse, rather than discrete patterns of thinking that are walled off from each other without mutual influence. In my work and my personal life, I try to make a point of blending the personal with the universal and the everydaywith the
THE SPLINTERED MIND: WHAT SCHOOLS HAVE THE MOST RACIALLY University of Alabama in Huntsville (4/95) 4. University of Nevada-Reno (4/126) 5. California State University-Long Beach (8/262) Given the small numbers, extending beyond the top five probably doesn't make sense. The 9th and 10th ranked campuses only graduated 2 THE SPLINTERED MIND: APPLYING TO PHD PROGRAMS IN It is extremely difficult to gain admittance to the most elite philosophy PhD programs if you aren't from an elite university or liberal arts college. On the other hand, mid-ranked PhD programs like UCR admit students from a wide range of undergraduate institutions. The top 1-2 philosophy majors at U.C. Riverside every year have GPAsaround 3.9.
THE SPLINTERED MIND: AARON JAMES'S THEORY OF ASSHOLES The nature and management of assholes -- or as I generally prefer to say, jerks-- deserves far more attention than it has received thus far in moral psychology.Thus, I commend to your attention Aaron James's recent book Assholes: A Theory.. James defines an asshole as follows. THE SPLINTERED MIND: THE ODDS OF GETTING THREE CONSECUTIVE Summing up these three paths: .000003 + .000006 + .000202 = .000211. In other words, the chance of three wars in a row is 0.0211% or 1 in 4739. Now for some leftover turkey. As it happens we were playing the variant game Modern War -- which is much THE SPLINTERED MIND: DO ETHICS CLASSES INFLUENCE STUDENTS Julia Riber Pitt said. For me, it wasn't too much ethics courses, but rather discussions on the topic with my friends outside of class. Of course, the courses I took in college as a philosophy undergrad did help to some degree, since most of them clarified certain concepts. APPLYING TO PHILOSOPHY PH.D. PROGRAMS, PART I: SHOULD YOU Anonymous said Eric, Does the data you have present not scream at you that something, somewhere, is going horribly wrong? It almost knocked me down. If philosophy graduate programs were genuine competitive businesses, they would go down in flames -- imagine a skill-intensive company where 50% of its new hires quit before they finished training, or before they finished their first big project. THE SPLINTERED MIND: DIVERSITY AND EQUITY IN RECRUITMENT How philosophers hire, tenure, and promote faculty in the U.S. likely contributes to philosophy’s low overall demographic diversity. For example, a recent study shows that the proportion of women in tenure track positions is lowest in the most prestigious positions and programs, and women are especially underrepresented at the highest professorial ranks (Conklin, Artamonova, and Hassoun THE SPLINTERED MIND: TWO KINDS OF ETHICAL THINKING? The two kinds of ethical thinking that Sigrist identifies are ends of a continuum that we all regularly traverse, rather than discrete patterns of thinking that are walled off from each other without mutual influence. In my work and my personal life, I try to make a point of blending the personal with the universal and the everydaywith the
THE SPLINTERED MIND: WHAT ZOOM REMOVES It is a device for communication. And my point here isn’t that Zoom is somehow “fake” communication, or that virtual meetings aren’t real. It’s that Zoom gets rid of all the other stuff that surrounds a communicative encounter. It makes communication frictionless. It THE SPLINTERED MIND: TOP SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY The New Yorker, McSweeney's, Tin House, Conjunctions, Boston Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Harper's, and Paris Review are literary magazines that occasionally publish science fiction or fantasy. Slate and Buzzfeed are popular magazines, and Omni, Cosmos, and MIT Technology Review are popular science magazines, which publish a bitof science
THE SPLINTERED MIND: ON SHARING UMBRELLAS Sometimes I love a cloudburst. You're walking downtown. Suddenly the rain starts and you're under some random awning, shoulder to shoulder with strangers, sharing complaints and guesses about the weather. THE SPLINTERED MIND: WHY ARE WE SUCH BAD INTROSPECTORS? Introspective attention to experience is hardly a habitual practice for most, perhaps any, of us, except maybe a few dedicated meditators of a certain sort. If accurate introspection requires a degree of skill, as I suspect it does, in most people the skill is uncultivated. Furthermore, relatedly, experience is difficult to remember: Generally THE SPLINTERED MIND: GENDER DISPARITY IN PHILOSOPHY, BY The National Center of Education Statistics keeps a database of bachelor's degree recipients at accredited colleges in the U.S., currently running through the 2018-2019 academic year. Search "NCES" on The Splintered Mind and you'll see my many posts drawing on this database.. Here's something I noticed today, in the course of preparing a new paper on demographic trends in academic THE SPLINTERED MIND: CREEPS AND CREEPINESS Oddly, perhaps, the etymology of a person as a creep is quite different.Per the OED, originally a "creep" was a thief who crept around quietly, a stealthy robber, especially one who worked in a brothel. The contemporary use of "creep" as a noun to refer to a person no longer suggests thievery, but some of the sexualized tinge remains: The paradigmatic creep has sneaky, sexual intentions -- the THE SPLINTERED MIND: MY WORKDAY AS A PHILOSOPHY PROFESSOR Good information is hard to come by. I will describe my own workload and typical workday, as one data point. I am a full professor of philosophy, with a six-digit salary and tenure at UC Riverside, whose philosophy PhD program is ranked 28th in the US by the Philosophical Gourmet. Our normal teaching load is four 10-week courses (plus final APPLYING TO PHILOSOPHY PH.D. PROGRAMS, PART I: SHOULD YOU Anonymous said Eric, Does the data you have present not scream at you that something, somewhere, is going horribly wrong? It almost knocked me down. If philosophy graduate programs were genuine competitive businesses, they would go down in flames -- imagine a skill-intensive company where 50% of its new hires quit before they finished training, or before they finished their first big project. THE SPLINTERED MINDBRYAN VAN NORDENJUSTIN TIWALDMANUEL VARGASJONATHAN ICHIKAWACARRIE FIGDORTHE BLISSFUL MIND BLOGCALM YOUR MINDHEALTHY MIND BLOGSUNFLOWER STATE OF MIND BLOG Just out at The Philosophers' Magazine!. This is part of an special issue on diversity in philosophy at TPM, also with contributions by Simon Fokt, Helen Beebee, Zahra Thani, Shen-li Liao, Ian James Kidd, and Rochelle Duford.. In our contribution to the issue, Liam Kofi Bright, Carolyn Dicey Jennings, Morgan Thompson, Eric Winsberg, and I looked systematically at data on racial/ethnic and THE SPLINTERED MIND: TWO KINDS OF ETHICAL THINKING? The two kinds of ethical thinking that Sigrist identifies are ends of a continuum that we all regularly traverse, rather than discrete patterns of thinking that are walled off from each other without mutual influence. In my work and my personal life, I try to make a point of blending the personal with the universal and the everydaywith the
THE SPLINTERED MIND: THE 295 MOST-CITED CONTEMPORARY My son David Schwitzgebel is back in town with new mad computer skills, so I thought I'd have him update his 2014 scrape of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy bibliographies. Below are the 295 most-cited authors (including only authors born 1900 or later). THE SPLINTERED MIND: ON SHARING UMBRELLAS Sometimes I love a cloudburst. You're walking downtown. Suddenly the rain starts and you're under some random awning, shoulder to shoulder with strangers, sharing complaints and guesses about the weather. THE SPLINTERED MIND: HOW TO PUBLISH A BOOK IN PHILOSOPHYAMAZON PHILOSOPHY BOOKSBEST PHILOSOPHY BOOKSFREE PHILOSOPHY BOOKSGOOD PHILOSOPHY BOOKSNEW PHILOSOPHY BOOKSNEW PHILOSOPHY BOOKS A couple of weeks ago, I signed my fourth book contract (working title, The Weirdness of the World, Princeton University Press). I thought I'd share my impressions on book publishing in academic philosophy since I haven't seen any good, detailed how-to guides (and to help others avoid my mistakes). THE SPLINTERED MIND: TOP SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASYBEST SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINESSCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINES ONLINESCI FI AND FANTASY MAGAZINESSCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINES LISTSCIENCE FICTION SHORT STORY MAGAZINESFANTASY SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE The New Yorker, Tin House, McSweeney's, Conjunctions, Harper's, Beloit Fiction Journal, Boston Review, and Paris Review are literary magazines that occasionally publish science fiction or fantasy. Cosmos, Slate, and Buzzfeed are popular magazines that publish a bit of science fiction on the side. e-flux is a wide-ranging arts journal. THE SPLINTERED MIND: THE EMOTIONAL PSYCHOLOGY OF LYNCHING A barrage of rocks shattered the jailhouse windows, sending dozens of frantic inmates in search of cover. A sixteen-year-old boy, James Cameron, one of the three intended victims, paralyzed by fear and incomprehension, recognized familiar faces in the crowd -- schoolmates, and customers whose lawns he had mowed and whose shoes hehad polished
THE SPLINTERED MIND: AARON JAMES'S THEORY OF ASSHOLES The nature and management of assholes -- or as I generally prefer to say, jerks-- deserves far more attention than it has received thus far in moral psychology.Thus, I commend to your attention Aaron James's recent book Assholes: A Theory.. James defines an asshole as follows. THE SPLINTERED MIND: DO ETHICS CLASSES INFLUENCE STUDENTS Julia Riber Pitt said. For me, it wasn't too much ethics courses, but rather discussions on the topic with my friends outside of class. Of course, the courses I took in college as a philosophy undergrad did help to some degree, since most of them clarified certain concepts. WHEN OUR EYES ARE CLOSED, WHAT DO WE Anonymous said It seems variable to me. When I close my eyes at first it is difficult to tell what the experience seems to be of, but it turns black when I put my hand over my eye (not pressing on the eye but just preventing light from getting through my eyelid). THE SPLINTERED MINDBRYAN VAN NORDENJUSTIN TIWALDMANUEL VARGASJONATHAN ICHIKAWACARRIE FIGDORTHE BLISSFUL MIND BLOGCALM YOUR MINDHEALTHY MIND BLOGSUNFLOWER STATE OF MIND BLOG Just out at The Philosophers' Magazine!. This is part of an special issue on diversity in philosophy at TPM, also with contributions by Simon Fokt, Helen Beebee, Zahra Thani, Shen-li Liao, Ian James Kidd, and Rochelle Duford.. In our contribution to the issue, Liam Kofi Bright, Carolyn Dicey Jennings, Morgan Thompson, Eric Winsberg, and I looked systematically at data on racial/ethnic and THE SPLINTERED MIND: TWO KINDS OF ETHICAL THINKING? The two kinds of ethical thinking that Sigrist identifies are ends of a continuum that we all regularly traverse, rather than discrete patterns of thinking that are walled off from each other without mutual influence. In my work and my personal life, I try to make a point of blending the personal with the universal and the everydaywith the
THE SPLINTERED MIND: THE 295 MOST-CITED CONTEMPORARY My son David Schwitzgebel is back in town with new mad computer skills, so I thought I'd have him update his 2014 scrape of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy bibliographies. Below are the 295 most-cited authors (including only authors born 1900 or later). THE SPLINTERED MIND: ON SHARING UMBRELLAS Sometimes I love a cloudburst. You're walking downtown. Suddenly the rain starts and you're under some random awning, shoulder to shoulder with strangers, sharing complaints and guesses about the weather. THE SPLINTERED MIND: HOW TO PUBLISH A BOOK IN PHILOSOPHYAMAZON PHILOSOPHY BOOKSBEST PHILOSOPHY BOOKSFREE PHILOSOPHY BOOKSGOOD PHILOSOPHY BOOKSNEW PHILOSOPHY BOOKSNEW PHILOSOPHY BOOKS A couple of weeks ago, I signed my fourth book contract (working title, The Weirdness of the World, Princeton University Press). I thought I'd share my impressions on book publishing in academic philosophy since I haven't seen any good, detailed how-to guides (and to help others avoid my mistakes). THE SPLINTERED MIND: TOP SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASYBEST SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINESSCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINES ONLINESCI FI AND FANTASY MAGAZINESSCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINES LISTSCIENCE FICTION SHORT STORY MAGAZINESFANTASY SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE The New Yorker, Tin House, McSweeney's, Conjunctions, Harper's, Beloit Fiction Journal, Boston Review, and Paris Review are literary magazines that occasionally publish science fiction or fantasy. Cosmos, Slate, and Buzzfeed are popular magazines that publish a bit of science fiction on the side. e-flux is a wide-ranging arts journal. THE SPLINTERED MIND: THE EMOTIONAL PSYCHOLOGY OF LYNCHING A barrage of rocks shattered the jailhouse windows, sending dozens of frantic inmates in search of cover. A sixteen-year-old boy, James Cameron, one of the three intended victims, paralyzed by fear and incomprehension, recognized familiar faces in the crowd -- schoolmates, and customers whose lawns he had mowed and whose shoes hehad polished
THE SPLINTERED MIND: AARON JAMES'S THEORY OF ASSHOLES The nature and management of assholes -- or as I generally prefer to say, jerks-- deserves far more attention than it has received thus far in moral psychology.Thus, I commend to your attention Aaron James's recent book Assholes: A Theory.. James defines an asshole as follows. THE SPLINTERED MIND: DO ETHICS CLASSES INFLUENCE STUDENTS Julia Riber Pitt said. For me, it wasn't too much ethics courses, but rather discussions on the topic with my friends outside of class. Of course, the courses I took in college as a philosophy undergrad did help to some degree, since most of them clarified certain concepts. WHEN OUR EYES ARE CLOSED, WHAT DO WE Anonymous said It seems variable to me. When I close my eyes at first it is difficult to tell what the experience seems to be of, but it turns black when I put my hand over my eye (not pressing on the eye but just preventing light from getting through my eyelid). NAZI PHILOSOPHERS, WORLD WAR I, AND THE GRAND WISDOM Now let’s think about Nazis. Nazism is an excellent test case of the Grand Wisdom Hypothesis, since pretty much everyone now agrees that Nazism is extremely morally odious. Germany had a robust philosophical tradition in the 1930s, and excellent records are available on individual professors’ participation in or resistance to the Nazimovement.
