There is an odd paper by Jeanne Peijnenburg in the latest Mind. (It’s subscription only, so no link.) There’s a formal point and a philosophical point.

The formal point concerns the following question. Are there values of a1, b1, a2, b2, … such that given that P(Ei|Ei+1) = ai, and P(Ei|~Ei+1) = bi for all i, we can compute the value of P(E1)? This is answered in the affirmative, in some complicated cases where we have to compute some tricky infinite sequences.

The philosophical point is that this is meant to be a defence of infinitism, a la Peter Klein. The idea, if I’ve understood it, is that we can (contra Klein’s critics) say that we can deduce unconditional probabilities from an infinite string of conditional probabiilties. So probabilities don’t have to be ‘grounded’ in unconditional probabilities, as Klein suggests.

But there’s a much simpler way to prove the formal point. If a1 = b1 = x, the Pr(E1) = x, whatever the other values are. Here is a way to get from conditional probabilities to unconditional probabilities. And we don’t even need an infinite chain. So I don’t see how this is meant to give any support to infinitism. Maybe I’m just missing something here. At the very least, I’m certainly missing how these computations of particular probabilities support the idea that infinite chains can justify old-fashioned, non-probabilistic, belief.

The first two are things I possibly should have added to the link to Robbie’s post below.

* Aidan McGlynn’s “philosophy job market and publishing advice”:http://aidan.mcglynn.googlepages.com/adviceforwannabephilosophers
* Jon Cogburn’s “Guide to philosophy hiring”:http://drjon.typepad.com/jon_cogburns_blog/2007/09/explanation-of-.html
* Vote on “What to do with Barry Bonds’ home run ball”:http://www.vote756.com/marcecko/
* “National Journal Political Stock Exchange”:http://njpse.nationaljournal.com/
* When I look at a map of New York, the first thing I think is “Why aren’t there more water parks?” Someone was doing something about this, but now it looks like “it might not work”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/nyregion/18mbrfs-PARK.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion&oref=slogin.

“Robbie Williams”:http://theoriesnthings.blogspot.com/2007/09/uk-job-market.html has a good guide to the British job market.

From the “NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/science/18mora.html?8dpc.

bq. Where do moral rules come from? From reason, some philosophers say. From God, say believers. Seldom considered is a source now being advocated by some biologists, that of evolution.

Someone should tell “Brian Skyrms”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/102-1247012-9760127?%5Fencoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=Brian%20Skyrms. I bet he’d have something interesting to say about this newly considered source.

This may all be old news to philosophers who work on decision theory and related things, but I think it bears repeating.

There’s an interesting post up at Cosmic Variance by the physicist Sean Carroll wondering idly about some issues that come up in the foundations of economics. One paragraph in particular caught my eye:

But I’d like to argue something a bit different – not simply that people don’t behave rationally, but that “rational” and “irrational” aren’t necessarily useful terms in which to think about behavior. After all, any kind of deterministic behavior – faced with equivalent circumstances, a certain person will always act the same way – can be modeled as the maximization of some function. But it might not be helpful to think of that function as utility, or [of] the act of maximizing it as the manifestation of rationality. If the job of science is to describe what happens in the world, then there is an empirical question about what function people go around maximizing, and figuring out that function is the beginning and end of our job. Slipping words like “rational” in there creates an impression, intentional or not, that maximizing utility is what we should be doing – a prescriptive claim rather than a descriptive one. It may, as a conceptually distinct issue, be a good thing to act in this particular way; but that’s a question of moral philosophy, not of economics.

There’s a lot of stuff in here. Part of this is a claim that science only addresses descriptive issues, not normative ones (or “prescriptive” in his words – I’m not sure what distinction there is between those two words, except that “prescriptive” sounds more like you’re meddling in other people’s activities). Now to a physicist I think this claim sounds natural, but I’m not sure that it’s true. I think it’s perhaps clearest in linguistics that scientific claims are sometimes about normative principles rather than merely descriptive facts. As discussed in this recent post by Geoffrey Pullum on Language Log, syntax is essentially an empirical study of linguistic norms – it’s not just a catalog of what sequences of words people actually utter and interpret, but includes their judgments of which sequences are right and wrong. Linguists may call themselves “descriptivists” to contrast with the “prescriptivists” that don’t use empirical evidence in their discussions of grammaticality, but they still deal with a notion of grammaticality that is essentially normative.

