If anyone’s leaving grad school choice to the very last minute, some quick advice. (Beyond “Change the past so you acted earlier.”)
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Three Four Five quick thoughts on Wesley Salmon’s _Four Decades of Scientific Explanation_, which I’m somewhat breezily reading through.

First, although there’s a discussion of functionalist explanation, it doesn’t really connect with other topics. I think that’s in part because Salmon takes it to be somewhat settled that explanations must be causal. But there’s no mention of the argument from considerations about function to that conclusion.

Second, the work in openly autobiographical in many places, so we have an example of what autobiographical analytic philosophy looks like. I find it more than a little disconcerting frankly. Maybe I should stop mixing (drinking) stories into my philosophy posts.

Third, the bibliography is ordered chronologically rather than alphabetically. For the kind of book it is this makes some sense, and it might even speed up search time for a particular piece – once you know that’s how it’s ordered of course. Maybe this should be more common practice. I like it much more than the practice one sees in the Stanford Encyclopedia sometimes of having thematic bibliographies, which makes searching for a reference very very slow.

Fourth, Peter Railton’s dissertation was 851 pages long! There’s a standard for grad students to aim for.

Fifth, Salmon often complains about theories of explanation that take the concepts CAUSE or LAW as primitive and build accounts of explanation out of them. This is dodging hard philosophical questions he says. Well true it is a dodge, but why isn’t it a permissible one? Lewis builds his account of explanation on the basis of causation, without thereby committing himself on the question of what causation is. And good thing too, or else when he changed his theory of causation (as he did from time to time) he would have to change his theory of explanation. Not all philosophers have to solve all problems all the time. I don’t understand this push within the literature on explanation to not use a philosophically loaded concept without giving a theory of it first. (“James Woodward”:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-explanation/ makes a similar point in his SEP entry.)

These posts are me “thinking out loud” even more than normal, so if you’re looking for finished philosophical analysis, skip to some other post. (Or, better yet, go pick up the latest AJP.)

I realised my claim that the failure of functionalist explanation in social science is bad news for DN and unificationist theories of explanation had a gap at a crucial step. In particular, I was tacitly assuming that something like the following is a law.

bq. All customs that fulfil useful functions are instantiated.

This is obviously absurd. Some useful functions are unfulfilled. And there’s more than one way to fulfil most functions, so it can’t be that they are *all* instantiated. So there’s no obvious functionalist explanation that fits the DN model, and hence no counterexample to the DN theory. (Or to the unificationist theory, which isn’t that far from the DN theory on these questions, I’d say.)

But … the DN theory allows, as it must, for probabilistic laws. [1] And we can restate the objection that way. For the following is plausibly a law.

bq. The probability of custom C existing is higher given that C plays a useful function than the probability of C existing given that it plays no useful function.

And given that’s a probabilistic law, the facts that (a) C fulfils the F-function, and that (b) the F-function is useful to have filled, should combine with that law to form a good probabilstic explanation. And providing explanations of just those forms is a part of Durkheim and his followers seem to be doing. And since (a large % of?) social scientists eventually rejected this program just because they didn’t think these ‘explanations’ were genuinely explanatory, I think that tells very heavily against the DN model and all its followers.

fn1. Strictly speaking we’re now dealing with Hempel’s IS, or inductive statistical explanations. But the family of Hempel’s views is systematic enough that using the single term DN seems fine. I know it’s odd to call a probabilistic argument _Deductive-Nomological_, but for notes like these I don’t really care.

OK I better write something that’s actually got philosophical content after the last two posts. I was kinda shocked by something that came up when I was preparing my seminar class for tomorrow. We’re working through various papers on explanation in economics, and social science more generally, and for this week we’re looking at various papers by Philip Pettit. (It isn’t the central paper we’re looking at, but if you’ve got JSTOR access you can see one of these papers “here”:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0007-0882%28199606%2947%3A2%3C291%3AFEAVS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9.)

Now the unsurprising thing is that the papers are very good and the conclusions seem sound. The surprising thing is one of the presuppositions.

The topic is the objection to functionalist explanations that they don’t really _explain_ anything because they don’t provide a mechanism whereby the institution with a useful function comes into existence or persists. Philip thinks this is a _prima facie_ problem, and I agree. But he thinks the same problem hurts rational choice explanations, since it doesn’t provide a _plausible_ mechanism. (Rational-choice explanations are backed up by _a_ mechanism, but it doesn’t seem to resemble the decision-making mechanisms real people actually use.)