THE SPLINTERED MIND: HOW TO PUBLISH A BOOK IN PHILOSOPHY A couple of weeks ago, I signed my fourth book contract (working title, The Weirdness of the World, Princeton University Press). I thought I'd share my impressions on book publishing in academic philosophy since I haven't seen any good, detailed how-to guides (and to help others avoid my mistakes). THE SPLINTERED MIND: CREEPS AND CREEPINESS Oddly, perhaps, the etymology of a person as a creep is quite different.Per the OED, originally a "creep" was a thief who crept around quietly, a stealthy robber, especially one who worked in a brothel. The contemporary use of "creep" as a noun to refer to a person no longer suggests thievery, but some of the sexualized tinge remains: The paradigmatic creep has sneaky, sexual intentions -- the THE SPLINTERED MIND: WHY ARE WE SUCH BAD INTROSPECTORS? Introspective attention to experience is hardly a habitual practice for most, perhaps any, of us, except maybe a few dedicated meditators of a certain sort. If accurate introspection requires a degree of skill, as I suspect it does, in most people the skill is uncultivated. Furthermore, relatedly, experience is difficult to remember: Generally THE SPLINTERED MIND: THOUGHTS ON CONJUGAL LOVE In conjugal love, one commits to seeing one’s life always with the other in view. One commits to pursuing one’s major projects, even when alone, in a kind of implicit conjunction with the other. One’s life becomes a co-authored work. Parental love for a young child might be purer and more unconditional than conjugal love. THE SPLINTERED MIND: THE EMOTIONAL PSYCHOLOGY OF LYNCHING A barrage of rocks shattered the jailhouse windows, sending dozens of frantic inmates in search of cover. A sixteen-year-old boy, James Cameron, one of the three intended victims, paralyzed by fear and incomprehension, recognized familiar faces in the crowd -- schoolmates, and customers whose lawns he had mowed and whose shoes hehad polished
DEPRESSIVE THINKING STYLES AND Depressive thinking styles are, perhaps, the opposite of this blithe and easy self-confidence. People with mild depression will tend, I suspect, to be less easily satisfied with their first thought, at least on matters of importance to them. Before taking a public stand, they might spend more time imagining critics attacking Position A, andhow
THE SPLINTERED MIND: MY WORKDAY AS A PHILOSOPHY PROFESSOR Good information is hard to come by. I will describe my own workload and typical workday, as one data point. I am a full professor of philosophy, with a six-digit salary and tenure at UC Riverside, whose philosophy PhD program is ranked 28th in the US by the Philosophical Gourmet. Our normal teaching load is four 10-week courses (plus final THE SPLINTERED MIND: DO YOU MOSTLY SEE DOUBLE? The great majority of objects, comprising all those that were farther or nearer than this point, were all seen double (1910/1962, III.7). The eminent 18th-century philosopher Thomas Reid writes: We find that when the eyes are sound and perfect, and the axes of both directed to one point, an object placed in that point is seen single. THE SPLINTERED MIND: THE GENDER MIGRATION OF NAMES Male to Female: (apologies for the small reproduction: click to enlarge) As is evident from this list, 5 of the top 25 girls' names in 2000 (Madison, Taylor, Lauren, Sydney, Morgan) were boys' names in 1900! The gender migration of girls' names to THE SPLINTERED MINDBRYAN VAN NORDENJUSTIN TIWALDMANUEL VARGASJONATHAN ICHIKAWACARRIE FIGDORTHE BLISSFUL MIND BLOGCALM YOUR MINDHEALTHY MIND BLOGSUNFLOWER STATE OF MIND BLOG Just out at The Philosophers' Magazine!. This is part of an special issue on diversity in philosophy at TPM, also with contributions by Simon Fokt, Helen Beebee, Zahra Thani, Shen-li Liao, Ian James Kidd, and Rochelle Duford.. In our contribution to the issue, Liam Kofi Bright, Carolyn Dicey Jennings, Morgan Thompson, Eric Winsberg, and I looked systematically at data on racial/ethnic and THE SPLINTERED MIND: TWO KINDS OF ETHICAL THINKING? The two kinds of ethical thinking that Sigrist identifies are ends of a continuum that we all regularly traverse, rather than discrete patterns of thinking that are walled off from each other without mutual influence. In my work and my personal life, I try to make a point of blending the personal with the universal and the everydaywith the
THE SPLINTERED MIND: THE 295 MOST-CITED CONTEMPORARY My son David Schwitzgebel is back in town with new mad computer skills, so I thought I'd have him update his 2014 scrape of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy bibliographies. Below are the 295 most-cited authors (including only authors born 1900 or later). THE SPLINTERED MIND: ON SHARING UMBRELLAS Sometimes I love a cloudburst. You're walking downtown. Suddenly the rain starts and you're under some random awning, shoulder to shoulder with strangers, sharing complaints and guesses about the weather. THE SPLINTERED MIND: HOW TO PUBLISH A BOOK IN PHILOSOPHYAMAZON PHILOSOPHY BOOKSBEST PHILOSOPHY BOOKSFREE PHILOSOPHY BOOKSGOOD PHILOSOPHY BOOKSNEW PHILOSOPHY BOOKSNEW PHILOSOPHY BOOKS A couple of weeks ago, I signed my fourth book contract (working title, The Weirdness of the World, Princeton University Press). I thought I'd share my impressions on book publishing in academic philosophy since I haven't seen any good, detailed how-to guides (and to help others avoid my mistakes). THE SPLINTERED MIND: TOP SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASYBEST SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINESSCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINES ONLINESCI FI AND FANTASY MAGAZINESSCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINES LISTSCIENCE FICTION SHORT STORY MAGAZINESFANTASY SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE The New Yorker, Tin House, McSweeney's, Conjunctions, Harper's, Beloit Fiction Journal, Boston Review, and Paris Review are literary magazines that occasionally publish science fiction or fantasy. Cosmos, Slate, and Buzzfeed are popular magazines that publish a bit of science fiction on the side. e-flux is a wide-ranging arts journal. THE SPLINTERED MIND: THE EMOTIONAL PSYCHOLOGY OF LYNCHING A barrage of rocks shattered the jailhouse windows, sending dozens of frantic inmates in search of cover. A sixteen-year-old boy, James Cameron, one of the three intended victims, paralyzed by fear and incomprehension, recognized familiar faces in the crowd -- schoolmates, and customers whose lawns he had mowed and whose shoes hehad polished
THE SPLINTERED MIND: AARON JAMES'S THEORY OF ASSHOLES The nature and management of assholes -- or as I generally prefer to say, jerks-- deserves far more attention than it has received thus far in moral psychology.Thus, I commend to your attention Aaron James's recent book Assholes: A Theory.. James defines an asshole as follows. THE SPLINTERED MIND: DO ETHICS CLASSES INFLUENCE STUDENTS Julia Riber Pitt said. For me, it wasn't too much ethics courses, but rather discussions on the topic with my friends outside of class. Of course, the courses I took in college as a philosophy undergrad did help to some degree, since most of them clarified certain concepts. WHEN OUR EYES ARE CLOSED, WHAT DO WE Anonymous said It seems variable to me. When I close my eyes at first it is difficult to tell what the experience seems to be of, but it turns black when I put my hand over my eye (not pressing on the eye but just preventing light from getting through my eyelid). THE SPLINTERED MINDBRYAN VAN NORDENJUSTIN TIWALDMANUEL VARGASJONATHAN ICHIKAWACARRIE FIGDORTHE BLISSFUL MIND BLOGCALM YOUR MINDHEALTHY MIND BLOGSUNFLOWER STATE OF MIND BLOG Just out at The Philosophers' Magazine!. This is part of an special issue on diversity in philosophy at TPM, also with contributions by Simon Fokt, Helen Beebee, Zahra Thani, Shen-li Liao, Ian James Kidd, and Rochelle Duford.. In our contribution to the issue, Liam Kofi Bright, Carolyn Dicey Jennings, Morgan Thompson, Eric Winsberg, and I looked systematically at data on racial/ethnic and THE SPLINTERED MIND: TWO KINDS OF ETHICAL THINKING? The two kinds of ethical thinking that Sigrist identifies are ends of a continuum that we all regularly traverse, rather than discrete patterns of thinking that are walled off from each other without mutual influence. In my work and my personal life, I try to make a point of blending the personal with the universal and the everydaywith the
THE SPLINTERED MIND: THE 295 MOST-CITED CONTEMPORARY My son David Schwitzgebel is back in town with new mad computer skills, so I thought I'd have him update his 2014 scrape of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy bibliographies. Below are the 295 most-cited authors (including only authors born 1900 or later). THE SPLINTERED MIND: ON SHARING UMBRELLAS Sometimes I love a cloudburst. You're walking downtown. Suddenly the rain starts and you're under some random awning, shoulder to shoulder with strangers, sharing complaints and guesses about the weather. THE SPLINTERED MIND: HOW TO PUBLISH A BOOK IN PHILOSOPHYAMAZON PHILOSOPHY BOOKSBEST PHILOSOPHY BOOKSFREE PHILOSOPHY BOOKSGOOD PHILOSOPHY BOOKSNEW PHILOSOPHY BOOKSNEW PHILOSOPHY BOOKS A couple of weeks ago, I signed my fourth book contract (working title, The Weirdness of the World, Princeton University Press). I thought I'd share my impressions on book publishing in academic philosophy since I haven't seen any good, detailed how-to guides (and to help others avoid my mistakes). THE SPLINTERED MIND: TOP SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASYBEST SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINESSCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINES ONLINESCI FI AND FANTASY MAGAZINESSCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINES LISTSCIENCE FICTION SHORT STORY MAGAZINESFANTASY SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE The New Yorker, Tin House, McSweeney's, Conjunctions, Harper's, Beloit Fiction Journal, Boston Review, and Paris Review are literary magazines that occasionally publish science fiction or fantasy. Cosmos, Slate, and Buzzfeed are popular magazines that publish a bit of science fiction on the side. e-flux is a wide-ranging arts journal. THE SPLINTERED MIND: THE EMOTIONAL PSYCHOLOGY OF LYNCHING A barrage of rocks shattered the jailhouse windows, sending dozens of frantic inmates in search of cover. A sixteen-year-old boy, James Cameron, one of the three intended victims, paralyzed by fear and incomprehension, recognized familiar faces in the crowd -- schoolmates, and customers whose lawns he had mowed and whose shoes hehad polished
THE SPLINTERED MIND: AARON JAMES'S THEORY OF ASSHOLES The nature and management of assholes -- or as I generally prefer to say, jerks-- deserves far more attention than it has received thus far in moral psychology.Thus, I commend to your attention Aaron James's recent book Assholes: A Theory.. James defines an asshole as follows. THE SPLINTERED MIND: DO ETHICS CLASSES INFLUENCE STUDENTS Julia Riber Pitt said. For me, it wasn't too much ethics courses, but rather discussions on the topic with my friends outside of class. Of course, the courses I took in college as a philosophy undergrad did help to some degree, since most of them clarified certain concepts. WHEN OUR EYES ARE CLOSED, WHAT DO WE Anonymous said It seems variable to me. When I close my eyes at first it is difficult to tell what the experience seems to be of, but it turns black when I put my hand over my eye (not pressing on the eye but just preventing light from getting through my eyelid). NAZI PHILOSOPHERS, WORLD WAR I, AND THE GRAND WISDOM Now let’s think about Nazis. Nazism is an excellent test case of the Grand Wisdom Hypothesis, since pretty much everyone now agrees that Nazism is extremely morally odious. Germany had a robust philosophical tradition in the 1930s, and excellent records are available on individual professors’ participation in or resistance to the Nazimovement.
