I have very exciting news to report on behalf of Rutgers. We have just made 3 new senior hires. They are Branden Fitelson, Jonathan Schaffer and Susanna Schellenberg. Branden will be starting in Fall 10, Jonathan and Susanna in Spring 11.

Branden is of course one of the leading formal epistemologists in the world, as well as the driving force behind big events like the Formal Epistemology Workshop. He’s also been doing some incredibly interesting work in cognitive science explaining some of the probabilistic fallcies that have been documented over the last 30 years using concepts from confirmation theory. Given Rutgers’ existing strengths in formal epistemology (Barry Loewer, Thony Gillies, etc), I think there’s a very good case that we’re the world leader in formal epistemology, and it will be great to have more connections built up with the excellent cognitive science program at Rutgers.

Jonathan is already a central figure in contemporary debates in epistemology and in philosophy of language. (Both of them also strengths of Rutgers.) But, in my opinion at least, his most significant work is in metaphysics. His paper on monism was in many ways the best paper I reviewed during my term as editor of the Philosophical Review. There’s not many philosophers (let alone metaphysicians) around right now who make contributions that are simultaneously significant to the big perennial philosophical questions, and to contemporary debates about the details of popular theories. The philosophers I value most highly are always excellent on both scores, advancing a big picture while being careful over the details. Jonathan’s work on monism, like so much of his work, is really a paradigm of this way of doing philosophy, and he’ll be a super colleague to have.

Susanna has to date largely been working on perception, and has a number of insightful papers (in very top journals) on the various debates about perception. Much of her work to date has involved synthesising apparently conflicting views, and showing that there are attractive yet under-explored grounds between some of the warring factions in today’s debates. Rutgers has a long history of being at the forefront of research in philosophy of mind, and hiring Susanna is one of the steps we’re taking to keep that tradition going.

We’d be thrilled by these hires at any time. To have pulled them all off in the middle of the Great Recession is something of a coup for the department and university. So congratulations to Barry Loewer for steering these hires through, and thanks (and congratulations) to the university for this show of faith in philosophy.

Consider this proposition:

N: Brian does not know that N.

Assume N is false. That is, I know that N. Knowledge is factive, so N. That contradicts our original assumption. So N must not be false. So it follows, at least classically, that N is true. So I don’t know N.

But I can follow the reasoning that showed N is true. And I accept that reasoning, so I believe N. And the reasoning justifies me in believing N. So I have a justified true belief that isn’t knowledge. So the JTB theory of knowledge fails.

My reasoning didn’t go via any false lemmas. It went via a false assumption, but making false assumptions for purposes of reductio is consistent with knowledge. So I have a JTB with no false lemmas, but no knowledge. So much for the JTB+No false lemmas.

I’m (generally) a competent logical reasoner. My belief in N, which is a true belief, was a product of my logical competence. Indeed, I formed the belief in N, rather than some alternative, because of that competence. So I should have Sosa-style animal knowledge of N. Indeed, I can reflectively, and aptly, endorse the claim that my belief in N is accurate because it was an exercise of competence. So I should have Sosa-style reflective knowledge that N. But I don’t; clearly I don’t know N.

It seems to me that pretty much any otherwise plausible theory of knowledge will fall this way. Whatever qualities or virtues a belief might have, short of knowledge, my belief in N has. But I don’t know N. Indeed, logic prevents me from knowing N. So any such theory must be false.

N also undermines various proposals people have relating knowledge to other things. Some people think knowledge is a norm of belief. But there seems to be nothing wrong with my believing N on the basis of the reasoning above, even though I don’t know N. So knowledge isn’t a norm of belief. Many people think knowledge is a norm of assertion. But I don’t see why I shouldn’t assert N. I have a deductive argument that it is true after all; I simply don’t know that it is true. So knowledge isn’t a norm of assertion.

I’m not sure whether N alone could knock out Williamson’s thesis that all and only evidence is knowledge, commonly known as E=K. But N’s good friend E can do the trick.

