Via Matthew Yglesias, there is an article in Scientific American on the support for multiverse hypotheses in cosmology. The most striking feature of the article is the claim that the multiverse hypothesis (allegedly) corresponding to Lewisian modal realism has testable consequences. I think this is either a misuse of ‘testable’ or a philosophical mistake akin to the argument that modal realism leads to inductive scepticism. But whatever the causes, it is nice to see Lewisian metaphysics being taken seriously.

Via Matthew Yglesias, there is an article in Scientific American on the support for multiverse hypotheses in cosmology. The most striking feature of the article is the claim that the multiverse hypothesis (allegedly) corresponding to Lewisian modal realism has testable consequences. I think this is either a misuse of ‘testable’ or a philosophical mistake akin to the argument that modal realism leads to inductive scepticism. But whatever the causes, it is nice to see Lewisian metaphysics being taken seriously.

I was reading through Jobs for Philosophers today, and I noticed that the APA has opinions on which parts of the country are in the Midwest. According to their classifications, the Midwest consists of Illinois, Indiana, Minnestoa, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin. That doesn’t exactly match up with the consensus around here that Ohio is Midwestern. Maybe that goes to show you shouldn’t trust philosophers’ linguistic intuitions.

The philosophy papers blog is up, with new papers on epistemology and on practical reasoning.

John Quiggin and Kieran Healy have further posts on gender segregation in academia. John points out that some of the effects can be traced to high school where (at least in Australia, and at least to a first generalisation) boys tend to end up focussing on mathematics and girls on language. Kieran agrees that this is part of the story, though he notes that we still have to explain why there is not as significant a gender gap in newer fields that require significant mathematical ability.

UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias has more, suggesting that I’ve been underestimating the effect of having a male-dominated professoriate on the makeup of undergraduate classes.

Kieran Healy posts a very good follow-up to (among other things) my earlier post on why there aren’t more women in philosophy. I think a lot of the points he makes are correct, but I’m still not sure it gets to the heart of the matter. Kieran notes a number of reasons why some academic fields, particularly well-established academic fields, might be less friendly than they think they are towards women coming into the profession. Those are presumably among the causes of there being so few women in philosophy. But they aren’t I think the only causes.

At least from my occasional observations, the gender split in philosophy is already present in undergraduate classes. (Remember class, the plural of anecdote is data.) And while that may be caused in part by there being so few women in the professorship, I’d be surprised if it’s the only reason.

I’d be more surprised if the reason was something particularly to with the subject matter of philosophy. Kieran gives one (pretty conclusive) batch of reasons for thinking this is not the root cause, let me add another. Much of analytic philosophy is very close, in subject matter and approach, to theoretical work in linguistic and cognitive sciences. And those fields do not, as far as I can tell, have anything like as striking a gender gap, even within the more theoretically oriented sub-fields. Some areas of analytic philosophy, notably ethics and history, are not like cognitive science, but those are the areas that do best at attracting and keeping women. The idea that there is some distinctive characteristic of analytic metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language that is not shared by either analytic ethics or philosophical history, or by formal semantics or theoretical cognitive science, and it’s this characteristic that drives women from the profession, is not highly plausible.

But that doesn’t get to the heart of explaining why our undergrad classes are so imbalanced, especially compared to all nearby fields. I’d be disappointed if the suggestions Kieran makes, that women are held to a higher standard, that the profession is just displaying a familiar tendency towards homogeny, and so forth, turned out to be major parts of the explanation of this phenomenon. But when it comes to social sciences the argument Brian would be disappointed by p therefore not-p is not exactly valid.

The philosophy papers blog is up.

While congratulating Steve Levitt for winning the John Bates Clark medal for being the best young (i.e. sub-40) economist in the world, Brad DeLong posts a list of the previous 27 winners of the award. The prize has been awarded every two years since 1947 except, for some reason, in 1953. It’s not quite best under 40, because by rule no one gets awarded it twice. So it’s best non-winner under 40. Two things about the list stand out.

First, Levitt is in pretty good company. Samuelson, Friedman, Tobin, Arrow, Solow, Becker, Stiglitz, Krugman, Summers, just to name a few. For those who are unfamiliar with these scholars’ work, Brad goes into some detail about their many, no many many, virtues. I wonder if we had a similar prize in philosophy we’d be able to look back at the list after 50 years and be pleased with the list, or whether it would contain a large number of flame-outs who never lived up to potential, and gaps for people who rose to prominence after 40.