THE SPLINTERED MIND: HOW TO PUBLISH A BOOK IN PHILOSOPHY A couple of weeks ago, I signed my fourth book contract (working title, The Weirdness of the World, Princeton University Press). I thought I'd share my impressions on book publishing in academic philosophy since I haven't seen any good, detailed how-to guides (and to help others avoid my mistakes). THE SPLINTERED MIND: CREEPS AND CREEPINESS Oddly, perhaps, the etymology of a person as a creep is quite different.Per the OED, originally a "creep" was a thief who crept around quietly, a stealthy robber, especially one who worked in a brothel. The contemporary use of "creep" as a noun to refer to a person no longer suggests thievery, but some of the sexualized tinge remains: The paradigmatic creep has sneaky, sexual intentions -- the THE SPLINTERED MIND: WHY ARE WE SUCH BAD INTROSPECTORS? Introspective attention to experience is hardly a habitual practice for most, perhaps any, of us, except maybe a few dedicated meditators of a certain sort. If accurate introspection requires a degree of skill, as I suspect it does, in most people the skill is uncultivated. Furthermore, relatedly, experience is difficult to remember: Generally THE SPLINTERED MIND: THOUGHTS ON CONJUGAL LOVE In conjugal love, one commits to seeing one’s life always with the other in view. One commits to pursuing one’s major projects, even when alone, in a kind of implicit conjunction with the other. One’s life becomes a co-authored work. Parental love for a young child might be purer and more unconditional than conjugal love. THE SPLINTERED MIND: THE EMOTIONAL PSYCHOLOGY OF LYNCHING A barrage of rocks shattered the jailhouse windows, sending dozens of frantic inmates in search of cover. A sixteen-year-old boy, James Cameron, one of the three intended victims, paralyzed by fear and incomprehension, recognized familiar faces in the crowd -- schoolmates, and customers whose lawns he had mowed and whose shoes hehad polished
DEPRESSIVE THINKING STYLES AND Depressive thinking styles are, perhaps, the opposite of this blithe and easy self-confidence. People with mild depression will tend, I suspect, to be less easily satisfied with their first thought, at least on matters of importance to them. Before taking a public stand, they might spend more time imagining critics attacking Position A, andhow
THE SPLINTERED MIND: MY WORKDAY AS A PHILOSOPHY PROFESSOR Good information is hard to come by. I will describe my own workload and typical workday, as one data point. I am a full professor of philosophy, with a six-digit salary and tenure at UC Riverside, whose philosophy PhD program is ranked 28th in the US by the Philosophical Gourmet. Our normal teaching load is four 10-week courses (plus final THE SPLINTERED MIND: DO YOU MOSTLY SEE DOUBLE? The great majority of objects, comprising all those that were farther or nearer than this point, were all seen double (1910/1962, III.7). The eminent 18th-century philosopher Thomas Reid writes: We find that when the eyes are sound and perfect, and the axes of both directed to one point, an object placed in that point is seen single. THE SPLINTERED MIND: THE GENDER MIGRATION OF NAMES Male to Female: (apologies for the small reproduction: click to enlarge) As is evident from this list, 5 of the top 25 girls' names in 2000 (Madison, Taylor, Lauren, Sydney, Morgan) were boys' names in 1900! The gender migration of girls' names to skip to main | skip to sidebarTHE SPLINTERED MIND
reflections in philosophy of psychology, broadly construed FRIDAY, APRIL 03, 2020WISDOM AND CHAOS
_I. The Puzzle: Why Aren't Academic Philosophers Wise?_ Etymologically, philosophy is the study of wisdom. In the popular imagination, philosophers sit cross-legged, uttering cryptic profundities through long white beards. Real philosophy professors spend considerable time reading texts from the "wisdom traditions", and on ethics, the meaning of life, and the fundamental nature of reality. So you might think that the average philosopher would be at least a little bit wiser than the average non-philosopher. Since the wisdom-o-meter is still in early development, we don't yet have solid scientific evidence on this question. But my impression is that academic philosophers in the United States, as a group, are no wiser than others of their social class -- no wiser on average than chemistry professors, high school teachers, lawyers, or cityadministrators.
In other words, we don't seem to profit much, in terms of personal wisdom, from our philosophical reading and extended reflection on big-picture questions. Why is this? One easy answer that will suggest itself to many professional philosophers is this. Most of our reading and reflection doesn't concern the kinds of issues central to wisdom. A philosopher of language might spend much of their professional time reading about the reference of proper names and donkey anaphora.
An ethicist might focus on textual puzzles in Kant interpretation. Wisdom might no more tend to follow from those activities than from grading high school history homework or studying sulfates. However, I think that answer is at best partial. Although one's philosophical _research _might mostly concern donkey anaphora, most philosophers spend most of their professional time teaching. We teach classes like "introduction to philosophy" and "contemporary moral issues" and "meaning, truth, and value" -- and in prepping and teaching these classes, as well as sometimes apart from class, MOST OF US DO ENGAGE QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MEANING OF LIFE AND WHAT MATTERS MOST IN THE BIG PICTURE. Substantially more than the average chemistry professor, WE READ AND TEACH CLASSIC TEXTS THAT ORDINARY PEOPLE TURN TO AS SOURCES OF WISDOM. IT SEEMS THAT WE _OUGHT _TO LEARN SOME WISDOM FROM DOING SO. The fact that we don't, or don't seem to, thus remainsa puzzle.
_II. The Nature of Wisdom._ To address the puzzle, we need to think about wisdom and its sources.What is wisdom?
Here's my proposal: WISDOM IS THE DISPOSITION TO MAKE DECENT CHOICES IN A WIDE RANGE OF CIRCUMSTANCES. If you tend to make poor choices, you're not wise. If you tend to make good choices but only in a narrow range of familiar circumstances and any perturbance would throw you into bewildered disarray, you're also not wise. Wisdom involves stability of good practical judgment even when circumstances turnstrange.
A decent choice isn't necessarily the _best _choice. Only someone with inhumanly heroic insight could be disposed generally to make the best choices in a wide range of circumstances. Decency is more about avoiding blunders -- bad decisions due to panic, short-term thinking, seriously misweighing one's values, overlooking obvious considerations, or grossly misjudging people's character andintentions.
A wide range of circumstances needn't mean all circumstances. How wide a range and what belongs in the range remains an open parameter in this account. If you're a man in a culture where it's not unusual for men to be called to battle, then wisdom probably requires that you be disposed to make decent choices if called to battle. If you're not in such a culture, maybe how you'd react in battle doesn't matter so much. We can also define subclasses of wisdom by considering narrower ranges of circumstances or narrower classes of decisions: wise in matters of child-rearing or in choosing friends or in financialmatters.
Being calm and giving good advice, classically associated with wisdom, aren't part of my definition, but they flow naturally from it. Panic leads to bad decisions, so if you're prone to panic, you're probably not wise. Good hypothetical thinking is crucial to good decision making, so the wise will tend to have good judgment about circumstances they aren't in; and since giving bad advice is itself a type of bad decision, it's a failure of wisdom not to know one's limits well enough to stay silent rather than misdirect others. _III. Chaos and Wisdom._ It's an unfortunate feature of the human condition that we rarely learn from other people's mistakes. We insist on making the mistakes ourselves. (This seems to be especially true of teenagers and nations.) SO UNLESS YOU'VE PERSONALLY LIVED THROUGH A WIDE RANGE OF CIRCUMSTANCES AND MADE A WIDE RANGE OF CORRESPONDING MISTAKES, YOU'RE UNLIKELY TO HAVE ACQUIRED THE KNOWLEDGE NECESSARY TO NAVIGATE A DIVERSITY OF SITUATIONS WITHOUT BLUNDERING. Narrow, stable lives will thus tend to generate less wisdom than chaotic lives with radical changes of circumstance. This explains your grandmother's wisdom -- grandma who grew up in Hungary, fled the Nazis, built a new life in an unfamiliar country speaking an unfamiliar language, raised five children each with their own chaos, lost her husband, almost died of cancer, knew poverty and comfort, security and uncertainty, love and betrayal. What is pretty much the _least _chaotic path through our culture? The academic path. Do what your teachers tell you. Get good grades. Go to graduate school and do it some more. Get a job. Get tenure. It's extremely competitive, but the path is orderly and laid out clearly in advance. Each thing flows neatly from the next. (I set aside the increasingly common chaos of the academic job market.) The set of skills and the range of challenges doesn't change radically over the course of one's life, and there normally are few disruptive conflicts with authority. You wrote decent essays in high school. You wrote better essays in college, then in grad school, and then as a faculty member. Philosophy, literature, and math are perhaps especially narrow, even among academic disciplines. In the laboratory sciences, one at least needs also to learn to manage people and equipment. The solution to the puzzle, then, is this. Although one _can_ of course learn some wisdom from reading great philosophy and thinking about profound questions, that's not a particularly good or efficient way to acquire wisdom, compared to actually living through ups and downs and weirdness and chaos. Academic philosophers with narrow, orderly life paths won't fully catch up with grandma, despite some possible modest benefits from thinking hard about Kant, Buddhism, andMontaigne.
You'll be unsurprised to learn that this post was inspired by noting my own and others' reactions to the chaos of the pandemic. ------------------------------------------------ PS: Maybe reading personal essays like Montaigne's or engaging historical or fictional narratives is more effective in simulating alternative experiences than reading abstract arguments? My student Chris McVey has been working on this issue. See some of his data here.
Martha Nussbaum's Poetic Justiceis also relevant.
------------------------------------------------Related:
Cheeseburger ethics
(Aeon Magazine, 2015). The moral behavior of ethicists(in
J. Sytsma and W. Buckwalters, eds., A Companion to ExperimentalPhilosophy, 2016)
------------------------------------------------ If you enjoy my blog, check out my recent book: A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures.
Posted by Eric Schwitzgebel at 8:22 AM15 comments
Labels: dispositions,
moral development
,
moral psychology
TUESDAY, MARCH 31, 2020 CHARITY ARGUMENT CONTEST UPDATE In october, Fiery Cushman and I announced a contest:
Participants were to write a philosophical argument that attempts to convince research participants to donate a surprise bonus to charity. The winner would receive $500, and we would donate an additional $500 to the winner's choice of charity. We planned to run the experiment in early 2020 and announce the winner by today, March 31. For a variety of reasons, the experiment has been delayed, but the contest is still on and we will announce the winneras soon as we can.
In the meantime, I hope Splintered Mind readers and contest entrants are managing well through the chaos. Posted by Eric Schwitzgebel at 12:19 PM0 comments
Labels: moral psychology,
psychology of philosophy TUESDAY, MARCH 24, 2020SNAIL WEATHER
Yesterday was a good day to be a snail. Spring rains are rousing them from hibernation, and on my morning stroll I saw hundreds cruising the vacant sidewalks of suburban Riverside. The streets were so quiet, even this snail appeared to be in noparticular danger:
I took dozens of photos in the rain, my usual fifty-five minute walk stretching to an hour and a quarter. It was peaceful -- just me and the snails. Normally on a Monday morning, cars fill the streets, leaving for work and school. Yesterday I counted only fourteen cars the whole time I was out, less than one car every five minutes. Nor were there other pedestrians. Alone in the rain with the snails, I thought back to couple of days previously, when my wife Pauline, my teenage daughter Kate, and I had been walking our dog in the sun. Pauline had wondered aloud if the world would be better without humans. Think of all the destruction and suffering we cause, she said. But without humans, I replied, there'd be no science, no philosophy, no art, no heroes -- none of the distinctively human things that make Earth such an amazing planet! Isn't it better that the universe has planets like this, even with all the suffering we inflict on ourselves and other species, than it would be if every planet were just aparadise of cows?
But how much destruction and suffering is worth it, Pauline asked. What if we wiped out every species, including ourselves, and turned the planet into a sterile rock forever? Would our great accomplishments have been worth it? Probably not, I conceded. But if we wiped out 90% of species and then the world recovered, with new wonderful species emerging later -- thenwe were worth it.
Kate had been listening in. I asked her opinion. "The world would be better without humans," Kate said. She loves animals. She was thinking, I'm sure, of all the wild animals that would flourish better without us. Two antinatalists in myown family!
I'll give Pauline and Kate this much: It's not a bad thing to let the snails to enjoy a day without us once in a while. I've noticed more birds and squirrels recently too. We humans can tuck in for a nap and let some other species cruise around for a while, in our suddenlyquieter spaces.
The big, beautiful ones are common garden snails, _Cornu aspersum._ The low, sleek ones are decollates, _Rumina decollata_, predatory snail-eating snails, sneaking up on the garden snails in theirslow-paced hunt.
------------------------------------------ If you enjoy my blog, check out my recent book: A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures.
Posted by Eric Schwitzgebel at 9:55 AM4
comments
Labels: culture
FRIDAY, MARCH 20, 2020 ON SHARING UMBRELLAS Sometimes I love a cloudburst. You're walking downtown. Suddenly the rain starts and you're under some random awning, shoulder to shoulder with strangers, sharing complaints and guesses about the weather. The rain eases a little, and the most hurried or the least concerned dash away, accepting wet faces and shoulders, while the more relaxed wait it out. I'm reminded of G.K. Chesterton's essay about the joy of chasing your hat when it's snatched by the wind "On Running AfterOne's Hat
"
-- but a friendlier event, where people are thrown together instead ofmanaging alone.
Last November, after a week of warm sunny weather here in southern California, a surprisingly rainy afternoon jumped on us. The first rain of the season is always fun, and I noticed students sharing umbrellas. Every umbrella, it seemed, had two or three students under it, some in coats, some in shorts -- sandals, boots, skirts, sweatshirts, flannel, summer dresses, all jumbled together, smilingand giggling.