E: Brian’s evidence does not include E.

Assume E is false. Then my evidence includes E. Either evidence is factive or it isn’t. If it isn’t, then E=K is false for independent reasons. If it is, then it follows E is true, contradicting our assumption. So E is true. Since I can follow this argument competently, I know its conclusion is true. (Unlike the argument about N, logic doesn’t stop me knowing E is true.) So I know E, but E is, as it says, not part of my evidence. So E=K is false.

Note that this argument doesn’t touch the plausible view that “evidence is all and only our non-inferential knowledge”:http://www.philosophersdigest.com/philphen/fallibilism-epistemic-possibility-and-concessive-knowledge-attributions-trent-dougherty-and-patrick-rysiew. Even if I know E via that argument, it is clearly inferential knowledge. So while I can refute all theories of knowledge with self-referential propositions, I can’t refute all theories of evidence.

Consider the following decision problem. You have two choices, which we’ll call 1 and 2. If you choose option 1, you’ll get $1,000,000. If you choose option 2, you’ll get $1,000. There are no other consequences of your actions, and you prefer more money to less. What should you do?

It sounds easy enough right? You should take option 1. I think that’s the right answer, but getting clear as to why it is the right ansewr, and what question it is the right answer to, is a little tricky.

Here’s something that’s consistent with the initial description of the case. You’re in a version of Newcomb’s problem. Option 1 is taking one box, Option 2 is taking two boxes. You have a crystal ball, and it perfectly reliably detects (via cues from the future) whether the demon predicted your choice correctly. And she did; so you know (with certainty) that if you pick option one, you’ll get the million, and if you pick option two, you’ll get the thousand. Still, I think you should pick option one, since you should pick option one in any problem consistent with the description in the first paragraph. (And I think that’s consistent with causal decision theory, properly understood, though the reasons why that is so are a little beyond the scope of this post.)

Here’s something else that’s consistent with a flat-footed interpretation of the case, though not I think with the intended interpretation. Option 2 is a box with $1000 in it. Option 1 is a box with a randomly selected lottery ticket in it, and the ticket has an expected value of $1. Now as a matter of fact, it will be the winning ticket, so you will get $1,000,000 if you take option 1. Still, if everything you know is that option 2 is $1,000, and option 1 is a $1 lottery ticket, you should take option 2.

Now I don’t think that undermines what I said above. And I don’t think it undermines it because when we properly interpret descriptions of games/decision problems, we’ll see that this situation isn’t among the class of decision problems described in the first paragraph. When we describe the outcomes of certain actions in a decision problem, those aren’t merely the actual outcomes, they are things that are properly taken as fixed points in the agent’s deliberation. They are, in Stalnakerian terms, the limits of the context set. In the lottery ticket example, it is not determined by the context set that you’ll get $1,000,000 if you take option 1, even though it is in fact true.

I think “things the agent properly takes as fixed points” are all and only the things the agent knows, but that’s a highly controversial theory of knowledge. (In fact, it’s my version of interest-relative invariantism.) So rather than wade into that debate, I’ll simply talk about proper fixed points.

Saying that something is a fixed point is a very strong claim. It means the agent doesn’t even, shouldn’t even, consider possibilities where they fail. So in Newcomb’s problem, the agent shouldn’t be at all worrying about possibilities where the demon miscounts the money she puts into box 1 or 2. Or possibilities where there is really a piranha in box 2 who’ll bite your hand, rather than $1000. And when I say that she shouldn’t be worrying about them, I mean they shouldn’t be in the algebra of possibilities over which her credences are defined.

There’s a big difference formally between something being true at all points over which a probability function is defined, and something (merely) having probability 1 according to that function. And that difference is something that I’m relying on heavily here. In particular, I think the following two things are true.

First, when we state something in the set up of a problem, then we say that the agent can take it as given for the purposes of a problem.

