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Philosophy seems to have a self-esteem problem these days. Partly it is a matter of depending for a sense of self-worth unduly on the opinions of others, but there is no denying that some of those opinions are negative. The Sokal event was in response to a particular school of apparent nonsense, but we also have the earlier remarks of Feynman on philosophy of science, and more recently Hawking on the relevance of the subject as a whole.

And now we also have the nasty dust-up over Lawrence Kraus’s childish and dismissive response to David Albert’s review of the title of his book. Gary Gutting sensibly asks Can Physics and Philosophy Get Along? (in the NYTimes on May 10), and provides a reasoned discussion of the sources of disagreement, but I think there is a bigger issue.

Perhaps it might be worthwhile for philosophers to ask if there is some good reason for the currently perceived disrespect of philosophy rather than just going into defense mode – and for those who do so ask, I have a suggested partial answer.

To me the value of Philosophy lies not in providing answers but in asking questions, and the problem as I see it is that many in the discipline present themselves as having some special kind of expertise in giving answers or resolving problems. Even when the claim of expertise is made more for the analysis and histories of proposed solutions (as opposed to their actual finding and evaluation) I still think that the emphasis on solutions is problematic.

A couple of my favourite examples of bad philosophising may help to make the point. Although Searle’s ‘Chinese Room’ is mere foolishness as a “refutation” of “strong AI”, it may perhaps serve as a useful source of questions to clarify what the proponents of strong AI are actually saying. And similarly the “Gettier Problems” can lead to clarifying questions regarding the intent of those who “define” knowledge as justified true belief. In both cases a question might occasionally lead the hearer to identify something they had actually overlooked, but it remains open to the more likely possibility that the intent of the “folk” was actually much more sophisticated than the philosopher had understood it to be.

This time it’s christians taking offense (and getting support from the legal system in India) at the”blasphemy” of revealing the actual mechanism behind a purported ”miracle”.

And yet …more »

Robert Reich’s ‘Thoughts on Tax Day 2012′ is worth noting if only for its reminder of two famous quotes.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.(1904): “taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.”

Louis Brandeis (1897):  “we may have a democracy or we may have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”

One reason for believing the latter was attempted in a much more recent quote.

Abbott Joseph Liebling (1960): “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

But this actually isn’t quite right. The cost of publication was never all that high and now it is negligible. And so it’s not the press but the audience that is hard or costly to obtain.

The reason Brandeis was right is because those with great wealth are better placed to buy or bribe the attention of voters to their message.

And the situation is unstable. Once a small class acquires more than half the wealth, that class has the power to buy more than half of the voters’ attention and with the not unreasonable assumption of total gullibility (ie every viewer is immediately persuaded by the last message heard) that is enough for them to further cement their position. And even without total gullibility it may still be possible to persuade the majority with sufficiently repeated exposure so a high enough domination of the economy may be sufficient to control the politics so as to be self-perpetuating.

Byron Jennings of TRIUMF has a blog at Quantum Diaries where his latest post challenges the Intelligent Design crowd to actually make some kind of testable prediction.

An alternative to making predictions, though, is just to declare the opposition in default for failure of postdiction and that is what  actually seems to be the preferred strategy of creationists. As Jennings says, “Being able to describe past observations is just the price to play the game, and with sufficient ingenuity, can usually be done.” Yes, and I am pretty sure that natural selection from random variations can in fact do the job. But given the effectively infinite variety of life, the task of explaining all past observations will never be done. When we have explained the eye that sees, then there’s the eye on the peacock’s tail, and after that the I of conscious experience, and then who knows what. If we don’t want to appeal to magic then the price of this game will never have been paid in full.  Of course finding the price of admission then becomes a game in itself, and we should thank those of little ingenuity whenever they come up with interesting puzzles for us to solve. (Yes, we have usually thought of whatever they suggest long ago, but we should still thank them out of politeness – and then ask them to go out and find us more challenging problems to solve.)

British Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks claims to know The Limits of Secularism, but he seems to be confusing secularism with science rather than just considering it as freedom from religion.

The two essential roles that he reserves for religion are the answering of big questions and the support of community and fellow-feeling. But he seems unconcerned as to whether the purported answers are in fact true, and is blind to the way that faiths which unite their adherents divide them from others.

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Law professor Stanley Fish probably knows quite a bit about evidence, but from his recent article with the above title I am led to doubt that he really understands much about science.

In particular, his main point appears to be based on a misunderstanding, for he says:

What I do assert is that with respect to a single demand — the demand that the methodological procedures of an enterprise be tethered to the world of fact in a manner unmediated by assumptions — science and religion are in the same condition of not being able to meet it (as are history, anthropology, political science, sociology, psychology and all the rest).