Students and staff members sharing umbrellas seemed much liklier to be smiling than those walking solo. I put on my hat (no umbrella) and took a long stroll around campus in the rain, starting a count: student/non-student, umbrella/no umbrella, sharing/not sharing, smiling/not smiling, with a friend/alone. I developed a method and coding scheme on the fly. I chose observational subjects when I was behind them, not looking at their faces, to minimize experimenter bias, then somehow without seeming too weird or conspicuous I had to position myself to register, at a predetermined time, smile vs. no smile. I did a lot of speedwalking, corner cutting, and sprinting through the rain. The fairest comparison, I soon realized, would be groups of friends who all had umbrellas vs. groups of friends sharing umbrellas. After about forty minutes, I was thoroughly soaked (but having great time), and the rain let up. I didn't yet have many good data points, since it could take sixty seconds to choose a group and position myself for an observation. Preliminary evidence suggested that my hypothesis would play out. I could see it in their faces. Being thrown together with a friend under an umbrella is one of the lovely little pleasures of life. There's the shoulder-bumping intimacy. How often are we so physically close with our friends? There's the novelty of the change of weather in dry California, which you can now jokingly grouse about together. There's a special pleasure, maybe too, in having something to offer a friend -- room under your umbrella -- which you can share without cost. It's a toy emergency: no real risk of harm, nothing serious at stake, but some of the same cooperative bonding as in real emergencies, some of the same intimacy, uncertainty, newness, lowered barriers. After the rain stopped, I had only the beginning of a data set. No worries, I thought. I'll collect more data later, during the next unexpected rain. It didn't happen, though, in December, January, February. It had been a dry winter, and during the few rains, I didn't manage to find the time. It's rainy again this week, after a warm February and early March. A wee bit of winter (SoCal style) is back. It would be a perfect time to don my hat and gather more data. But of course, with the epidemic, no one was on campus this week. Wednesday was my last day to retrieve belongings from my office before complete lockdown through April. Campus was already looking a little dilapilated -- the paper and cardboard signs and flyers from a few weeks ago bent and weathered, abandoned, unreplaced. I saw only one person during my visit, someone in a winter jacket, turned away from me, head down, walking swiftly the other direction. With the California governor's shelter-in-place order last night, sharing umbrellas with acquaintances, anywhere, is on pause -- one more small casualty of the pandemic. So I'm sitting at home, staring through my window at the overcast sky while my wife and daughter sleep late. My son is self-quarantined on the other side of town after possible exposure during his truncatedstudy abroad.
My umbrella research will wait til next year, I suppose, while I huddle with family, not knowing what kind of protection we might need, waiting out a different kind of storm. Posted by Eric Schwitzgebel at 6:49 AM2 comments
Labels: culture
, moral
psychology
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18, 2020 FEELING BORED? ISOLATED? INSUFFICIENTLY SUPPLIED WITH PHILOSOPHICAL WEIRDNESS? WATCH OR LISTEN TO A WIDE-RANGING TWO-HOUR INTERVIEW ABOUTMY WORK
Released Monday
at Eclectic SpacewalkTopics include:
* juvenile delinquency * group consciousness and the "Chinese room" * a cyberpunk spin on Kant's transcendental idealism * ancient Chinese philosophers Mengzi and Xunzi on whether humannature is good
* science fiction as a form of philosophy* garden snail sex
* approaching academic life with a childlike sense of fun* and more!
Eclectic Spacewalk is just getting started, so if you like the interview, please subscribe and support them! Bonus feature if you the YouTube video : You can play a new COVID19 themed game. Every time you see me touch my face, squirt a bit of sanitizer on your hands! -------------------------------------------Timestamps:
* Eric’s dad was a grad student in the famous Harvard (Timothy Leary & Ram Das) LSD Studies, and invented the ankle monitoring system for arrestees (00:04:28) * Eric did his post graduate work at UC Berkley under John Searle of “The Chinese Room” thought experiment fame - a critique of “The Turing Test” (00:11:14) * What exactly is consciousness? (00:17:35) * Can collectives, societies, companies, ideas, or countries like the United States be conscious? (00:21:00) * Eric’s thoughts on Object Oriented Ontology and speculativerealism (00:25:52)
* Kant meets cyberpunk (00:29:38) * Unknown Unknowns, and the quest for consilience, and the Fermiparadox (00:34:31)
Part Two:
* Philosophical outlook on altered states of consciousness (00:43:17) * The great debate between Mengzi & Xunzi about whether human nature is good or evil. (00:47:21) * Moral psychology, business ethics, and how much can someone gain from thinking philosophically? (00:53:08) * Making experiments to test philosophical and moral inquiries(00:58:17)
* Science fiction as a philosophy & ethics of technology (01:01:37) * Upcoming anthology: “Philosophy through science fiction stories” (01:05:44) * Discussing films Ex Machina & Arrival (01:10:11) * The bizarre, weird, and complex lives of garden snails (01:15:24) * The love of writing, running a blog called “The Splintered Mind,” and everyone is really a philosopher and interested in the deepest mysteries of existence (01:22:55) * Eric’s new book: “A Theory of Jerks and other Philosophical Misadventures" (01:29:36) * The re-connection of psychology and philosophy (01:36:53) * Recommending Zhuangzi (Butterfly Dream) and John Stuart Mill (On Liberty) and Montaigne (Personal essays like On Solitude) (01:39:05) * How has teaching philosophy changed you? Different teaching methods starting with moral questions first. (01:42:38) * How has your influences changed over time? (01:49:01) * What can we gain philosophically from the idea of the “The Overview Effect?” (01:54:49) Posted by Eric Schwitzgebel at 9:44 AM0 comments
Labels: announcements FRIDAY, MARCH 13, 2020 THE ACADEMIC JERK: A WILDLIFE GUIDE This post originally appeared as "The Jerks of Academe"
in the _Chronicle of Higher Education_, Jan 31, 2020. The awesome art was created by Lars Leetaru for the Chronicle and is used by permission.] ---------------------------------------------------------- This morning you probably didn’t look in the mirror and ask, “Am I a jerk?” And if you did, I wouldn’t believe your answer. Jerks usually don’t know that they are jerks. Jerks mostly travel in disguise, even from themselves. But the rising tide (or is it just the increasing visibility?) of scandal, grisly politics, bureaucratic obstructionism, and toxic advising in academia reveals the urgent need of a good wildlife guide by which to identify the varieties of academic jerk. So consider what follows a public service of sorts. I offer it in sad remembrance of the countless careers maimed or slain by the beasts profiled below. I hope you will forgive me if on this occasion I use “he” as a gender-neutral pronoun._The Big Shot_
The Big Shot is the most easily identified of all academic jerks. You can spot him a mile away. His plumage is so grand! (Or so he thinks.) His publications so widely cited! (At least by the right people.) His editorial board memberships so dignified! (Not that anyone else noticed.) You will never fully appreciate the Big Shot’s genius, but if you cite him copiously and always defer to his judgment, he’ll think you have above-average intelligence. _The Creepy Hugger _ To those unfamiliar with his ways, the Creepy Hugger appears the opposite of the Big Shot. He will seem kind, modest, and charming, despite his impressive accomplishments. This is his alluring disguise. You will flee to him for comfort and protection after abuse by the other types of academic jerk. The Creepy Hugger with lecherous motivations is one variety, but not the only one, nor the most common. More frequently you’ll encounter the type who takes advantage of his power to extract favors and “friendship” that you would not otherwise give. His arm is around your shoulder while he complains about his colleagues. He invites you for beers that you feel obliged to consume in feigned bonhomie. You meet his family and are expected to be sweet and sociable. Because you are so nice, and because he seems so enamored of you, you proofread his drafts and help organize his office. Soon, he will be distracted by someone better and forget you exist – unless he can gain advantage by presenting you as hisprotégé.
_The Sadistic Bureaucrat _ You will recognize the Sadistic Bureaucrat by the little smile he can’t quite suppress as he informs you that your reimbursement application was not completed correctly. Your visa approval process is delayed. The only available time slot for your class is seven in the morning, and your sabbatical request is denied. He is really so sorry. But, he reminds you, the policies are clearly listed in the faculty manual. It would be unfair, don’t you see, to make an exception. Somehow, his friends don’t seem to suffer under the policies in quite the same way. The Sadistic Bureaucrat washes away his moral qualms about granting exceptions to others by relishing his great fairness and rigorous principle when applying the rules to you. _The Embittered Downdragger _ You and the Embittered Downdragger agree that the Big Shot is not nearly as brilliant as he imagines – neither, the Downdragger adds, is that other scholar, whose work you rather admire. The Embittered Downdragger is distinctly unimpressed that you finally managed to publish in a so-called “elite” venue. And your great teaching evaluations? They prove only that you cater to student demand for easy A’s. The Embittered Downdragger has only published a few articles. His students complain about him. He serves no important administrative role. This is because he knows that the system is corrupt. He rolls his eyes at the award you just won and the invitation you just received, of which you had, until then, felt rather proud. His “no” vote can be relied on for every policy change, every new initiative, and every tenure case. This list is neither exhaustive nor exclusive. Jerkitude manifests in wondrous variety and not all the species have yet been cataloged. Hybrids abound – for example, the past-his-prime Big Shot who is becoming an Embittered Downdragger. If you spot one of these jerks in the wild – at a conference hotel, on the other side of the seminar table, at a campuswide committee meeting – react as if you had spotted a bear. They are dangerous, unpredictable creatures, best avoided if possible. Do not try to cuddle up close, thinking you can befriend them without getting hurt. Do not try to seduce them with treats. Walk as far away as possible. Jerks are best viewed from a distance, with telescopic lens. If surprised up close by an angry jerk, stand tall, if you can raise yourself to intimidating height. If it’s a grizzly, though, playdead.
---------------------------------------------------------- But what if _you _are the jerk? It’s generally difficult to recognize and acknowledge one’s vices. No one wants to see themselves as flaky or vain. We try to ignore evidence of such character deficiencies in ourselves, and we find rationalizing excuses. But if we look close enough and long enough we can wincingly recognize such shortcomings. Self-knowledge of jerkitude is more recalcitrant. Big Shots will not see themselves as Big Shots – at least not _that _kind. Sadistic Bureaucrats and Embittered Downdraggers will rarely recognize the true shape and extent of their awfulness. We can admit, when pressed, that we are flaky and vain, but we can’t admit, not deep down, that we are the Creepy Huggers students whisper about in the halls. Jerkitude, though it comes in many varieties, has a central defining feature: culpably failing to appreciate the perspectives of the peoplearound you
.
The Big Shot fails to appreciate the intellectual merits of his colleagues. The Creepy Hugger fails to appreciate how the power dynamics of “friendliness” are experienced by those he wraps his arms around. The Sadistic Bureaucrat fails to appreciate the merit of most other people’s excuses and the difficulty of negotiating complex, unfamiliar rules. The Embittered Downdragger fails to appreciate the value of accomplishments beyond his own. Illegitimately devaluing others’ goals and ignoring their opinions – this is the essence of being a jerk. It’s a peculiarly epistemic vice, one that works to prevent its own detection by painting the world in seemingly objective self-flattering colors and by thwarting the jerk’s ability to respectfully hear others’ critical feedback. Jerkitude flourishes in ignorance of itself. But all hope is not lost. Though I doubt that the most horrible jerks among us will ever change their ways, the best chance to attain a glimmer of self-knowledge is to think phenomenologically – that is, to think about how the world in general looks through your eyes, and then to compare that vision with the world as seen by the jerk. Do you see the world through _jerk goggles?_ You’re important, and you’re surrounded by idiots! You can’t believe they gave that award to that absolute dolt. Her work isn’t nearly as good as yours. And why are you wasting time with this student? Can’t he see you have a ton of important things you need to get done? That new article should have cited your work here and here and here. Is the author ignorant? Is she intentionally downplaying how much she’s borrowing from you? Ugh, your colleague is making a case for Distinguished Professor, but you’re clearly more deserving. No need to read work by scholars you haven’t heard of. It can’t be good if they aren’t well known…. You’re thinking like a BigShot.