Second, when we are considering the possible outcomes of a situation, the only situations we need to consider are ones that are not fixed points. So in my version of Newcomb’s Problem, the right thing to do is to take one box, because there is no outcome where you do better than taking one box. On the other hand, some things that we now know to be false might (in some sense of might) become relevant, even though we now assign them probability 0. That’s what goes on in cases where backwards induction fails; the context set shifts over the course of the game, and so we have to take into account new things.

Having said all that, there is one hard question that I don’t know the answer to. It’s related to some things that Adam Elga, John Collins and Andy Egan were discussing at a reading group on the weekend. In the kind of puzzle cases that we usually consider in textbooks, the context set consists of the Cartesian product of some hypotheses about the world, and some choices. That’s to say, the context set satisfies this principle: If _S_ is a possible state of the world (excluding my choice), and _C_ is a possible choice, then there is a possibility in the context set where _S_ and _C_ both obtain. I wonder if that’s something we should always accept. I’ll leave the pros and cons of accepting that proposal for another post though.

Sally Haslanger has put together a survey on publishing, and she’d like any professional philosophers to take it. It should take about 10 minutes. It will be useful to have your CV handy as you fill it out. Please go here to find it:

• Publishing Survey

If all goes well, Sally Haslanger will report on the results at the December APA in the symposium on philosophy publishing (Wednesday December 30th, 11:15-1:15).

… are on Facebook. Be there or be mereologically variable (inclusive ‘or’).

See also: this page, with all the Original Monads tunes and the new tracks from the 21st CMs!

UPDATE: New song out now! The G. E. Moore Shift

• My colleague Stephen Stich is collecting data on philosophers’ views about normative judgments. This is part of work he’s doing jointly with Joe Henrich and Taylor Davis at UBC. It involves answering questions in a 20-item “questionnaire”:https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=u_2fmW1lVR2ZyszkTSH2Jnzw_3d_3d. The research has been approved by UBC’s Behavioral Research Ethics Board and is open to all faculty and graduate students in philosophy. If you’d like to take this survey, it is online at:
  
  https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=u_2fmW1lVR2ZyszkTSH2Jnzw_3d_3d.
• Somewhat relatedly, this week’s “David Brooks”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/opinion/20brooks.html column talks about empirically influenced work in ethics, highlighting in particular Kwame Anthony Appiah’s recent book Experiments in Ethics.
• The “Blackwell Compass Virtual Conference”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/home_conference is underway, and I encourage everyone to check out the activities.
• I’m going to be at (at least) three workshops/conferences in St Andrews next summer. This includes the “methodology workshop”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~arche/events/event?id=257, the large “Arché / Rutgers Epistemology conference”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~arche/events/event?id=257 and the “Conference on the Foundations of Logical Consequence”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~arche/events/event?id=214. I’m also scheduled to give talks in Germany and in England. It should be a busy, and very rewarding, summer.
• While all that is happening, my colleague Dean Zimmerman is co-organising a “summer seminar in philosophy of religion”:http://www.stthomas.edu/philosophy/templeton/project.html. There’s lots of information available at that link, but the crucial thing to note now is that registration for it closes December 1.
• Finally, here are some very nice pictures of Lower Manhattan.

Roger White has a very interesting paper on origins of life research in Nous from a couple years ago, which I only just got around to reading.  I think he makes some very good points about the general reasons why apparent coincidences often shouldn’t be taken as evidence against a chance hypothesis.  He makes these arguments in order to suggest that origins of life research rests on a mistake – in particular, he suggests that we have no positive reason to believe that the initial appearance of life in the universe was anything other than chance.  However, I think his argument for this claim fails. Continue reading →

There have been a lot of discussions why the gender ratios in academic philosophy remain so abysmal these days. Prominent recent posts include:

• Jenny Saul at Feminist Philosophers (“one”:http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/women-in-philosophy-whats-getting-left-out/, “two”:http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/mars-and-venus-a-cautionary-tale-and-some-questions/)
• Louise Anthony at Feminist Philosophers (“here”:http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2009/10/13/guest-post-by-louise-antony/)
• Dana at Edge of the American West (“here”:http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/thats-a-funny-place-to-keep-your-reasoning-ability/)
• Evelyn Brister at Knowledge and Experience (“one”:http://knowledgeandexperience.blogspot.com/2009/10/newsflash-fewer-women-than-men-in.html, “two”:http://knowledgeandexperience.blogspot.com/2009/10/not-discrimination-but-choice.html, “three”:http://knowledgeandexperience.blogspot.com/2009/10/say-it-again.html)
• Richard Zach and LogBlog (“one”:http://www.ucalgary.ca/~rzach/logblog/2009/10/women-in-academic-pipeline.html, “two”:http://www.ucalgary.ca/~rzach/logblog/2009/10/women-in-academic-pipeline-ii.html)

There’s a very big question about why philosophy is doing such a bad job at getting women into senior roles. I suspect that such a debate will be helped by thinking about just where things are going wrong. For someone to become a full professor of philosophy, they typically have to go through a number of stages. Here are four particularly prominent ones:

1. Enrolling in an intro philosophy course
2. Applying to graduate school
3. Getting an entry-level job
4. Being promoted to full professor

There might be other ways of dividing up the typical career path that are more helpful, but I find it useful to think about these four steps.

We know that the numbers at step 4 are terrible. What we don’t know, in general, are what the numbers are at the other three steps.

We do know a little. We know in Australia, for instance, that the majority of intro philosophy students are women, 57% in fact. That’s what the “big AAP report”:http://aap.org.au/women/reports/index.html found out. We also know that in Australia, there’s near gender parity in the Honours year, with 47% women. (That’s an extra year of philosophy study, after the requirements for the undergrad degree are completed, and practically essential for graduate study. It’s much like a 1 year coursework Masters.) We also know in Australia there are somewhat fewer (proportionally) women graduate students than Honours students (39% vs 47%), though I don’t think we know whether that happens at the application stage or later. There are about the same percentage of junior faculty as PhD students (40%), and then a cliff dive in getting to full professorship (6%).

Now some of the drop off from junior to senior professorship comes in because the numbers of junior professors was lower in recent years. But I doubt that’s all of the explanation. Still, it’s nice to see numbers like this. Imagine what it would be like in the U.S. if 47% of honours majors were women!

One reason for thinking hard about where the drop off is occuring is that it rules in or out certain hypotheses for why there are proportionally fewer women.

For instance, it’s hard to square the Australian data with a particularly strong version of the claim that philosophy is offputting to women because of its aggressiveness. You know a fair bit about what philosophy is like before starting Honours. You know a lot more by the time you end Honours and start a PhD. It’s hard to explain any drop off in numbers beyond that as due to agressiveness I think.

For similar reasons, it’s also hard to square the Australian data with a claim that the subject matter is just not something appealing to women. You don’t sign up for an Honours year if you don’t like the subject.

And it’s somewhat hard to square the Australian data with the hypothesis put forward by Regan Penaluna (via “Leiter’s Blog”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/10/why-arent-there-more-women-in-academic-philosophy.html) that women are put off by the all-male canon. After all, the canon is pretty male in Australia as well. To be sure, an intro philosophy student taking the courses I took (and later taught) could well come away with the impression that Judith Jarvis Thomson is the most important philosopher of the last 50 years given the amount of time we spent on trolleys and violinists. But I still think this explanation is hard to make consistent with the Australian data.

Indeed, it’s hard to see how these three explanations (aggressiveness, subject matter, maleness of canon) could together account for more than a few percent of the ‘missing’ women in non-Australian philosophy programs, given that all of the features are present in Australia.

Now it’s true that there is attrition, from 57% in intro classes, to 47% in Honours, to 39/40% in junior faculty. And that attrition might be explained by agressiveness/dislike of the material/maleness of the canon. But beyond that we need a different explanation.