When a scientist expresses the criteria of an experimental test in terms of the theory being tested, that is only a shorthand for those familiar with the theoretical context and the true test can always be expressed in terms that require no theory-specific assumptions. For example the prediction that “this collision will produce an output of that particle” is just shorthand for something that could be expressed (though at much greater length) in terms of statements like “if you set those dials this way then that needle will point to this mark”.
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John Baez gave a Google Tech Talk on the issue. The slides include links to more detailed arguments and his home page also links to the Azimuth Project wiki is collecting information and ideas from a larger group of participants.

Philosophers seem to always be worried about not being taken seriously as providers of answers to important questions. But Philosophy Is Not a Science and so it is foolish of them to expect that kind of respect. They do not provide answers but they do often provide useful (albeit arguably often meaningless) questions and/or commentary which challenge the presumptions of our language and are better interpreted as art intended to influence our mood and mindset than as providing any kind of authoritative answers to real questions.
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I guess it’s at least a way of generating traffic for The Chronicle Review and those who have written books and articles on the subject, but I don’t know if there’s anything really new being said – either in those articles or in the responses from Russell Blackford and others.

But I do generally seem to agree with Blackford on most things and no less so this time when he says “I’m coming to think increasingly that all this talk of ‘free will’ isn’t very helpful for understanding our actual situation, partly because we don’t seem to have much clarity or agreement about what it even means”.

I also like Blackford’s apparent suggestion in his second response to Jerry Coyne that determinism is to some extent a *requirement* for free will. If what I actually choose to do or think at any point is not a function of the immediately preceding mental state which I have by previous cogitation brought into being, then that indeterminacy denies rather than grants me the capacity to control my own mental destiny.

This is along the same lines as my own claim that determinism is a requirement for responsibility in that the idea of responsibility is based on the capacity for being influenced by a response to our actions (or by observation of responses applied to others) in such a way as to perhaps modify our future behaviour.

What Is Science? From Feynman to Sagan to Curie, an Omnibus of Definitions is collected by Maria Popova at Brain Pickings,

and John S Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts has The Knight’s Song, or What is a Theory?

My own take is that a science is any teachable art of making correct testable predictions. With any restriction as to method or attitude being superfluous to the definition (though not without compelling interest in practice).

And I would say that a theory is just any specific process for making such predictions – including explanatory theories (such as “the butler did it”)as predicting the results of further investigation (such as “you will find the money hidden in his room”), and mathematical theories such as analytic function theory or analytic number theory as being respectively the body of techniques of predicting and proving results a specific area or the possible results from  application of a specific class of methods.

William M. Briggs » Good Friday: Rally For Reason With St Anselm’s Ontological Argument believes that one can “come to religion through rational argument”.

Of course, if one admits a wrong argument expressed in a superficially rational-looking form as a rational argument then one can come to anything through rational argument, but the claim to rationality depends on a willingness to see and acknowledge flaws in one’s argument.

It is irrational to persist in believing arguments which have been shown to be incorrect, and it is only slightly less irrational to repeatedly fall for false arguments in favour of a proposition just because you want to have a “reason” to believe it.

Frankly, the only faith for which I have any respect is that which admits it is *not* supported by reason. If the existence of God were provable by reason then there would be no reason for faith and so to claim to have made an act of willful faith would itself be unreasonable. (Except perhaps if belief in god were attributed to faith in reason, which then sets reason above God – which may well be a greater sin than not believing in “him” at all.)

P.S. While it is not “irrational” to make a logical error it is arguably stupid to do so – and since (at least in my experience) we all make stupid mistakes quite frequently, I suspect that those who are offended by the charge of stupidity are displaying a higher level of arrogance than that of which they accuse their accusers.

Russell Blackford seems to like the fact that a recent Pew survey shows more Americans are getting wary of religion in politics.

So do I. I am offended by the view that religions should have privileged treatment under the law and I disagree strongly with many of their other views on how society should be run. So I am happy to see any move towards defeating those views.

But I am not so keen on the wording which suggests that people are prepared to say that churches should not express those views.

I am happy to see that Blackford, too, is not actually opposed to the churches expressing views on political matters, but I don’t understand why he thinks their expressed views should not be based on theological considerations. Shouldn’t they have the same right as any other group to express views that are ill-founded and wrong?

This ‘debate’ at The Chronicle Review came to my attention via Jean Kazez and Russell Blackford.

The fact that Facebook Co-Founder Chris Hughes has purchased The New Republic is a good sign that those who bewail the impact of the web on serious writing.