I think the same is true of economics, though the sort of normativity is quite different from the norms of grammaticality (and the other norms studied in semantics and pragmatics). There is some sort of norm of rationality, but of course it’s (probably) different from the sort of norm discussed in “moral philosophy”. Whether or not it’s a good thing to maximize one’s own utility, there’s a sense in which it’s constitutive of being a good decision maker that one does. Of course, using the loaded term “rationality” for this might be putting more force on this norm than we ought to (linguists don’t call grammaticality a form of rationality, for instance) but I think it’s actually a reasonable name for it. The bigger problem with the term “rationality” is that it can be used both to discuss good decision making and also good reasoning, thus confusing “practical rationality” and “epistemic rationality”.

And that brings me to the biggest point I think there is in this paragraph. While there might be good arguments that maximizing utility is the expression of rationality, and there might be some function that people descriptively go around maximizing, it’s not clear that this function will actually be utility. One prominent type of argument in favor of the claim that degrees of belief must obey the axioms of probability theory is a representation theorem. One gives a series of conditions that it seems any rational agent’s preferences should obey, and then shows that for any such function there is a unique pair of a “utility function” and a “probability function” such that the agent’s preferences always maximize expected utility. However, for each of these representation theorems, at least some of the conditions on the preference function seem overly strong to require of rational agents, and then even given the representation, Sean Carroll’s point still applies – what makes us sure that this “utility function” represents the agent’s actual utilities, or that this “probability function” represents the agent’s actual degrees of belief? Of course, the results are very suggestive – the “utility function” is in fact a function from determinate outcomes to real numbers, and the “probability function” is a function from propositions to values in the interval [0,1], so they’re functions of the right sort to do the job we claim they do. But it’s certainly not clear that there’s any psychological reality to them, the way it seems there should be (even if subconscious) for an agent’s actual utility and degree-of-belief functions.

However, if this sort of argument can be made to work, then we do get a connection between an agent’s observed behavior and her utility function. We shouldn’t assume her decisions are always made in conformity with her rational preferences (since real agents are rarely fully rational), but if these conditions of rationality are correct, then there’s a sense in which we should interpret her as trying to maximize some sort of expected utility, and just failing in certain instances. This sense is related to Donald Davidson’s argument that we should interpret someone’s language as having meanings in such a way that most of their assertions come out as true. In fact, in “The Emergence of Thought”, he argues that these representation theorems should be united with his ideas about “radical translation” and the “principle of charity” so that belief, desire, and meaning all fall out together. That is, the normativity of rationality in the economic sense (as maximizing expected utility) just is part of the sort of behavior agents have to approximate in order to be said to have beliefs, desires, or meaning in their thoughts or assertions – that is, in order to be an agent.

So I think Sean Carroll’s found an important point to worry about, but there’s already been a lot of discussion on both sides of this, and he’s gone a bit too fast in assuming that economic science should avoid any talk of normativity.

According to CNN, the official kilogram “is lighter than it used to be”:http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/09/12/shrinking.kilogram.ap/index.html. The consequences for semantic theory are not remarked upon in the article.

Quick hits while feeling happy that iTunes has finally added album rating.

* “Harry Brighouse on nightclub bouncers and philosophy admissions committees”:http://crookedtimber.org/2007/09/06/sally-haslanger-on-women-in-philosophy/.
* “Robbie Williams on sleeping around Dutch bookies”:http://theoriesnthings.blogspot.com/2007/09/sleeping-bookie.html.
* “David Chalmers on expressivism and representationalism”:http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2007/09/expressivism-pr.html.
* In the middle of “a post on Larry Craig”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=09&year=2007&base_name=post_4787, Mark Schmidt interestingly says “[I]n my world, if something’s none of my business, it’s o.k. for you to lie about it, in order to protect your privacy.” That would allow a much broader sphere of permissible lying than many philosophers would (I think) allow. Still, it sounds like a pretty plausible principle to me. Maybe this is widely accepted in the lying literature, and I’m just revealing my ignorance here.

To the “philosophy bites blog”:http://nigelwarburton.typepad.com/philosophy_bites/, which is mostly a collection of podcast interviews with (mostly) British philosophers. I haven’t listened to any of them, but hopefully will soon. It’s a great idea, and apparently is doing well on the iTunes PodCast charts.

I keep meaning to try out podcasting, but first I guess I better figure out how to record things, and how to speak in a radio voice.

Five more quick thoughts on “Sally Haslanger’s important paper”:http://www.mit.edu/~shaslang/papers/HaslangerCICP.pdf.