You’re not like those other professors, formal and standoffish and so full of themselves. You’re an egalitarian. Your students are peers, and, well, you guess you’re kind of cool. It’s kind of big of you to step down the social hierarchy like this, relating so well with your inferiors – whoops, you didn’t mean “inferiors”! It’s fun that you can tease her, call her an “asshole” in a joking way, say her thesis work is totally stupid. She knows you’re just razzing her. It sure is nice of her to help you organize your office. You guess you do kind of deserve that, because – whoops! You mean of course you would do the same for her…. You’re thinking like a Creepy Hugger. Box A correct. Box B correct. Box C, oh, tsk-tsk … no, no, no. This will need to be redone. You can’t approve it this way. They did it wrong, and the policies aren’t really under your control. _Option A:_ If excuse is from a friend. Ah, you see the problem! Of course, we can get this fixed. The rules serve us, not us the rules. Mistakes happen – we’re human, after all. _Option B:_ If excuse is not from a friend. The rules need to be applied consistently. It’s only fair to the others. Clear rules are what make the institutions work, and it’s important to be even-handed and careful. You’re sorry about all the trouble this is causing – though maybe in your secret heart not so sorry. Did you just now feel a little rush of pleasure at the power you exerted over them? No, of course not! Really it’s too bad they’ll have to return to their home country / not get sabbatical / lose the grant money…. You’re thinking like a Sadistic Bureaucrat. Wow, you find this description of jerks to be so on target! You’re not like any of them! The whole system is rotten. Peer review is basically a scam. And the students – lazy complainers! None of them really deserve As, but with all the grade inflation you’ll have to give out a few good marks. You give sarcastic congratulations to your friends on their great success in the Game!... You’re thinking like an Embittered Downdragger. I have drawn these four types as caricatures. We – you and I – know we’re not that awful … right? But there’s a reason I find it so easy to imagine the inner life of these jerks. It’s my own inner life, sometimes. I catch myself thinking in these ways, and I worry. That sting of worry is the moral self-knowledge I treasure – the seeing that it is so, which makes itless so.
----------------------------------------------------------For more:
A Theory of Jerks
(Aeon Magazine, Jun 4, 2014) A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures(MIT Press, 2019).
How to Get a Big Head in Academia (blog post, Sep 20, 2010)Cheeseburger Ethics
(Aeon Magazine, Jul 14, 2015) Posted by Eric Schwitzgebel at 9:18 AM1 comments
Labels: humor
, moral
psychology
,
sociology of philosophy WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11, 2020 SNAIL AND SLUG CONSCIOUSNESS AND SEMI-UNLIMITED (?) ASSOCIATIVELEARNING
I've just finished reading Simona Ginsburg's and Eva Jablonka's tome on consciousness in non-human animals, The Evolution of the SensitiveSoul . It is
an impressively wide-ranging work, covering huge swaths of philosophy, biology, and psychology for many different species. (For an article-length version of their view, see here.)
Ginsburg's and Jablonka's central idea is that CONSCIOUSNESS (i.e., phenomenal consciousness, subjective experience, being an entity that there's "something it's like" to be) REQUIRES SOMETHING THEY CALL UNLIMITED ASSOCIATIVE LEARNING. They argue that we see consciousness and Unlimited Associative Learning in vertebrates, at least some arthropods (especially insects), and in some mollusks (especially cephalopods) but not other mollusks (e.g., sea hares ), and not in most other animal phyla (e.g., annelida such as earthworms or cnidaria such as jellyfish). If you wonder -- as I do -- where we should draw the line between animal species with consciousness and those without consciousness, theirs is one of the most interesting and well-defendedproposals.
I'm not convinced for two broad reasons I discuss hereand here
.
I think _all_ general theories of consciousness suffer from at least the following two epistemic shortcomings. First, all such theories beg the question, right from the start, against plausible views endorsed by leading researchers who see consciousness as either much more abundant in the universe or much less abundant in the universe (e.g., panpsychism and Integrated Information Theory on the abundant side, theories that require sophisticatedself-representation
on the other side). Second, all such theories are ineliminably grounded in human introspection and verbal report, creating too narrow an evidence base for confident extrapolation to very differentspecies.
But today I don't want to focus on those broad reasons. As regular readers of this blog know, Ilove
snails . So I
was interested to note that Ginsburg and Jablonka specifically highlight two genera of terrestrial gastropod (the _Limax_ slug and the _Helix _snail) as potentially in the "gray area" between the conscious and nonconscious species (p. 395). And I think if you pull a bit on the thread they leave open here, it exposes some troubles that are specific to their theory. Ginsburg's and Jablonka's view depends essentially on a distinction between Limited Associative Learning and _Unlimited _Associative Learning. Associative learning, as you might remember from psychology class, is the usual sort of classical and operant conditioning we see when a dog learns to salivate upon hearing a bell associated with receiving food or when a rat learns to press on a lever for a reward. Unlimited Associative Learning, as Ginsburg and Jablonka define it, "refers to an animal's ability to ascribe motivational value to a _compound _stimulus or action pattern and to use it as the basis for future learning" (p. 35, italics added). Unlimited Associative Learning allows "open-ended behavioral adjustments" (p. 225) and "has, by definition, enormous generativity. The number of associations among stimuli and the number of possible reinforced actions that can be generated are practically limitless" (p. 347). An animal with Limited Associative Learning, in contrast, can only associate "simple ('elemental') stimuli and stereotypical actions" (p. 225). IMMEDIATELY, ONE MIGHT NOTICE THE HUGE GAP BETWEEN LIMITED ASSOCIATIVE LEARNING (NO LEARNING OF COMPOUND STIMULI, NO STRINGING TOGETHER OF COMPOUND ACTIONS) AND TRULY OPEN-ENDED, TRULY "UNLIMITED" UNLIMITED ASSOCIATIVE LEARNING WITH FULL GENERATIVITY AND "PRACTICALLY LIMITLESS" POSSIBILITIES FOR LEARNING. Mightn't there be some species in the middle, with some ability to learn compound stimuli, and some ability to string together compound actions, but only a very limited ability to do so, far, far short of full combinatorial generativity? For example... the garden snail? Terrestrial snails and slugs are not the geniuses of the animal world. With only about 60,000 neurons in their central nervous system, you wouldn't expect them to be. They don't have the amazing behavioral flexibility and complex learning abilities of monkeys or pigeons. There's not a whole lot they can do. I'd be very surprised, for example, if you could train them to always choose a stimulus of intermediate size between two other stimuli, or if you could train them to engage in long strings of novel behavior. (Certainly, I have heard no reports of this.) But it does seem like they can be trained with some compound stimuli -- not simply "elemental" stimuli. For example, _Limax_ slugs can apparently be trained to avoid the combined scent of A and B, while they remain attracted to A and B separately (Hopfield and Gelperin 1989 ) -- compound stimulus learning. Terrestrial gastopods also tend to have preferred home locations and home ranges, rather than always moving toward attractive stimuli and away from unattractive stimuli in an unstructured way, and it is likely (but not yet proven) that their homing behavior requires some memory of temporally or spatially compound olfactory and possibly other stimuli (Tomiyama 1992; Stringer et
al. 2018 ).
Nor is it clear that even rat learning is fully generative and compoundable. As Ginsburg and Jablonka acknowledge (p. 303), in the 1960s John Garcia and Robert A. Koelling famously found that although rats could readily be trained to associate audiovisual stimuli with electric shock and gustatory stimuli with vomiting, the reverse associations (audiovisual with vomiting and gustatory with shock) are much more difficult toestablish.
Between, on the one hand, "Limited Associative Learning" which is noncompound and reflex and, on the other hand, fully compoundable, fully generative "Unlimited Associative Learning" stands a huge range of potential associative abilities, which with intentional oxymoronity we might call Semi-Unlimited Associative Learning. GINSBURG'S AND JABLONKA'S SYSTEM DOES NOT LEAVE THEORETICAL SPACE FOR THIS POSSIBILITY. Terrestrial gastropods might well fall smack into the middle of this space, thus suggesting (once again!) that they are the coolest of animals if you are interested in messing up philosophers' and psychologists' neat theories of consciousness.Go, Slugs!
Posted by Eric Schwitzgebel at 8:35 AM18 comments
Labels: consciousness FRIDAY, MARCH 06, 2020 APPLYING TO PHD PROGRAMS IN PHILOSOPHY, PART VII: AFTER YOU HEAR BACK Part I: Should You Apply, and Where? Part II: Grades, Classes, and Institution of Origin Part III: Letters of Recommendation Part IV: Writing Sample Part V: Statement of Purpose Part VI: GRE Scores and Other Things Old Series from 2007 -------------------------------------------------------- Applying to PhD Programs in Philosophy Part VII: After You Hear Back _When You'll Hear and When You'll Have to Decide_ There's a general agreement among philosophy PhD programs that applicants have until April 15 to decide whether to accept an offer of admission. This deadline drives the process. Schools with a hard cap on their admissions offers might be permitted by the administration to admit only eight students, for example, or to offer funding (in the form of TA-ships and fellowships) to only eight students. These schools will try to admit those eight students quickly (in February, maybe) and will often pressure those students to decide quickly so that, if the student declines, another student further down the list can be admitted or offered funding. Other departments will target a certain entering class size and admit approximately twice that many students (more or less, depending on "yield" rates in recent years) with the expectation that about half will decline. In principle, these departments could admit all of those students early in the process, but in fact things often fall behind. Departments might sometimes be conservative in their early admissions to avoid the risk of being committed to too large an entering class. Later, if the number of students accepting offers is falling short of expectations, a few may be admitted late in the process. If you're at the top of the department's list, expect (typically, depending on the department's speed) to hear around mid-February to mid-March. Applicants lower on the list might not hear until April -- even April 15 itself! You might not hear good news about funding, in particular, until very near the April 15 deadline, if the department has a hard cap on funding. Be ready on April 15 to make an immediate decision about an offer should one come -- and don't be too far from the phone! It's not unreasonable to ask for an additional day or two to decide, should you hear on April 15th, but the department might or might not comply with such a request. It's generally in the interest of the applicants, then, to wait on their decisions until April 15. However, it is in the interest of departments to extract decisions from applicants as early as possible.Unfortunate!
Occasionally, if an entering class is looking smaller than expected, a department may admit someone after April 15th. That student may already have committed to another school. This needs to be handled delicately, since the school is counting on you to attend and might have turned away another applicant in favor of you. My own view is that the interests of the student generally ought to outweigh the interests of the program in such cases. If one program is much more appealing than the other, I'd recommend reneging with a heartfeltapology!
_Funding Offers_
Most top-50 ranked PhD programs do not expect students to pay their way through graduate school. They'll offer funding (at poverty levels) in the form of TAships and fellowships. When comparing funding offers between schools, don't just look at the raw dollar amounts. Some schools inflate their dollar amounts by adding the cost of tuition to their stated funding totals -- money which of course comes right back to them. Make sure, also, that your funding offer includes studentmedical insurance.
Most departments will guarantee students five years of support in some combination of fellowship and TAship. If you're on fellowship you're paid just for being a student! (Sweet!) A typical offer at a typical department will be for one year of fellowship (your first year, when you aren't really advanced enough a student to be a T.A., anyway, in the eyes of many departments) and four years of TAship. Students especially targeted by the department may receive additional fellowship years. (Outstanding GPA and GRE scores help a lot here, since the high-level administrators who often give out those fellowship packages can evaluate those numbers better than they can evaluate writing samples and letters of recommendation.) Although most PhD programs expect most of their students to pay their way through most of their years by TAing, a few schools -- especially the smaller private schools -- don't expect much TAing from their students and offer comparatively more fellowship support. You might also consider how much is expected of a T.A.: Teaching one section of 25 students is much easier than teaching three sections of 25 which in turn is easier (usually) than teaching an entire course on your own. Also consider what happens when your guaranteed years of funding run out, since most students at most schools run out of guaranteed funding before they complete their degrees. Don't expect too much wiggle room in negotiations about funding. But if a comparable department is offering you a better package than the school that would otherwise be your first choice, it can't hurt to politely mention that fact to the chair of the admissions committee. Financial offers generally don't include summer funding, though often students can apply for a limited number of summer-school teachingpositions.
_Letting People Know Where You've Been Admitted_ Let your letter writers know where you've been admitted -- or even if you haven't been admitted anywhere -- and ultimately where you decide to go. It's only polite, since they put in work on your behalf. It helps them have a better sense, too, of what to expect for future students. And besides, they might have some helpful advice. Admissions committee chairs also like to know where you've been admitted and where you decide to go (if not to their school) and why. You needn't share this information if you don't want to, but it helps them in thinking about future admissions. For example, if lots of admittees are going to comparably ranked schools because those schools have better funding offers, admissions committees can make a case for more funding to the college administrators. If admittees are declining mostly for much better-ranked schools, then committees know that their low yield rates are due to having a strong batch of applicants. Etc. _Visiting Departments_ I highly recommend visiting the departments to which you've been admitted -- but only _after _you've been admitted. Admitted students, whom departments now want and are competing to attract, are treated _much _differently than students who have merely applied or who are on the "waiting list" (if there is one), who will be seen as petitioners. Unfortunately, then, it won't be possible to properly visit departments that admit you at the last minute. Some departments have money to help students fly out to visit, others don't. It doesn't hurt to ask politely. In any case, let the admissions committee chair know you intend to visit. Even if funding isn't available, she can help arrange your stay -- for example by mentioning what times would be good or bad and maybe finding a graduate student willing to let you crash on their couch for a nightor two.