Philip goes on to argue, rightly I think, that both functionalist and rational choice explanations can properly explain the _resilience_ of certain institutions and practices, even if they don’t explain the introduction or even the persistence of those phenomena. There’s lots here to talk about, but as I said I want to look back at the presuppositions involved.

Why think there is even a problem with the functionalist explanations to start with? And at this point I should note that thinking there’s a problem here isn’t some idiosyncratic feature of Philip Pettit – the problem is reasonably widely discussed. For one thing, functionalist explanations fit the old DN model of explanations that Hempel and Oppenheim advocated. More interestingly, they seem to fit the unificationist model of explanation that Michael Friedman and Phillip Kitcher advocate as a replacement for the DN model.

Why is this interesting? Well for one thing it looks like a clear case where intuitions of the relevant scientists simply don’t match up with the predictions of the unificationists. And given that what they are trying to explain is a social/cognitive phenomenon, what counts as a good explanation in our scientific culture, these intuitions should be important even to naturalists.

For another thing, this does not look like a merely technical problem, in the way that cases like the flagpole case feel a little artificial. (The flagpole problem is that on the DN theory there’s no way to distinguish the good explanation of a flagpole’s shadow length in terms of its height from the bad explanation of a flagpole’s height in terms of its length.) This is a naturally occuring putative explanation that fits the criteria but of the unificationist but doesn’t strike people as explanatory at all.

But something about this puzzles me. The problem for unificationists is so obvious that someone must have commented on this before me. And really I should do a huge lit search now to find out who. Since the Red Sox are rained out and ’24’ has been bumped for some press conference, maybe I’ll make a start on this, but I’m not sure how far I’ll get.

One of the things grad students should look for in selecting a program is how often the faculty are around. Many departments like to list faculty who are around for anywhere between 6 months and 6 hours a year on their faculty list to try and boost their rankings. But obviously that’s not as valuable as a full-time faculty member.

Now it’s sometimes hard to get a good read on how often people really are around. If you just ask people, you often get quite incredible stories. For instance, people at both Rutgers and Brown will say that Ernie Sosa puts in as much work as the average full-time faculty member at each university each spring. Actually, this one turns out to be true, but as a general rule you should still be careful.

One unscientific solution is to pick a random date, say this week, and ask how many people are around that week, as opposed to doing their ‘other job’, on a visiting assignment, off giving papers elsewhere, caught up in administrative duties, or otherwise occupied. So as a little research service, here’s the list of philosophy faculty ‘on duty’ at RSSS this week.

bq. “Andy Egan”:http://www.geocities.com/eganamit/

So the average faculty quality is off-the-charts, but there’s slightly less depth than you’ll find in the visiting bullpen at the end of a 4-game trip to Fenway.
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One of the things grad students should look for in selecting a program is how often the faculty are around. Many departments like to list faculty who are around for anywhere between 6 months and 6 hours a year on their faculty list to try and boost their rankings. But obviously that’s not as valuable as a full-time faculty member.

Now it’s sometimes hard to get a good read on how often people really are around. If you just ask people, you often get quite incredible stories. For instance, people at both Rutgers and Brown will say that Ernie Sosa puts in as much work as the average full-time faculty member at each university each spring. Actually, this one turns out to be true, but as a general rule you should still be careful.

One unscientific solution is to pick a random date, say this week, and ask how many people are around that week, as opposed to doing their ‘other job’, on a visiting assignment, off giving papers elsewhere, caught up in administrative duties, or otherwise occupied. So as a little research service, here’s the list of philosophy faculty ‘on duty’ at RSSS this week.

bq. “Andy Egan”:http://www.geocities.com/eganamit/

So the average faculty quality is off-the-charts, but there’s slightly less depth than you’ll find in the visiting bullpen at the end of a 4-game trip to Fenway.
Continue reading →

Apropos of not much, a quick thought about suggestions for parties. Sometimes it is a good idea to bring beers that need a bottle opener (or something functionally equivalent) to a party that is bereft of said bottle opener. Provided there is little enough else to drink, imaginative guests will do what they can to open said beers using things that are really _not_ functionally equivalent to a bottle opener. The comedic value of such efforts might be worth the cost in beer.

