“Wo”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2007/04/25/Meanwhile___ links to “this article”:http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v446/n7138/abs/nature05677.html in the most recent issue of _Nature_.

*An experimental test of non-local realism*

Most working scientists hold fast to the concept of ‘realism’—a viewpoint according to which an external reality exists independent of observation. But quantum physics has shattered some of our cornerstone beliefs. According to Bell’s theorem, any theory that is based on the joint assumption of realism and locality (meaning that local events cannot be affected by actions in space-like separated regions) is at variance with certain quantum predictions. Experiments with entangled pairs of particles have amply confirmed these quantum predictions, thus rendering local realistic theories untenable. Maintaining realism as a fundamental concept would therefore necessitate the introduction of ‘spooky’ actions that defy locality. Here we show by both theory and experiment that a broad and rather reasonable class of such non-local realistic theories is incompatible with experimentally observable quantum correlations. In the experiment, we measure previously untested correlations between two entangled photons, and show that these correlations violate an inequality proposed by Leggett for non-local realistic theories. Our result suggests that giving up the concept of locality is not sufficient to be consistent with quantum experiments, unless certain intuitive features of realism are abandoned.

I’ve only ever read philosophers (like Tim Maudlin) on the Bell inequalities, and I don’t think I’ve ever read about the Leggett inequalities. So I shouldn’t be too snarky. But really, these judgments about comparative spookiness can’t be left to stand. They find non-local relations, of the kind we need to posit to give a realistic explanation of Bell inequalities, “spooky”. (I wonder if they find spatiotemporal relations spooky too.) But the thought that there isn’t really a world out there to perceive, and that our impressions of the world are to be explained in some way other than as the perception of a mind independent reality. That’s apparently not spooky at all. This doesn’t strike me as particularly plausible.

Comments from anyone who knows more about Leggett’s inequalities, or who wants to mock my fear of anti-realism, more than welcome.

This is just a “link”:http://lemmingsblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/apa-report-status-of-women-in.html to Brit’s report. Here are a couple of highlights.

bq. 21% of employed philosophers are women (Kathryn Norlock)

bq. 2004 US Department of Education estimates 41% of those employed in the humanities are women.

bq. Philosophy PhDs awarded: 27% (and stuck there for the last ten years or so, with a spike to 33.3% in 2004, 25.1% in 2005).

bq. Survey of Degrees Awarded (SED) 2005 figures. History 41%, Astronomy and physics 26%, Economics: 30%, Political Science 39%.

I was worried we were as bad as engineering in terms of percentage of PhDs who are women. (I read enginnering was at 18%.) It seems we are between physics and economics. I suspect that restricting attention to analytic philosophy makes our position look much worse, maybe as bad as engineering…

Someone asked me an interesting question about revise and resubmits the other day. If a philosopher, call them X, submits a paper to journal Y, and the editors return a revise & resubmit assessment, what obligations is X under. Obviously X doesn’t have to resubmit the paper to Y. But should X regard the paper as still under submission at Y? If so, X is obliged to either formally withdraw the paper from Y or not submit the paper elsewhere.

I think the answer is no, that once the editors have returned a submission, the paper is no longer under submission. X may resubmit the paper to that journal, but that would be a new submission. (As the wording ‘resubmission’ suggests.) So it’s OK to send the paper to a new journal without informing Y. But I can see a counter. At some journals (including, perhaps, one or two that I edit), R&R’s are such a crucial part of the editorial process, that one could regard them as moves in the process of considering a paper. In that case, the submission would still be active, and X would be obliged to not submit the paper elsewhere without formally withdrawing it from Y.

What do you think?

This is a bit off-topic, but I thought some readers would be amused by some stuff I found on YouTube. The highlight is a song Paul Kelly wrote about Shane Warne, and released for free on YouTube.

A couple more Australian songs below the fold.
Continue reading →

I just got back from a very enjoyable trip to UMass to deliver a talk. I’ll write much more on the talk (and the feedback) after taxes, grading, etc are done, but in the meantime here are some links, comments etc for your enjoyment.

* Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the interesting (and on-going) “thread”:http://tar.weatherson.org/2007/04/11/women-in-philosophy/ on women in philosophy journals. One quick note about commenting here. In order to cut down on spam and trolls, I’ve implemented rules where you have to sign up to comment, and your first comment has to be approved by a moderator. Once you have been approved once though, future comments don’t need to be moderated. (They might be deleted by a moderator, for better or worse reasons, but they’ll go straight up.)
* On the same line, I pretty much approve of the “bloggers code of conduct”:http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/04/draft_bloggers_1.html that has been discussed in various places. But I won’t be enforcing them as they are written. It seems that they want you to delete any comment that contains something ‘knowably false’. That would rule out most (attempted) philosophical contributions the posters or commentators here make.
* Keeping with the theme, I liked “Geoff Nunberg’s take”:http://www.vacancies.auckland.ac.nz/positiondetail.asp?p=5057 on the Don Imus affair.
* In a couple of weeks (on Saturday April 28 to be precise) there will be a workshop on complex demonstratives here at Cornell. Matti Eklund is the organiser for this. Jeff King, David Braun, Lynsey Wolter and Zachary Abrahams will be speaking. It starts at 1pm, and is at 236 Goldwin Smith Hall. Everyone is welcome!
* Congratulations to “Vincent Hendricks”:http://akira.ruc.dk/~vincent/ for winning the “Choice Outstanding Academic Title”:http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/choice/outstanding/academic.htm award for “Mainstream and Formal Epistemology”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521857899/qid=1144936294/sr=1-5/ref=sr_1_5/104-7261105-2861510?s=books&v=glance&n=283155!
* If you’re looking for a logic job in the southern hemisphere, there is “one just announced at Auckland”:http://www.vacancies.auckland.ac.nz/positiondetail.asp?p=5057.
* Here are “the slides”:http://brian.weatherson.org/CaCS.pdf for the talk I gave at UMass. I’m using a new computer, so I wasn’t sure how to make the slides a reasonable size. So that’s a large download. As I said above, hopefully more detailed comments to come.
* The new computer has some quirks, some of them due to the design, some of them due to the user. I was setting up my chat preferences, and I thought it would be neat to have my status be “Current iTunes Track”. It was only after I noticed this that I saw that my status, as revealed to the world (or at least my chat buddies) was “Thank God I’ve Hit the Bottom”. Had I left it on that setting, later that evening it would have been (in order) “Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies”, “Welcome to the Pleasuredome” and, finally, “All My Friends are Getting Married”. For better or worse, I’m not using that as my status until I sort out my song library a little.
* Finally, I’ve set up the sidebar so that links to various posts on other blogs that I find interesting, amusing, worth tracking etc appear under ‘Elsewhere’. That list will change fairly often, even when this blog isn’t being updated.

Part _n_ of an _m_ part series, I guess. I was intrigued by these comments by “Ross Cameron”:http://metaphysicalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/04/paper-changes.html.

bq. As I understand it, women are under-represented in the major journals (I mean, even given their under-representation in the profession – that is, woman are even more under-represented in the journals than you’d expect them to be, given how many women there are in the profession). Why is this? Well, we’d need a study on this, but the following seems likely to me. Since women are under-represented in the profession it is very likely, for every paper sent to a journal, that it will be refereed by a man. Men and women vary in their styles of writing and arguing. So while when a man submits a paper it is likely that it will be reveiwed by someone who writes and argues in a broadly similar style, with women this is very unlikely. Hence, women face a disadvantage in trying to get papers published.

bq. Okay – it’s hardly likely to be that simple. But I bet there’s something to this. And if there’s some truth to this then there’s a good case to be made, it seems to me, for journals implementing the rule that papers by women should, other things being equal, be reveiwed by women. (The ‘other things’ packs in a lot, because it seems far more important that papers be reveiwed by experts in the subject.) Is there a good reason why this shouldn’t happen?

I don’t have any off-the-cuff opinions on this, but I thought it should be shared with a wider audience. I’m not really sure it is true that women _are_ under-represented in the major journals relative to their distribution in the profession. My rough idea (and boy will this be embarrassing if I’m wrong) is that the _overwhelming_ bulk of submissions to Phil Review are by men, and that the gender balance of what’s published roughly equals the gender balance of what’s submitted. (We referee papers blind, but we learn the identity of authors after a decision is made, so I have some sense of who has been sending stuff in, if not the current submissions.) But if it is true (and it wouldn’t surprise me if it is) then is Ross’s proposal worth adopting?

*UPDATE* – Asta notes in the comments that Sally Haslanger will be presenting some research at the Central APA showing that women are indeed under-represented in the major journals, even relative to their representation in the leading departments.

“Jason”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2007/04/using_google_sc.html writes that he approves of using Google Scholar to assess which papers are making much of an impact. This does seem like fun, and I wish I had more time to procrastinate with it. A couple of quick observations to add to what Jason said.