There are two main reasons to visit departments: First and obviously, it can help you decide where to go. But second, and less obviously, it is a valuable educational experience in its own right. The second point first: As I mentioned in Part I, students who spend their whole time in one department often have a provincial view of philosophy. Even visiting another department for a few days can crack that provincialism and give an invigorating and liberating, broader perspective on the field. Also, you will never again be treated as well by eminent professors as you will when you are a prospective (admitted!) graduate student. The country's best-known philosophers will take you out to lunch or coffee for an hour and genuinely listen to your views on philosophical topics. They'll be solicitous of you. They'll value your opinion. Graduate students -- who at top schools sometimes soon become influential professors themselves -- will engage you in long discussions about the state of philosophy, and you'll (sometimes) feel a real camraderie. My own graduate school tour, for which I set aside three full weeks (for six campuses) was one the highlights of my philosophical education. To maximize all this, try to stay at each campus for a few weekdays. Weekends don't really count. If you have to cut classes, cut classes. This is much more important than whether you get an A or a B in Phil 176. Also, I'd recommend emailing in advance the professors you'd like to meet and asking them if they're willing to go out for coffee withyou.
When you visit a school, the department will generally set you up with first- and second-year students to meet. No harm in that, but bear in mind that first- and second-year students are often still in the glow of having been admitted and they haven't yet started the most difficult part of their education, their dissertation. _Insist on meeting students in their 5th year and beyond,_ especially students working with advisors you imagine you might be working with. In my experience, such students will generally be brutally honest. Unlike new graduate students and unlike professors they don't really care whether you come to their school or not, so they have little motive to draw a rosy picture. And often they're just itching to have someone togrouse to.
Not everyone who read the 2007 version of this post took my advice about talking with advanced graduate students, so let me emphasize it just a bit more. I think this is the single most important thing you can do. I don't have statistics on this, but my impression is that only about half of students finish their PhDs in philosophy, and among those who don't finish the majority peter out during their dissertation phase, after already haven given four, five, six, seven, eight years of their life to the program. The reasons for fade out are complex: lack of funding, perfectionism, procrastination, loss of inspiration, confusion about what to do -- almost never, I think, lack of ability -- and also _bad advising_ or at least lack of encouragement, support, and timely feedback from one's dissertation chair. It is very important to have a realistic sense of this before you enroll in a PhD program (it's bad almost everywhere, but not _equally_ bad), especially if the students of one of your prospective advisors are among those who tend to struggle or fade out. Relatedly, don't expect professors' solicitious treatment necessarily to continue after you've enrolled. The advanced students' opinions about the professors are probably a better gauge of how you'll actually be treated. Nonetheless, if you talk substance with professors on philosophical topics you care about, you can get a sense of whether you're likely to see eye-to-eye philosophically. Gosh, with this new emphasis, this section is sounding a bit like a downer. I don't really mean it that way. Take a look again at the "Yippie!" button. Yippee! In many respects, graduate school is terrific and writing a dissertation is an amazing experience unlike anything else in your life in terms of the depth of study and scholarly satisfaction you can experience. But... eyes open about thechallenges.
_The Summer Before_
Students often seem to be shy about showing their faces around the department to which they've been admitted until either classes start or there's some formal introductory event. No need for this. Move in early. Meet some professors and ask them for some reading suggestions pertinent to your shared interests or classes you'll be taking with them in the fall. Get a running start. Professors are often quite interested in meeting the new students -- until the inevitable disappointment of discovering that on average they're only average! But if you get a running start, maybe that's a sign that you'll be an unusually good student...? _ETA (March 8): Wait Lists_ If you've been told you've been "waitlisted"? Probably, you should interpret this as "unlikely to be admitted" unless you have specifically been told that you are high on the wait list and have a decent chance of admission. (On the other hand, if you have been told the latter, believe it.) Normally, there isn't a formally ranked wait list, just a sense of who are among the dozens of students who were considered seriously but not offered admission. If yield is low, some these students' applications will be revisited, prioritized partly on grounds of balance (e.g., if acceptances are coming from students in Area A but not Area B, Area B students are more likely to bereconsidered).
_ETA (March 10): If You Can't Visit_ I have no especially creative ideas here, but it is especially pertinent this year due to the epidemic. I recommend video or phone conversations with prospective advisors and with advanced graduatestudents.
If it's possible to get a list of contact information for all graduate students, along with their year and areas of interest, that might be especially helpful, so you can choose students whose experiences might be representative of your own rather than being funneled to a few of the most enthusiastic students whose areas of interest and faculty advisors might be very different from what you expect yours to be. Posted by Eric Schwitzgebel at 7:06 AM2 comments
Labels: advice
, applying
to grad school
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2020 APPLYING TO PHD PROGRAMS IN PHILOSOPHY, PART VI: GRE SCORES AND OTHERTHINGS
Part I: Should You Apply, and Where? Part II: Grades, Classes, and Institution of Origin Part III: Letters of Recommendation Part IV: Writing Sample Part V: Statement of Purpose Old Series from 2007 -------------------------------------------------------- Applying to PhD Programs in Philosophy Part VI: GRE Scores and Other Things_GRE Scores_
GRE scores tend to be required for U.S. programs, but they are less important than grades, letters, writing sample, and statement of purpose. Some schools don't even require them. According to this site,
that currently includes Cornell, Emory, Illinois-Chicago, Michigan, Penn, and Wisconsin-Madison (among US PhD programs). In my experience, some members of admissions committees take GRE scores seriously, others ignore them entirely, and still others employ minimum scores as a preliminary screen and otherwise disregard them. This will almost certainly vary by committee member, institution, year, and applicant details. (Foreign applicants, for example, might not be expected to have taken or done well on the GRE.) Higher-level administrators play a role here: They oversee the admissions process, and in many schools they make the final decisions about fellowship funding. Since these administrators can really only evaluate your GPA, institution of origin, and GRE scores, students who do well on the GRE are more likely to get better funding offers than students with lower scores on the GRE -- for example, more years of fellowship without teaching (being paid simply to be a student!). Also, it looks good for the department if the students they admit have better average grades and GRE scores than the students in psychology, economics, etc. Since philosophy students on average do amazingly wellon the
GRE, even philosophers who don't think of GRE as diagnostic can find themselves citing students' GRE scores to make the case for financial support and for the superiority of philosophy over all otherdisciplines!
Therefore, I recommend that you practice for the GRE and retake it if your performance is disappointing. However, I don't recommend intensive training for the GRE. Devote that time, instead, to revising your writing sample and doing as well as possible in your classes and/or independent work. Although averages will vary by school, my sense is that among students admitted to UC Riverside (currently ranked #32in the U.S.),
a typical GRE score is 160-167 verbal (86th-98th percentile) and 153-165 quantitative (51st-89th percentile), with totals in the 320-330 range. (No one I know takes the Writing score seriously, but 5 is a typical score.) Much lower would potentially be a disadvantage, whereas a nearly perfect score would be an advantage. Let me emphasize, however, that at UCR, and I believe most other places, A LOW SCORE IS NOT A DEFEATER: Students with weak or (e.g., if foreign) no GREs are regularly admitted if their application is otherwise strong. Conversely, great GREs are at best a small favorable factor, more likely to help with fellowship opportunities than with admissionitself.
There is no GRE subject test in philosophy. _Race, Gender, and Disability_ Applications will often have optional tick-boxes in which you can indicate race/ethnicity, gender, veteran status, disability status, or membership in other social categories. Letter writers must also choose pronouns, and they might choose to mention disability or race if they think it's relevant. (Some would never mention such things. Others think they help the applicant by doing so, if the applicant is a member of a historically underrepresented group. If you prefer to keep the information confidential, tell your letter writers in advance.) Committees will often guess gender and ethnicity based on names.Women
and people of color are notoriously underrepresented in U.S. academic philosophy, compared to most other disciplines (data on other dimensions of diversity are harder to obtain). I believe there are persistent systemic biases.
However, I also believe that most admissions committees would like to counter these biases and see a broader diversity in the field. Admissions committees may nonetheless show bias implicitlyin how they read a
file from "María Gonzalez" compared to a file from "Jake Miller", or in how they read a file from someone with a serious disability. For these reasons and others, it is perfectly reasonable not to want to disclose your race, gender, disability status, etc., to the extent these can be hidden. Don't let yourself be pressured into revealing something you're not comfortable revealing. Schools that allow a "personal" statement in addition to a statement of purpose invite applicants to expand on obstacles they have overcome or other ways that they might contribute to the diversity of the graduate program. For discussion, see my advice on Statements ofPurpose
.
_Presentations, Publications, Life Experience_ If you have published a paper in an undergraduate journal or if you have presented at an undergraduate conference, or if you have other achievements of that sort, briefly mention it in your statement of purpose. However, they normally don't count for much. If you have life experience relevant to your proposed area of study, also mention this in your statement of purpose -- but only do this if it is genuinely relevant, and err on the side of being brief and factual rather than overplaying it. For example, if you want to study philosophy of law and you have some work experience in law, mention it. If you want to study philosophy of race and you have worked with an organization focused on racial justice, briefly describe your experience and its relevance to your philosophical interests. In disciplines other than philosophy, laboratory experience, work experience, and life experience are often an important part of the application. In philosophy, however, unless your situation is unusual, admissions decisions are almost always based on academic performance plus considerations of fit, balance, and diversity in the entering class, with other considerations having little weight. _Reapplying to Programs You Were Rejected from Last Year_ Yes, this is fine! Likely, the admissions committee's composition will have partly changed, so you might get a fresh set of eyes. Also, hopefully, your application will be somewhat stronger._Late Applications_
... are sometimes accepted. This will vary by school. _Personal Contacts and Connections_ Such things don't help much, I suspect, unless they bring substantive new information. If a professor at some point had a good, substantive, philosophical conversation with an applicant and mentions that to the committee, that might help a bit. But seeking out professors for such purposes could backfire if it seems like brown-nosing, or if the applicant seems immature, arrogant, or not particularly philosophically astute. Some professors may be very much swayed by personal connections, I suppose. I myself, however, often have a slightly negative feeling that I'm being "played" if someone who is applying to our PhD program contacts me during application season. If you seek to build a personal connection with a professor, it's best to do so after application season is over or long before you have begun applications. The best way to build a connection is this: Carefully read something recently written by the professor (within the past four years maybe), then ask an interesting and well-informed question about it. You can send them the question by email or possibly ask them face to face at a conference or a local event. The odds of an email reply are probably below 50% and tend to be lower for the best-known faculty, who are inundated with emails from strangers. The chance of a sustained correspondence is even lower, but it's notunheard of.
Unless you are genuinely brimming with inspiration and enthusiasm, you probably won't want to attempt to build these kinds of connections as an undergraduate. However, I recommend remembering this advice for later. If and when you are an advanced graduate student, building connections in this way, outside of your home department, can be both intellectually rewarding and good for your career. ---------------------------------------------------------- In the final part of this series I will discuss what to do after youhear back. (Here
's
the 2007 version.)
Posted by Eric Schwitzgebel at 10:03 AM4 comments
Labels: advice
, applying
to grad school
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2020 DO BUSINESS ETHICS CLASSES MAKE STUDENTS MORE ETHICAL? STUDENTS AND INSTRUCTORS AGREE: THEY DO! I'm inclined to think that university ethics classes typically have little effect on students' real-world moral behavior. I base this skepticism partly on Joshua Rust's and my finding,
across a wide variety of measures, that ethics professors generally don't behave much differently than other professors -- and if they don't behave differently, why would students? And I base it partly on my (now somewhat dated) reviewof
business ethics and medical ethics instruction specifically, which finds shoddy research methods and inconsistent results suggestive of an underlying non-effect. On the other hand, part of the administrative justification of ethics classes -- especially medical ethics and business ethics -- appears to be the hope that students will eventually act more ethically as a result of having taken these courses. Administrators and instructors who aim at this result presumably expect that the classes are at least sometimes effective. The issue, perhaps surprisingly, isn't very well studied. I parody only slightly when I say that the typical study on this topic asks students at the end of class "are you more ethical now?", and when they respond "yes" at rates greater than chance, the researcher concludes that the instruction was effective. ----------------------------------------------------- Nina Strohminger and I thought we'd ask instructors and students what they thought about this. We wanted to know two things. First, do instructors and students think that business ethics instruction _should_ aim at improving students morally? Second, do they think that business ethics classes _do in fact_ tend to improve students morally? Our respondents were 101 business ethics instructors at the 2018 Society for Business Ethics conference, plus students from three very different universities: 339 students from Penn (an Ivy League university with an elite business school), 173 students from UC Riverside (a large state university), and 81 students from Seattle University (a small-to-medium-sized Jesuit university, where JessicaImanaka
coordinated the distribution). Surveys were anonymous, pen and paper. Students completed their surveys on the spot near the beginning of the first day of instruction in business ethics courses. Using a five-point scale from "not at all important" to "extremely important", Question 1 asked respondents to "rate the importance of the following goals that YOU PERSONALLY AIM to get from your business ethics classes: * An intellectual appreciation of fundamental ethical principles * An understanding of what specific business practices are considered ethical and unethical, whether or not I choose to comply with those practices * Tools for thinking in a more sophisticated way about ethicalquandaries
* Interesting readings and fun puzzle cases that feed my intellectual curiosity * Practical knowledge that will help me be a more ethical business leader in the future * Satisfying my degree requirements * Grades that will look good on my transcripts Brackets indicate changes for the instructors' version. The target prompt was the fifth: Practical knowledge that will help them be more ethical business leaders in the future. Responses were near ceiling. 58% of students rated practical knowledge that will help them be more ethical business leaders as "extremely important" to them, the highest possible choice. The mean response was 4.44 on the 1-5 scale. This was the highest mean response among the seven possible goals. 40% of students rated it more highly than they rated "satisfying my degree requirements" and 48% rated it more highly than "grades that will look good on my transcript". Responses were similar for all three schools. If we accept these self-reports, gaining practical knowledge that will help them actually become more ethical is one of students' most important personal aims in taking business ethics classes. Instructors' responses were similar: 58% said it was personally "extremely important" to them to have students gain practical knowledge that will help them be more ethical business leaders in the future. The mean response was 4.41 on the 1-5 scale. Question 2 asked students and instructors to guess each other's goals (with the same seven possible goals). Students tended to think that professors would also very highly rate (mean 4.71) "practical knowledge that will help students be more ethical business leaders in the future". Professors tended to think that students would regard such knowledge as important (mean 4.09) but not as important as satisfying degree requirements (mean 4.42). Question 3 asked respondents how _likely _they thought it was that "the average students gets the following things from their business ethics classes". The same seven goals were presented, with a 1 - 5 response scale from "not at all likely" to "extremely likely". Overall, both students and instructors expressed optimism: Both groups' mean response to this question was 3.84 on the 1-5 scale. Based on this part of the questionnaire, it looks like students and instructors agree: It's important to them that their business ethics classes produce practical knowledge that helps students become more ethical business leaders, and they think that their business ethics classes do tend to have that effect. On the second page of the questionnaire, we asked these questionsdirectly.