As several of the posts quoted at the top suggest, I suspect the right explanation will have more to do with conscious or unconscious biases, or with network effects that create institutional biases. I’d guess, though this is something that would need to be checked against the facts, that the small size of the philosophical community in Australia makes it less likely that all-male subcommunities will have time and space to develop, and that might ameliorate the kind of network effects that, e.g, “Dana”:http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/thats-a-funny-place-to-keep-your-reasoning-ability/ discusses. But more work is needed here.

Of course, the Australia data is just Australian. Things may look very different in other countries. I don’t know if there’s much data about what’s happening in Britain. I’ve heard it suggested that there’s a much bigger dropoff between undergraduate numbers and graduate numbers than we see in Australia, but I don’t know whether that’s something that’s been measured. I have seen, thanks to some excellent bloggers, some data about America!

“Richard Zach”:http://www.ucalgary.ca/~rzach/logblog/2009/10/women-in-academic-pipeline-ii.html and “Evelyn Brister”:http://knowledgeandexperience.blogspot.com/2009/10/say-it-again.html have been posting about the percentage of women among philosophy BA’s in the United States. As Prof Brister points out, the number got to around 30% fifteen years ago, and hasn’t moved much since. It’s striking how much lower this is than the Australian numbers. It’s also striking that it isn’t that different to the percentage we see of women in graduate programs, amongst junior faculty and so on.

And that puts more constraints on what can count as a good explanation of the numbers. We need to explain not just why the U.S.A. numbers are so low, but why they are so low compared to other countries.

Here it would be nice to know just where things are going wrong in the U.S. system. Is it that 50% of students in intro classes are women, but a much higher percentage of men are going on to further classes? Is it that we start at 30% and never get better? Or is it somewhere in between?

My anecdotal observation is that the last is true. We don’t have female majorities in our big intro classes – far from it. But the gender balance in intro is better than it is in 300/400 level courses, especially in metaphysics, epistemology, language and logic. If that’s right (and it would be nice to know if it is) then two things are going wrong: we’re not attracting enough women to intro courses, and we’re not giving them enough reason to stay in philosophy.

I’ll end with one very speculative hypothesis. Word of mouth seems to play a much bigger role in course selection in American universities than it (seems) to play in Australian universities. Australian universities typically feature very small numbers of students living on campus, with the vast majority commuting. (Just about everyone I knew as an undergrad commuted, with the exception of a few who lived walking distance from campus.) Perhaps philosophy is getting a bad reputation through the word-of-mouth networks, and that’s feeding into fewer women taking intro courses.

Perhaps. Any better explanations would be very gratefully received.

The New York Times is running an “article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html?em=&pagewanted=all about one quirky explanation for why we haven’t found a Higgs boson yet.

bq. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists [Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya] have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

The picture should be familiar enough from Lewis’s discussion of time travel. What would happen in a time travel world if someone tried to go back in time to kill their grandfather? They’d fail. They might fail in surprising ways. At this point of the story banana peels start to play a prominent role, leading to one of the “better paper titles of our time”:http://bjps.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/48/3/363.

But as Nielsen acknowledges in the article, it isn’t quite so clear why creating the Higgs boson would be akin to killing one’s grandfather. And at this point the analogy with time travel starts to look strained.

If we’re doing speculative physics on the basis of Lewisian philosophy, I think we should be looking not at Lewis on time travel, but Lewis on QM. In “How Many Lives has Schrödinger’s Cat?”:http://philpapers.org/rec/LEWHML, Lewis discusses what it feels like to be the inhabitant of a world where the Everett Hypothesis is true. And his conclusion is that inhabitants of such a world will appear to have, from their perspective, a surprising number of near-death experiences.