Of course, it would be very wrong to follow this plan intentionally. That would fall under the category of deliberately inflicting suffering for your own amusement, which is wrong, as is shewn “here”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/prank.pdf. (The old folk wisdom, it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye, hits uncomfortably close to home at this point.) But if you unintentionally follow the plan, it can lead to many many amusing stories, none of which sadly I can repeat here.

Regularly scheduled philosophical commentary will resume shortly.

The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/Archives/002780.html is up and there’s a few things to note.

First, the links to the PhilSci Archive don’t seem to be working, but I think that’s a temporary server problem.

Second, we have the first of the APA Central papers, in this case “Robert Allen’s”:http://home.twmi.rr.com/robertallen/papers.html “comments on Noel Hendrickson’s”:http://home.twmi.rr.com/robertallen/fwe.doc paper on free will, posted. Since I won’t be at the Central, I hope there are many more such papers posted in the next week or so.

(Why won’t I be at the APA Central? Three reasons. First, I’m already going to too many conferences this semester. Second, the Cubbies do better in years I don’t go to Chicago, and I feel some sympathy for Cubs fans. Third, it would mean going to all three APA conferences in an academic year, and that seems excessive. To be sure I went to all three APA conferences in calendar year 2003, but that’s somehow different.)

Third, there are a large number of papers that aren’t new to the web but that I hadn’t noticed before. These include papers by “Gabriel Segal”:http://www.kcl.ac.uk/kis/schools/hums/philosophy/staff/g_segal.html, “Brian Skyrms”:http://hypatia.ss.uci.edu/lps/home/fac-staff/faculty/skyrms/Skyrmspapers.html and “Kai Wehmeier”:http://members.cox.net/wehmeier/.

The “journals survey”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/journals/Journals_Survey.htm is ticking along nicely with 152 votes in so far. Keep those votes coming in! I think Brown’s email service is working again, so my delays in responding to email are now _mostly_ due to laziness/inefficiency than technical problems. But at least I should get votes. (UPDATE: I spoke too soon. Now my outgoing mail server – run by Cox not Brown – is down, so I can’t send out messages. My excuses for not replying in a timely manner to mail just keep growing!)

The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/Archives/002775.html is up, with two philosophy of language papers!

I had to read this sentence (fragment) from the abstract for “Keith DeRose’s new contextualism paper”:http://pantheon.yale.edu/~kd47/OLB.pdf a few times to make sure I got it.

bq. I like to think this paper contains significant enough advances in the argument that it is in important respects the state of the art — that anyone who wants to be well-informed about the debate but who doesn’t read this just won’t be up on the contextualist side of the debate.

I was hoping a state of the art piece would be slightly different, and that anyone who _did_ read it _would_ be up on the contextualist side of the debate. (‘Up on’ doesn’t quite sound right there. Is it negative polarity?)

I still haven’t received all my overnight mail, so I don’t know how many people have voted in the “journals survey”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/journals/Journals_Survey.htm. It’s at least 127. You can make it at least 128.

There don’t seem to be any updated pages today, so there might not be a “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/. On the other hand, I tinkered a little with the “daily entries”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/Archives/002769.html and “monthly archives”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/Archives/2004_04.html. The monthly archives use a nice calendar from “Dive Into Mark”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/08/06/fullscreen_calendars_in_movable_type.

I also reduced the sidebars on the individual entries here. This halved the size of the average page, and took about 17MB off my footprint. Since this site will be privately hosted soon, I’ve had to start doing things like this to minimise page size.

On a similar topic, the Rochester blog has moved into a new Movable Type home “here”:http://cif.rochester.edu/~philgrad/.

I don’t know how many votes have been submitted in the “journals survey”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/journals/Journals_Survey.htm, because I get the votes by email, and Brown email is down again. (Or it was down again a few hours ago and email is still banked up in the system.) Either they ran out of gaffer tape over at CIS, or the computer system got so old that even gaffer tape won’t hold it together. The people in computer services at Brown do an incredible job, but it would be much nicer if we just had a better server rather than relying on miracle workers to work miracles all the time.

Don’t let that stop you voting in the “journals survey”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/journals/Journals_Survey.htm. The votes will come through eventually.

There’s some iPod geekiness in the extended entry which is probably of very little interest to those of you without iPod’s, so I’ve left it off the main page.
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