Question 4: Do you think that, as a result of having taken business ethics classes, students on average will behave more ethically, less ethically, or about the same as if they had not taken a business ethics course? Among instructors, 64% said more ethical, 35% said about the same, and 1% said less ethical. Among students, 54% said more ethical, 45% said about the same, and again only 1% said less ethical. Question 5: To what extent do you agree that the central aim of business ethics instruction should be to make students more ethical? Among instructors, 63% agreed or strongly agreed and only 19% disagreed or strongly disagreed. Among students, 67% agreed or strongly agreed and only 9% disagreed or strongly disagreed. The results of these direct questions thus broadly fit with the results in terms of specific goals. EITHER WAY YOU ASK, BOTH BUSINESS ETHICS STUDENTS AND BUSINESS ETHICS INSTRUCTORS SAY THAT BUSINESS ETHICS CLASSES SHOULD AND DO MAKE STUDENTS MORE ETHICAL. ----------------------------------------------------- Many cautions and caveats apply. The results might be influenced by "socially desirable responding" -- respondents' tendency to express attitudes that they think will be socially approved (maybe especially if they think their instructors might be watching). Also, instructors attending a business ethics conference might not be representative of business ethics instructors as a whole -- maybe more gung-ho. Students and instructors might not know their own goals and values. They might be excessively optimistic about the transformative power of university instruction. Etc. I confess to having some doubts. Nonetheless, I was struck by the apparent degree of consensus, among students and instructors, that business ethics classes should lead students to become more ethical, and by the majority opinion that they do indeed have that effect. -----------------------------------------------------Note:
However, Peter Singer, Brad Cokelet, and I have also recentlyconducted a study
that suggests that under certain conditions teaching the philosophical material on meat ethics can lead students to purchase less meat at campus dining locations. Posted by Eric Schwitzgebel at 9:26 AM5 comments
Labels: ethics
, ethics
professors
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2020 THOUGHTS ON CONJUGAL LOVE For Valentine's Day, some thoughts on love. In 2003, my Swiss friends Eric and Anne-Françoise Rose asked me to contribute something to their wedding ceremony. Here’s a lightly revised version of what I wrote, concerning conjugal love, the distinctive kind of love between spouses.#
Love is not a feeling. Feelings come and go, while love is steady. Feelings are passions in the classic sense of _passion_, which shares a root with “passive” – they arrive mostly unbidden, unchosen. Love, in contrast, is something built. The passions felt by teenagers and writers of romantic lyrics, felt so intensely and often so temporarily, are not love – though they might sometimes be theprelude to it.
Rather than a feeling, love is a way of structuring your values, goals, and reactions. Central to love is valuing the good of the other for their own sake. Of course, we all care about the good of other people we know, for their own sake and not just for other ends. Only if the regard is deep, only if we so highly value the other’s well-being that we are willing to thoroughly restructure our own goals to accommodate it, and only if this restructuring is so rooted that it automatically informs our reactions to the person and to news that could affect them, do we possess real love. Conjugal love involves all of this, but it is also more than this. In conjugal love, one commits to seeing one’s life always with the other in view. One commits to pursuing one’s major projects, even when alone, in a kind of implicit conjunction with the other. One’s life becomes a co-authored work. Parental love for a young child might be purer and more unconditional than conjugal love. The parent expects nothing back from a young child. The parent needn’t share plans and ideals with an infant. Later, children will grow away into their separate lives, independent of parents’ preferences, while we retain our parental love for them. Conjugal love, because it involves the collaborative construction of a joint life, can’t be unconditional in this way. If the partners don’t share values and a vision, they can’t steer a mutual course. If one partner develops too much of a separate vision or doesn’t openly and in good faith work with the other toward their joint goals, conjugal love fails and is, at best, replaced with some more general type of loving concern. Nevertheless, to dwell on the conditionality of conjugal love, and to develop a set of contingency plans should it fail, is already to depart from the project of jointly fabricating a life, and to begin to develop individual goals opposing those of the partner. Conjugal love requires an implacable, automatic commitment to responding to all major life events through the mutual lens of marriage. One can’t embody such a commitment while harboring serious back-up plans and persistent thoughts about the contingency of the relationship. Is it paradoxical that conjugal love requires lifelong commitment without contingency plans, yet at the same time is contingent in a way that parental love is not? No, there is no paradox. If you believe something is permanent, you can make lifelong promises and commitments contingent upon it, because you believe the thing will never fail you. Lifelong commitments can be built upon bedrock, solid despite their dependency on that rock. This, then, is the significance of the marriage ceremony: It is the expression of a mutual unshakeable commitment to build a joint life together, where each partner’s commitment is possible, despite the contingency of conjugal love, because each partner trusts the other partner’s commitment to be unshakeable. A deep faith and trust must therefore underlie true conjugal love. That trust is the most sacred and inviolable thing in a marriage, because it is the very foundation of its possibility. Deception and faithlessness destroy conjugal love because, and to the extent that, they undermine that trust. For the same reason, honest and open interchange about long-standing goals and attitudes is at the heart ofmarriage.
Passion alone can’t ground conjugal trust. Neither can shared entertainments and the pleasure of each other’s company. Both partners must have matured enough that their core values are stable. They must be unselfish enough to lay everything on the table for compromise, apart from those permanent, shared values. And they must resist the tendency to form secret, selfish goals. Only to the degree they approach these ideals are partners worthy of the trust that makes conjugal love possible. Posted by Eric Schwitzgebel at 7:31 AM3 comments
Labels: culture
, moral
psychology
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2020 QUESTION: WHY DO GREAT PHILOSOPHERS EMBRACE SUCH WACKY VIEWS? ANSWER: THE WORLD ITSELF IS WACKY Recently, philosopher Michael Huemer seems intent on irritating philosophers of every stripe. (This isn't necessarily a bad thing.) On Saturday, he took aim at philosophical heroes, arguing that "great philosophers are bad philosophers ". He notes that great philosophers tend to confidently defend bizarre conclusions, which he suggests reveals their poor judgment; and often they rely, he says, on arguments so terrible that "even an undergrad" can see the fallacies and non sequiturs. As examples, he offers Socrates's bad arguments against Thrasymachus in Book I of the Republic, Hume's "absurdly skeptical" conclusions in the _Treatise _and _Enquiries_, and Kant's willingness to take his thinly defended "categorical imperative" to absurd conclusions, such as not telling a lie even to prevent a murder. If you don't already know this material, I won't detain you with explanations here -- Huemer's are succinct and readable . I allow that on the face of it, Huemer has a pretty good case. And he's not targeting obscure philosophers or obscure passages. These are some of the most famous parts of some of the most famous works in the Western canon. And the views and arguments are decidedly... well, let's go with _wacky_. Nor is Huemer _especially_ cherry picking. There's a lot of wacky-seeming stuff in other canonical philosophers too, for example, Leibniz on monads, Nietzsche on eternal recurrence, Descartes on animal (non-)minds, David Lewis on the real existence of possible worlds.... Huemer has an explanation. He suggests that what makes a philosopher "great" is that the philosopher advances intriguing ideas that future generations find worth arguing about. Ordinary, bland truths, convincingly defended, don't really heat up a conversation. When faced with a compelling argument for a reasonable conclusion, people might react with something like, "yeah, that sounds right," and just move on. If in contrast you say, "there is no self" or "you shouldn't even lie to a murderer chasing an innocent person" (and for whatever sociological reason people take you seriously), that can really start up a good debate! Maybe a debate that lasts centuries. Possibly, the only people willing to advance such claims are bad philosophers -- philosophers who lack the good judgment to recognize the absurdity of their conclusions and who lack the critical chops to recognize that their supporting arguments are rotten. Hence, great philosophers are bad philosophers. QED! Is Huemer's argument a good one? Or is it, perhaps instead, a great one (in the strict Huemerian sense of "great")? I am probably a good target audience for Huemer's argument: Regular readers will know that I am quite happy to attribute plain old bad argumentation to some of the great historical philosophers, includingKant
and Laozi
, in
accordance with my rejection of excessive charity in reading history of philosophy. Although I like Hume and Plato and (some parts of) Kant, I'm not bothered by Huemer's suggestion and I rather enjoy the idea that the great philosophers are fallible boneheads just like the rest of us. However, I have one observation about a piece of the story that Huemer's hypothesis leaves unexplained, and I have a competing explanation to offer instead. Here's what Huemer leaves unexplained: The lack of "good" philosophers in the historical record. If Huemer's hypothesis were correct, you'd think that among the contemporaries of Plato, Hume, and Kant would be good philosophers who defend sensible views on solid grounds. These philosophers might not get as much attention as the provocative philosophers, but it would be odd if historical records of them entirely disappeared. But there are no philosophers -- or at least (as I'll explain below) no ambitious metaphysicians -- who appear to meet Huemer's standard of being a"good" philosopher.
Huemer suggests that Aristotle might be somewhat better than the trio he highlights, even if not entirely good. On Facebook, some others suggested maybe Thomas Reid might be a good philosopher who was a contemporary of Hume and Kant. But I don't think Aristotle or Reid are probably good by Huemer's standards. Some of Aristotle's and Reid's views are quite strange, and their arguments for those strange views aren't reliably sensible. For example, Reid, despite his reputation as a "common sense" philosopher, argues that material objects have no causal power and can't even hold together into consistent shapes, without the constant intervention of immaterial souls (an opinion he acknowledges is contrary to the views of the "vulgar"). I have arguedthat
there are some metaphysical issues -- particularly the issue of the relation between mind and body -- where not a single philosopher in the whole history of Earth has been able to articulate a fleshed-out positive theory that isn't both highly dubious and in some respects radically contrary both to our current common sense and to the common sense of their own historical era. (I am still willing to entertain possible counterexamples, if you have some to suggest.) Why is this? Why are philosophical theories about the metaphysics of mind (and, I'd suggest, at least also personal identity, causation, and object individuation) all so bizarre and dubious? Here's my hypothesis: The _world_ is bizarre and (for the foreseeable future) philosophically intractable. This is my competing explanation of the bizarre and dubious claims that Huemer has noted often occupy center stage in the history of philosophy. The world is bizarre in the following sense: Some things that are true of it are radically contrary to common sense. In physics, consider quantum mechanics and relativity theory. And in philosophy, the bizarreness is epistemically intractable, for the foreseeable future, for the following pair of reasons: (1.) Our common sense about fundamental issues of metaphysics is probably inconsistent at root, and if so, no self-consistent well-developed metaphysics could possibly adhere to all of it. (This explains the inevitable bizarreness.) And (2.) In the domains under discussion, empirical methods are indecisive, and we need to rely on this flawed, inconsistent common sense to a substantial degree. This generates intractable debates where the violations of common sense of one theory become the commonsensical starting presuppositions of competitor theories, which then bring radical violations of common sense of their own. No theory decisively meets all reasonable criteria of excellence. (This explains the inevitable dubiety.) Great philosophers are undaunted! Amid the competing bizarrenesses, they find some to favor. (The epistemic landscape isn't totally flat: There still are considerations pro and con and better and worse ideas.) They defend their favored views as best they can -- of course indecisively, given the bad epistemic situation of ambitious metaphysical philosophy. How about arguments we now think of as "good" arguments for sensible conclusions? Either (a.) they are unambitious, rather than going after the really huge, intractable issues (especially in fundamental metaphysics), or (b.) they are flawed for reasons that remain mostly invisible to their proponents (i.e., probably you. Sorry!), or (3.) they are forms of skepticism about the enterprise. This metaphilosophy is probably at its most plausible when applied to fundamental issues of metaphysics. The best examples of totally weird views and arguments tend to be in metaphysics. Maybe other subfields work differently? (I do think, however, that ethics might soon face a cognitive and methodological crisis, when confronted with a range of Artificial Intelligence cases for which it is conceptually unprepared.) Great philosophers embrace bizarre views because our ordinary commonsense understanding of the world is so radically deficient that no non-bizarre view is defensible or even, once one tries to specify the details, coherently articulatable. Great philosophers confront this bizarreness, defending their best guess with the indecisive argumentative tools they have, pushing us forward into the weirdunknown.