The picture is that whenever we get near to death, there’s a possible evolution of the world in which we don’t die. (That tumour quantum tunnels its way out of the patient’s body, etc.) Now from an external perspective, such bizarre possibilities are generally ignorable quirks. But from the perspective of the agent nearing death, things look quite different. They don’t experience anything after they die. So all of the possibilities in which they keep experiencing are ones in which they survive. So if the only way to survive a time period t is through a series of events that are incredibly improbable, all of the agent’s future experiences will be in worlds where those events happen. So despite the improbability, the agent should expect those events to happen, in the sense that those events will probably be part of the only future the agent knows.

Now suppose that creating a Higgs boson (or more precisely isolating one) will lead to the instantaneous destruction of the universe. (Actually we just need that it leads to the death of everyone on earth.) And suppose the Everett hypothesis is true. Then unless the creation of a Higgs boson has probability 1, there are some really existing futures in which the Higgs is not created. And we should expect (with probability 1) that we’ll find ourselves in one of them. So we should expect (with probability 1) that the attempt to create a Higgs boson will appear to fail.

If future attempts to create a Higgs boson fail in more and more unlikely ways, I think we’ll have to start taking this hypothesis seriously. So far we’ve had two attempts to create the Higgs boson fail in mildly surprising ways. I think we need to get to more like 8-10 failures before we start worrying about the hypotheses sketched here, but if the improbable failures start accumulating, the lessons of “How Many Lives has Schrödinger’s Cat?”:http://philpapers.org/rec/LEWHML start to look more and more pressing.

Hopefully they’ll get the LHC back working soon and we can put crazy ideas like these to bed!

This interesting announcement was recently posted at “Feminist Philosophers”:http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/womens-papers-for-undergraduate-teaching/.

bq. We are seeking suggestions for papers to include in a database of women-authored papers that would be suitable for undergraduate teaching. The database is intended to facilitate the selection of texts written by women to be included in philosophy undergraduate teaching. The database will be freely accessible online, and is intended to be up and running by mid-2010. We aim for a pilot version to be ready by the end of 2009.

bq. This project is funded by a Macquarie University Competitive Learning and Teaching Grant, awarded to a team from the Philosophy Department. We are happy to provide more information if that should be useful. Thanks in advance for your assistance,

bq. Cynthia Townley, Albert Atkin, Mitch Parsell and Swantje Lorrimer

bq. womenphildatabase@gmail.com

This sounds like a great project, and I encourage people to contribute any suggestions they have.

Quite coincidentally, I had the idea the other day of putting together a syllabus for an intro philosophy class that only featured female authors. I’ve seen several such classes with all male reading lists, but I’d never seen an all female one. I’m interested in why so many *intro* classes in philosophy have an uneven gender balance, and one hypothesis is that (some) women are put off by all-male reading lists.

So I went to a few prominent anthologies used in intro teaching, and thought I’d start making lists of all the papers by women I found in them. I’m really bad at telling which papers will work in intro classes, so I use those big anthologies a lot as a guide to what I can get away with teaching. But I quit fairly soon after I started down that road, because it clearly wasn’t going to help.

All the anthologies I looked at had not a single paper by a woman that wasn’t on ethics. Admittedly I only looked at a handful of readers, and if I’d kept searching I would have found one or two papers by women on areas other than ethics that had been included in the standard readers. But still, I think this is a bit terrible, especially in readers with 100 or so articles.

So instead I started thinking about what an intro ethics course with only female authors would look like. And since there are lots of readers designed just for ethics courses, I thought they would be a better place to get started. But this wasn’t much better. Most of the big ethics readers still had 75% or more male-authored articles. If I wanted to stick to articles in prominent readers, I could have scraped together a course that talked about the difference between Deontological and Virtue theoretic approaches to ethics (the consequentialist sections of readers were inevitably all-male), and then some applied sections on abortion and pornography.

Now it’s probably not true that the ideal course would have only women on the reading list, any more than the ideal course would have only men on the reading list. But I would like to see what difference it makes to enrollments to have a more gender-balanced (and more racially-balanced) reading list. And having a few more gender balanced readers wouldn’t be a terrible way to start towards that. Neither would the database that Prof Townley and her collaborators are putting together.