Second, the list is all male. Analytic philosophy has done a very poor job over the years in attracting and keeping bright women. This failing is especially galling since the disciplines closest to ours, non-analytic philosophy on one end and linguistic and cognitive sciences on the other, do not have a similar shortcoming. As far as I can tell, the trouble starts as early as the undergraduate years. I wonder how many analytic programs have more female than male concentrators. I suspect (though I don’t have the data at hand to verify this) not a lot, even at schools where there are many more female than male undergraduates. And things get progressively worse in graduate schools and in the profession. It was particularly noticable at the Rutgers Epistemology conference how few women there are in epistemology, though I think that’s a particularly bad area. Conferences that are less focussed on a single area, or generally have a younger crew (or, like this one, both) tend to be more balanced. Still, having said all that, I’d like to think that had we had a similar prize in philosophy after 50 years the list of winners wouldn’t be all male. Would it? We’re not as bad, in this respect, as the economists. Are we?

Apropos of approximately nothing said above, I think it’s pretty neat that one can be a prize-winning scholar in part in virtue of having written papers on corruption in sumo wrestling and violence in hockey. Sadly, Levitt’s papers on these topics (cited here) are not available online, so I can’t find some snappy violent sumo hockey quotes to show what a fine scholar he is.

Earlier today I linked to Kieran Healy’s post on plagiarism. The comments board attached to it has a very lively discussion of some plagiaristic horror stories. It is well worth checking out just for the messages. If you have any juicy stories to add, please do! This all feels close to home because I just had my first “Why did you turn in identical assignments?” meeting with students since I got to Brown. Not good times.

I need new categories for the blogroll. Or at least, I need a category for blogs by philosophers that are not, or at least do not aim to be, philosophical blogs. Until I add that category, you might like to read Diachronic Agency by Ted Hinchman and Dan Jacobson. At least one of the authors insists it is not meant to be a philosophical blog, though just how many general-interest blogs have posts on Non-Constitutive Existence Internalism is presumably not that open a question.

From the other direction, The Infinite Loop is announced to be by an “irate and sardonic student of neuroscience at an east coast university”, but seems to be largely about philosophy of mind. I think posts on Kim, Fodor, functionalism and multiple realizability are all great things, but I’m not sure how far it gets one in a neuroscience program.

UPDATE: In the comments section, Ted Hinchman politely requests that if you do visit his and Dan’s site, it not be to “gawk”. I think that’s only fair, though I don’t think they’ve got much to worry about, especially compared to some of the disaster posts that have cropped up here from time to time to time. If you want to look at Ted’s more polished thoughts, his Nous paper from March, Trust and Diachronic Agency, is available via that link. The paper looks pretty good, as you’d expect from a paper published in the finest journal in philosophy, but I can’t make a definitive judgment since it’s about a million miles from my areas of ‘expertise’.

The philosophy papers blog is up.

Kieran Healy has a nice post up about cheaters, along with some tips for increasing blog traffic every May. He seems to enjoy catching cheaters somewhat more than I do.

Another little puzzle about truth in fiction to think about, this one indirectly related to the puzzle for Walton’s view discussd below. Some books end, rather annoyingly, with an ‘it was all a dream’ scene. The Alice in Wonderland books are prime examples of this. What is true in such a story? We normally say, unreflectively, that it is true in the Alice in Wonderland stories that the Queen of Hearts she baked some tarts, and that the White Rabbit is late for a very important date, and that Humpty Dumpty thought he could make words mean just what he wanted them to mean. But a more literalist theory of truth in fiction, such as the theory given by David Lewis in his paper Truth in Fiction, would presumably entail that it’s merely true in the story that Alice dreamed that the Queen of Hearts she baked some tarts, and that the White Rabbit is late for a very important date, and that Humpty Dumpty thought he could make words mean just what he wanted them to mean.

This isn’t a matter for philosophical theory to decide, since we presumably should be testing theories against what they say about this case, rather than having theories tell us what to say. (The question is, who is to be the master, that’s all.) I’m inclined to think the unreflective practice here is right. The Alice in Wonderland books are the stories of Alice’s dreams, and so it is true in the book, as in the dream, that the Queen of Hearts she baked some tarts. And this, I think, is some good news for Walton’s theory that truth in fiction is grounded in prescriptions to imagine, because there clearly is a prescription for the reader to imagine that the Queen of Hearts she baked some tarts. Well, at least I think it’s good news. Perhaps when I find out how Walton is to solve the problem of figurative language in fiction I’ll see that according to his theory it really isn’t true in the story that the Queen of Hearts she baked some tarts. Perhaps, that is, whatever makes it the case that it isn’t true in Ulysses that Bloom is an Arthurian knight, the prescription to imagine that notwithstanding, will also make it the case that it isn’t true in the Alice in Wonderland stories that the Queen of Hearts she baked some tarts, the prescription to imagine that notwithstanding. To be continued…