Here is “a largely complete list”:http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_q=david+lewis&num=100&btnG=Search+Scholar&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_occt=any&as_sauthors=d-lewis&as_publication=&as_ylo=&as_yhi=&as_allsubj=some&as_subj=soc&hl=en&lr= of David Lewis’s presence on Google Scholar. (It leaves off ‘General Semantics’, among other papers classified as mathematics, which is widely cited.) This list really brings out how much more prominent books are than articles. By far Lewis’s three most cited pieces are (in order) _Convention_, _Counterfactuals_ and _On the Plurality of Worlds_. The most cited paper, ‘Scorekeeping in a Language Game’ has not much more than half the citations of _Convention_, and (apart from ‘General Semantics’) no other papers have even a third as many citations.

As Jason notes, some papers are highly cited because people love to tee off on them. Coincidentally, on “my citation list”:http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=brian+weatherson&hl=en&lr=&btnG=Search the top run scorer is ‘Epistemic Modals in Context’.

Surprisingly, that’s also the most highly cited paper on “John Hawthorne’s list”:http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=john+hawthorne&hl=en&lr=&btnG=Search, though he has a couple of books that are ahead of it (well ahead in the case of _Knowledge and Lotteries_) and several other papers published under “his old name”:http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=o%27leary+hawthorne&hl=en&lr=&btnG=Search. Some of John’s papers have slipped under the radar a bit, but hopefully with their republication in his “Metaphysical Essays”:http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199291243, they will get a little more attention.

Anyway, feel free to chime in in comments with any other interesting results from “Google Scholar”:http://scholar.google.com/.

UPDATE: “This comment”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2007/04/using_google_sc.html#comment-65466250 by Michael Kremer in Jason’s thread is really interesting, and possibly the best researched comment ever left on a blog.

Lots of stuff happening around the web.

* Congratulations to Jonathan Schaffer on being “appointed to RSSS”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2007/03/jonathan_schaff.html. It’s hard to think of higher praise for Jonathan than to say that this is an entirely fitting and deserved appointment, and I’m very pleased that RSSS is continuing its tradition of hiring the very best philosophers in the world.
* Like “Ross”:http://metaphysicalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/03/shrinking-block.html, I’m puzzled why there isn’t more discussion of the shrinking block theory of time in the literature.
* “John Greco”:http://theblog.philosophytalk.org/2007/03/two_skeptical_a.html discusses some sceptical arguments over at Philosophy Talk. I think that what I’ve been calling the _exhaustive argument_ is simpler and (to me at least) more interesting than the more subtle arguments John discusses. The exhaustive argument says that for some sceptical hypothesis _sh_, you can’t know _~sh_ a priori, and you can’t know it a posteriori, and all knowledge is a priori or a posteriori, so you don’t know it. A lot of interesting epistemology can be classified by how it responds to that argument.
* There is a new edition of “Analysis”:http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/anal;jsessionid=3c2tdjuo17bwk.victoria out featuring Alan Hajek and David Chalmers on conditionals, and John Hawthorne on binding, among many other interesting papers. (How I miss the days when a new edition of _Analysis_ meant I could blog about each paper in it…)
* Some psychologists have been working on how much you can tell about a person from their musical tastes. Here is an “online quiz”:http://www.outofservice.com/music-personality-test/ that they have developed. (HT: “Mixing Memory”:http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/2007/03/what_does_your_music_say_about_1.php.)
* “Aidan”:http://aidanmcglynn.blogspot.com/ and his commentators have been discussing the most important books and articles of recent times. Nothing by anyone on TAR yet, though presumably the lists will be expanding.
* Via “Tapped”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/2007/04/post_3299.html#016094, some “disturbing”:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2007/03/29/violetblue.DTL&type=printable “articles”:http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2007/03/28/kathy_sierra/index.html about sexist hate speech on the web. One of the common arguments by first amendment absolutists is that the right response to bad speech is more speech. But one big problem cases like this bring up (and Ishani has been saying something similar in her work for a while now) is that in practice the obligations to produce the more speech are (a) inequitably distributed and (b) made harder to satisfy by the bad speech in the first place.
* I’m running out of time to even produce a links post, so three other quick links. “Robbie on fundamental and derivative truths”:http://metaphysicalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/03/fundamental-and-derivative-truths-x.html, “Ross on rejection notes”:http://metaphysicalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/03/dear-john-thank-you-for-your-paper.html and “Wo on non-rigid atomic expressions”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2007/03/22/Non_rigid_atomic_expressions all seemed well worth reading.

Christopher Hitchcock and Joshua Knobe are running a study on “intuitions about causation”:http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/causation/index.htm that they’d like you to take. ‘You’ here including any readers of this blog, and friends you have, any random stranger you meet on the street, etc. Unlike the little test I did here, this one features some careful controls, and has even been approved by an Institutional Review Board. So “go at it”:http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/causation/index.htm!