This New Yorker article gives a nice blend of personal,  scientific,  and species history. It would be interesting to know if what we picked up from our bigger brained but ultimately less successful cousins was just random or if it includes anything useful.

And as to the question of how “we” won, I am still inclined to speculate that there’s some kind of tie in between our capacity to learn from and cooperate with peers, a willingness to take direction from others (sometimes “blindly” so), and the tendency towards art and decoration – especially that of our own bodies to help identify “team” members in conflict situations. But now it looks as if the competitive team spirit and blind obedience to authority that won us the world may be about to become our undoing.  It would be ironic if some admixture from the Neanderthals were to be what we need in order not to destroy ourselves in religious conflict.

Some minds are changed a bit, and I think for the better, by this LinkedIn discussion, but it also includes a good example of exactly what I was concerned about in my comment on Keith Devlin’s original piece on the topic.

Here’s the link:

Should kids be told that multiplication is repeated addition? | LinkedIn.

First the good.

The question posed is a real paedagogical question to which I don’t think we know the answer, and the discussion led to some interesting examples of ways that the scaling interpretation of real number multiplication might be conveyed to small children . I don’t think it’s yet clear how early they can truly identify and compare different geometric magnitudes  (viz experiments comparing volumes for example) but this is certainly a worthwhile area for research.

But now the bad.

Part of what turns people against mathematics is the certainty of its results which means that one’s mistakes are hard to hide.  But what’s even worse than being found indisputably wrong when wrong is being told with a claimed mathematical level of authority that one is wrong when one cannot understand the argument.  And I think Devlin’s campaign against “repeated addition” makes it more likely for children to be exposed to that kind of dogmatic smackdown.

My objection to Devlin is that he claims as mathematical fact positions which are essentially philosophical. He makes no attempt to show any inconsistency in the  definition of multiplication of natural numbers by a recursive algorithm of repeated addition, but just claims in his first piece that this doesn’t capture what might be called the “essence” or “real meaning” of the corresponding operation on the reals and in his most recent effort he makes the claim that recursion is not a case of repetition.  While not mathematically provable, either of these may indeed be a reasonable philosophical position (though I don’t subscribe to either of them). And they may have valid paedagogical implications (which I might agree with despite not agreeing with his philosophy).  But I have always suspected that the way he said it would encourage people to dogmatically insist that repeated addition is  ”not multiplication. Not in any sense; not even on the naturals”. And unfortunately there was an instance demonstrating just that in the course of the LinkedIn discussion.

My fear is that teachers who are a bit insecure about their understanding of mathematics will be led by such attitudes to undermine rather than support the understanding of a child who, on being introduced to multiplication says “Hey, I get it. This is just repeated addition!”

When that happens, I have no doubt that the teacher’s response should be an enthusiastic “Yes!”,  and it should come with no anxious look or subsequent undermining “but…”

It is perfectly fine to follow the “Yes!” with some thing like “and here are some things we can use it for..”  (see the wonderful poster by Maria Droujkova for some nice examples) . And of course these may include, as Maria does, examples which help to prime the student for seeing things another way. But it is up to the student to eventually see the next step, not for the teacher to immediately suggest that she has somehow fallen short.

The Tyee’s David Beers has a nice story about the guy who was cheated out of the Vancouver Mayor’s chair in 2005.

But not, I’m afraid, in a good way.

Less Wrong comes down on the wrong side  of the “Sleeping Beauty” problem.

Sleeping Beauty volunteers to undergo the following experiment and is told all of the following details. On Sunday she is put to sleep. Afair coin is then tossed to determine which experimental procedure is undertaken. If the coin comes up heads, Beauty is awakened and interviewed on Monday, and then the experiment ends. If the coin comes up tails, she is awakened and interviewed on Monday and Tuesday. But when she is put to sleep again on Monday, she is given a dose of an amnesia-inducing drug that ensures she cannot remember her previous awakening. In this case, the experiment ends after she is interviewed on Tuesday.

Any time Sleeping beauty is awakened and interviewed, she is asked, “What is your credence now for the proposition that the coin landed heads?”

The intent of the problem is presumably that she NOT know what day it is until after giving her answer and since in a sequence of repetitions of the experiment there are twice as many expected wakeups for tails as for heads the probability of head on any given wakeup is 1/3.
(If she’s told what day it is the problem is not interesting. On Monday it’s just a normal coin toss with P(H)=.5,and on Tuesday it’s a coin toss where all the heads were discarded so P(H)=0.)