Posted by Eric Schwitzgebel at 12:39 PM24 comments
Labels: crazyism
,
metaphysics
,
sociology of philosophy MONDAY, FEBRUARY 03, 2020 JERKS OF ACADEME: A FIELD GUIDEJust out
in the Chronicle of Higher Education, with hilarious art depicting the four main types I profile: the Big Shot, the Creepy Hugger, the Sadistic Bureaucrat, and the Embittered Downdragger. Unfortunately, it's paywalled. I'm trying to get permission to repost it here, but in the meantime please feel free to comment here or email me and I can send you a PDF for personal use. ----------------------------------------_Jerks of Academe_
This morning you probably didn’t look in the mirror and ask, “Am I a jerk?” And if you did, I wouldn’t believe your answer. Jerks usually don’t know that they are jerks. Jerks mostly travel in disguise, even from themselves. But the rising tide (or is it just the increasing visibility?) of scandal, grisly politics, bureaucratic obstructionism, and toxic advising in academe reveals the urgent need of a good wildlife guide by which to identify the varieties of academic jerk. So consider what follows a public service of sorts. I offer it in sad remembrance of the countless careers maimed or slain by the beasts profiled below. I hope you will forgive me if on this occasion I use “he” as a gender-neutral pronoun.THE BIG SHOT
The Big Shot is the most easily identified of all academic jerks. You can spot him a mile away. His plumage is so grand! (Or so he thinks.) His publications so widely cited! (At least by the right people.) His editorial-board memberships so dignified! (Not that anyone else noticed.) You will never fully appreciate the Big Shot’s genius, but if you cite him copiously and always defer to his judgment, he’ll think you have above-average intelligence.THE CREEPY HUGGER
To those unfamiliar with his ways, the Creepy Hugger appears the opposite of the Big Shot. He will seem kind, modest, and charming, despite his impressive accomplishments. This is his alluringdisguise....
Posted by Eric Schwitzgebel at 10:11 AM10 comments
Labels: announcements,
humor ,
moral psychology
,
sociology of philosophy WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29, 2020INFLATE AND EXPLODE
I have a new paper in draft, "Inflate and Explode", which argues against eliminativismand "illusionism
"
about consciousness. It's so short (main text 1400 words) that I'll just share it as a blog post. It is, in fact, just a revised versionof a blog post
from 2018.
-----------------------------------------_1. Introduction._
Here’s a way to deny the existence of things of Type X. Assume that things of Type X must have Property A, and then argue that nothing has Property A. Sometimes this is a good argumentative approach. Ghosts must be immaterial. Nothing is immaterial. Therefore, there are noghosts.
Other times, the background assumption is false: Things of Type X in fact need not have Property A. The argument then fails: It illegitimately relies on an inflated or distorted conception of things of Type X. Real heroes must be ethically flawless. No one is ethically flawless. Therefore, there are no real heroes. Such arguments I pejoratively dub inflate-and-explode arguments. They explode not things of Type X but only an inflated conception of those things. Eliminativism or “illusionism” about consciousness – recently defended by Jay Garfield (2015), Keith Frankish (2016a), and François Kammerer (2019) among others – generally relies on the inflate-and-explode argumentative strategy, as I will now explain. _2. Inflate-and-Explode Eliminativism._ Paul Feyerabend (1963) denies that mental processes exist. He does so on the grounds that “mental processes”, understood in the ordinary sense, are necessarily nonmaterial, and only material things exist. Patricia Churchland (1983) argues that the concept of consciousness may “fall apart” or be rendered obsolete, or at least require “transmutation”, because the idea of consciousness is deeply, perhaps inseparably, connected with false empirical views about the transparency of our mental lives and the centrality of linguistic expression. Daniel Dennett (1991) argues that “qualia” do not exist, on the grounds that qualia are supposed by their nature to be ineffable and irreducible to scientifically discoverable mental mechanisms, and there is no good reason to believe that there are such ineffable, irreducible mental entities. Garfield (2015) denies the existence of phenomenal consciousness on the broadly Buddhist grounds that there is no “subject” of experience of the sort required and that we lack the kind of infallibility that friends of phenomenal consciousness assume. Frankish (2016a) argues that phenomenal consciousness is an “illusion” because there are no phenomenal properties that are “private” in the requisite sense, or ineffable, or irreducible to physical or functional processes. Kammerer (2019) likewise appeals to the non-existence of states with the right kind of irreducibility and other special epistemic features. The arguments share a common structure. The target concept – “consciousness”, “phenomenal consciousness”, “qualia”, “what it’s like” – is held to involve some dubious property, such as immateriality, infallibility, or irreducibility. The eliminativist argues plausibly that nothing possesses that dubious property. The conclusion is drawn: Consciousness, etc., does not exist. The arguments are sound only if nothing that lacks the dubious property satisfies the target concept. _ 3. How Consciousness Enthusiasts Invite Inflation._ Unfortunately, enthusiasts about consciousness tend to set themselves up for objections of this sort. Consciousness enthusiasts tend to want to do two things simultaneously: (1.) They want to use the word “consciousness” (or “phenomenology” or “qualia” or “what it’s like” or whatever) to refer to that undeniable stream of experience that we all have. (2.) In characterizing that stream of conscious experience, or for the sake of some other philosophical project, they make dubious assertions about its nature. They might claim that we know it infallibly well, or that it forms the basis of our understanding of the outside world, or that it’s irreducible to merely functional or physical processes, or.... If those additional claims were demonstrably correct, the double purpose would be approximately harmless. However, such claims are not demonstrably correct. In committing to both projects simultaneously, consciousness enthusiasts thereby invite critics to think that the dubious claims they advance in project (2) are essential to the existence of consciousness (“phenomenology”, “qualia”, “what it’s like”) in the intended sense. It’s like saying, in the same breath, “of course there are real heroes” (of which you are morally certain) and “real heroes are ethically flawless” (a theory you favor). A listener could be forgiven for mistakenly thinking that they have refuted your first claim if they can show that no one is ethically flawless. For instance, Thomas Nagel (1974) believes that there’s “something it’s like” to be you, and also that this something-it’s-like cannot be fully understood by objective sciences like physics. Earlier philosophers often committed to indubitability or substance dualism. John Searle (1992), Ned Block (1995/2007), and David Chalmers (1996) emphasize the importance of (phenomenal) consciousness and also commit to the inadequacy of functionalist explanations of it. The most famous recent articulators of the philosophical concept of phenomenal consciousness all commit to dubious claims about it – asphilosophers will.
_ 3. Resisting Inflation._ _ _However – and this is the key – there is no consensus about those dubious claims among Anglophone philosophers of mind who use the terms “consciousness”, “phenomenal consciousness”, and “what it’s like”. (“Qualia” is a harder case.) Because these terms are shared terms, they are not controlled by the minority who would attach dubious conditions to them. “Consciousness” is, and should be, understood in terms of shared community norms of use or meaning. The community norms do not essentially require indubitability, irreducibility, etc. Instead, “consciousness”, “phenomenal consciousness”, “what it’s like”, “stream of experience”, and (maybe) “qualia” all point to something that everyone (virtually everyone?) agrees exists: the types of things or events that you almost certainly think of when someone utters the phrase “conscious experiences”. The best definitions of consciousness are definitions by example. At the core of, for instance, Searle’s (1991), Block’s (1995), Chalmers’s (1996), Charles Siewert’s (1998), and recently my own (Schwitzgebel 2016) definitions of (phenomenal) consciousness are examples of conscious experiences: visual and auditory experiences, emotions, acute pains, vivid imagery. If you agree that such things exist, and if you agree they have a certain obvious and important property in common that other things lack – it is, I think, a very obvious property! – then you agree that consciousness in the intended sense exists. Since definitions by example can seem to lack rigor (and are subject to certain other risks I discuss in Schwitzgebel 2016), it might be tempting to supplement minimalist definitions by example. It might be tempting, for instance, to suggest that the target phenomena in question all have an irreducible subjectivity (or whatever). Such supplementation is philosophically risky. If it’s manifestly true that all conscious experiences have an irreducible subjectivity (or whatever), then this can be a helpful specification. But such supplementary assertions risk confusing the reader and inflating the target if they are built into the definition rather than offered as separate, non-definitional theses. We know some examples of consciousness. We know that these examples have an obvious and important property in common, which we dub (it only _seems _circular) “consciousness” or “phenomenality”. There is not much reasonable doubt about the existence of such examples or the fact that they have this property in common. Definition by example is a relatively safe and theoretically innocent way of characterizing consciousness; it blocks the inflate-and-explode maneuver; and it picks out the consensus target phenomenon that philosophers of mind are after when we talk about consciousness. I finish with a conjecture, which might not be true but which if true strengthens my argument: Non-eliminativist philosophers who commit to dubious claims about consciousness are in general much more deeply committed to the existence of consciousness than they are to the truth of those dubious claims. If required to abandon such dubious claims by force of argument, they would still accept the existence of consciousness. Their dubious claims aren’t ineliminably, foundationally important to their conception of consciousness. It’s not like the relation between magical powers and witches on some medieval European conceptions of witches, such that if magical powers were shown not to exist, the right conclusion would be that witches do not exist. It’s more like insisting that your heroes are still real heroes even if you are forced to abandon your theory of what makes someone a hero. It’s like insisting that red things are still red even after your favorite theory of color is destroyed. Of course there are still heroes and colors._4. Conclusion._
Almost all philosophers of mind have a conception of consciousness which rides free of the dubious claims that some of us make about consciousness, claims which are reasonably criticized by the eliminativists. We can remain confident that consciousness in this core, shared sense exists, even if indubitability, irreducibility, subjectivity, ineffability, ineliminable mystery, and so forth prove to be mistakes or illusions. The eliminativist arguments explode only an inflated conception of the target. Perhaps similar remarks apply to some of the other things philosophers have grumpily or gleefully attempted to vanquish – not only heroes and colors but knowledge, causation, altruism, freedom, race, objectivity, chance, mind-independent reality, moral facts, theself....
-----------------------------------------_Notes_
For some recent discussion, see Chalmers’s (2018) on “weak illusionism” and Type B materialism. I have suggested to Frankish (Schwitzgebel 2016) and Garfield (Schwitzgebel 2018) that the existence of phenomenal consciousness might be saved if it is defined in this relatively innocent way. Frankish accepts that such definition by example helpfully identifies a “neutral explanandum” that does exist, but he also asserts that the definition is “not substantive” “in the substantive sense created by the phenomenality language game” (2016b, p. 227). It remains unclear, however, why such a definition by example is not substantive. In contrast, Garfield replies by, as I see it, doubling down on the inflation move, denying the existence of “qualitative states” “that are the objects of immediate awareness, the foundation of our empirical knowledge… that we introspect, with qualitative properties that are the properties of those states and not of the objects we perceive” (2018, p. 584). For helpful discussion and comments, thanks to David Chalmers, Keith Frankish, Jay Garfield, Christopher Hitchcock, François Kammerer, Hans Ricke, Josh Weisberg, and commenters on my relevant posts at the Splintered Mind and other social media. -----------------------------------------_References_
* Block, Ned (1995/2007). On a confusion about a function of consciousness. In N. Block, Consciousness, function, and representation. MIT Press. * Chalmers, David J. (1996). The conscious mind. Oxford UniversityPress.
* Chalmers, David J. (2018). The meta-problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 25 (9-10), 6-61. * Churchland, Patricia Smith (1983). Consciousness: The transmutation of a concept. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 64,80-95.
* Dennett, Daniel C. (1991). Consciousness explained. Little, Brown,and Co.
* Feyerabend, Paul K. (1963). Comment: Mental events and the brain. Journal of Philosophy, 60, 295-296. * Frankish, Keith (2016a). Illusionism as a theory of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23 (11-12), 11-39. * Frankish, Keith (2016b). Not disillusioned: Reply to commentators. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23 (11-12), 256-289. * Garfield, Jay (2015). Engaging Buddhism. Oxford University Press. * Garfield, Jay (2018). Engaging engagements with Engaging Buddhism. Sophia, 57, 581-590. * Nagel, Thomas (1974). What is it like to be a bat? Philosophical Review, 83, 435-450. * Kammerer, François (2019). The illusion of conscious experience. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02071-y. * Schwitzgebel, Eric (2016). Phenomenal consciousness, defined and defended as innocently as I can manage. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23 (11-12), 224-235. * Schwitzgebel, Eric (2018). Consciousness, idealism, and skepticism: Reflections on Jay Garfield’s Engaging Buddhism. Sophia,57, 559-563.
* Searle, John R. (1991). The rediscovery of the mind. MIT Press. * Siewert, Charles (1998). The significance of consciousness. Princeton University Press. ----------------------------------------- Posted by Eric Schwitzgebel at 9:04 AM15 comments
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