LessWrong refers to a couple of other arguments for p=1/3 including a gambling argument from Richard Neal and Nick Bostrom’s argument from the extreme case but ends coming down as a “halfer” on the basis of the following:

A probability tree can help with the intuition (this is a probability tree corresponding to an arbitrary wake up day):

If Beauty was told the coin came up heads, then she’d know it was Monday. If she was told the coin came up tails, then she’d think there is a 50% chance it’s Monday and a 50% chance it’s Tuesday. Of course, when Beauty is woken up she is not told the result of the flip, but she can calculate the probability of each.

When she is woken up, she’s somewhere on the second set of branches. We have the following joint probabilities: P(heads, Monday)=1/2; P(heads, not Monday)=0; P(tails, Monday)=1/4; P(tails, Tuesday)=1/4; P(tails, not Monday or Tuesday)=0. Thus, P(heads)=1/2.

The problem with that tree diagram is that it really just amounts to giving a long calculation to prove what she already knows (or at least has been told) – namely that the coin is fair.
If so then of course the P(H)=.5 but that question is even less interesting than the cases in which she is told what day it is.

The actual question we are asked is what credence she should attach to the statement that when she wakes up she will be shown a head, and both Richard Neal’s gambling approach and Nick Bostrom’s extreme case should make it clear that the answer is 1/3.

Or, if you really like tree diagrams, think of it this way:

                               p=(1/2) Heads
       p=(2/3) – it’s Monday <
       /                       p=(1/2) Tails
Wakeup<
       \                       p=0 Heads
       p=(1/3) – it's Tuesday <
                               p=1 Tails

This gives p(H)=(2/3)*(1/2)+(1/3)*0=1/3

and               p(T)=(2/3)*(1/2)+(1/3)*1=2/3

Part of the difficulty in all this is that what we mean by asking for the “probability” of something is not well defined without a clear specification of the “game” or “experiment” involved. The 1/3 solution is the answer to the question “When you get woken up like this, in what fraction of the cases do you expect to see a head?” – which to my mind is the correct interpretation of  ”when you get woken up like this what will you take as the probability of seeing a head?”

That is very different from the question “when you get woken up like this what will you think was the probability of getting a head when the coin was tossed?”

Examples like this are why I have little trust in people who discuss probability but toss aside questions like “What is the actual game or experiment in terms of which you are saying that the probability of event E is p?”

intended, but this post by Daniel Finke seems to me to be so wrong on so many counts that it deserves demands a rebuttal. …more »

This post (from a source I find sometimes interesting but often wrong) appears to take the simplistic (but common) position that the state of personhood which defines murder is discrete

In addition to agreeing with commenter Alex Heyworth that “logical consistency is not a necessary condition for moral codes, nor even a common one”, I would also claim that logic, even when it does apply, does not require that the marker used to separate what is legal from what is illegal should correspond to anything other than agreement by the majority (or by whoever has the deciding power in a given culture).

With regard to the legal question, there may well be agreement on many cases. But in the continuum between what certainly should always be allowed and what certainly should always be forbidden there is a range of cases on which people may disagree. In the absence of any universal agreement on the moral issue, what the law does is attempt to strike a balance between competing moral positions. Often this means that it just draws one or more lines of convenience without actually claiming that they separate the moral from the immoral. So a legal distinction at twelve weeks of gestation, or twenty, or whenever, does not need to imply that any particular state of the fetus changes at any of those times.

Even for the purpose of an individual moral decision, there may well be competing values at stake and I have never seen a good argument for the existence of a common scale on which such competing values can be compared. We each decide on what seems right at the time. In many cases we have no qualms about the choice, and the vast majority agree. But there is no guarantee that all cases will be this simple, and we are often faced with situations where a choice we have made in good conscience may later be felt to be wrong (and maybe later right again). Sometimes we do fall into indecisive mental “churning”. But even if we do make a choice, that does not imply the existence of a truly “best” moral decision. What tips the balance towards our actual judgement at any given time may depend on past experience and current neuro-chemistry rather than any absolute prioritization of competing values. However, despite the fears and fear-mongering of some, this does not deny the possibility of *any* absolute moral principles. There are lots of cases where we do have essentially universal agreement on what is right, and even more where careful consideration leads always to the same answer even among those who might initially disagree with it. But I suspect that any project to find a *complete* set of absolute moral principles will fail.

With regard to the personhood of a fetus I doubt that anyone believes in a magical discrete change of status at any particular time. But many people see the progression from fertilized ovum to conscious infant as a gradual process where the attitude towards killing should range from negligible concern at the start to absolutely abhorrence at the end. And although I don’t *require* logic in morality, I see no lack of it in such a position.