# It really is important to get some data on what is happening at the undergraduate level. In my experience, lower level undergraduate courses are whiter and maler than the student body, and upper level undergrad classes are demographically much more similar to the demographics of the philosophy faculty than they are to the undergraduate community as a whole. I suspect that if we fixed this problem, and had more non-(white males) majoring in philosophy and going on to grad school, a lot of other problems would look a lot more tractable. Compiling this data will cost money, but I think it is a worthwhile expense.
# I think people who have never been in such a position can very often underestimate how disconcerting it can be to be the only member of a demographically marked group. When I first moved to America I naturally gravitated to other foreigners, because I never felt comfortable being the only foreigner. This gradually passed; it is a lot easier to become one of the locals than one of the boys, especially if you speak the same language. But it’s a real issue. This is one of (many) reasons why I think demographic diversity is more important in hiring than diversity of research focus. A more diverse faculty (and graduate program) will simply do better work. (See the previous point for another reason for favouring demographic diversity.)
# The data that Haslanger presents about journal publications is, as she is careful to note, hard to make much of unless matched with data about submission rates. Quickly eyeballing some data, I’d say that the rate at which women submit to Phil Review is roughly similar to the rate that Phil Review publishes papers by women, for example. And we certainly haven’t been flooded with papers on feminism, for instance.
# Haslanger doesn’t quite say that she thinks making refereeing more anonymous will be a solution to the problem, but seems to suggest this. (If I’m misreading what Haslanger is saying, I apologise in advance.) I suspect this isn’t going to be particularly helpful, though I’m far from certain here. First, my rough sense is that non-anonymous publications (Phil Perspectives, Oxford Studies in X) have been publishing more women (though perhaps not more minorities) than the blind review journals. Second, this might be self-serving, but I suspect unconscious discrimination is more of an issue at this time than conscious discrimination. I mean, I can’t imagine thinking “I’m not going to publish this because it’s by a woman.” But I can imagine thinking “I’m not going to publish this because it doesn’t have features X, Y or Z that I regard as key virtues of a philosophy paper,” where, in practice, virtues X, Y or Z are virtues that are more commonly found in papers written by men than by women. (For a sense of what X, Y and Z might be, see the violence metaphors at the start of Haslanger’s paper.) When I’m evaluating papers as part of applications (for junior faculty positions or grad school) I can adjust for this a little. If nothing else, I can look back at my judgments, note I’ve only been promoting male files, and go looking for the good files from women I must have missed. Blind refereeing makes this impossible. In short, blind refereeing will at best lead us to a kind of equal opportunity; given the possibility/probability of unconscious biases amongst the judges, affirmative action might be the better solution.
# Obviously one of the solutions to the previous problem would be to have more women editing major journals, making hiring decisions, ranking grad school applications, running the philosophy major so as to encourage more women to be in philosophy etc. That is, remove the unconscious biases physically! But this can’t really work for an obvious reason – there aren’t enough women to do all these jobs because the profession hasn’t been doing enough work at recruiting and retaining women. In practice, a lot of the work at trying to make the profession more diverse has fallen on a few shoulders. Unless we can clone people like Sally Haslanger (and my colleague-to-be Howard McGary) who put in superhuman amounts of service to the profession, we will need to rely on institutional measures like affirmative action. Having said that, it would be good to have more women editing leading journals. One nice effect of Cornell doing reasonably well in terms of hiring women in the last couple of years is that eventually the editorship of the Review should be more balanced, and hopefully the same thing can happen at other top journals.

Hopefully I’ll write some more about these in a bit.

* Sally Haslanger has posted her “paper on women and minorities in philosophy”:http://www.mit.edu/~shaslang/papers/HaslangerCICP.pdf. There is a lot to cover here, and hopefully it will spark a big discussion. (Including here when I have something coherent to say.) Via “Brian Leiter”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com.

* Also via Leiter, “Tim Crane”:http://web.mac.com/cranetim/iWeb/Tim%27s%20website/IP%20Blog/IP%20Blog.html has a blog.

* Chris Hill and Joshua Schecter have “a paper responding to Hawthorne on lotteries”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/faculty/schechter/papers/Lottery.pdf.

* Bonnie Kent pointed me to “this UCI website”:http://www.eod.uci.edu/availstats.html which records a whole bunch of stats about diversity in the profession. Here are just four tables that should be of some interest, and again hopefully something that I’ll comment on more down the track.

*Tenured Faculty in Humanities Disciplines, 6-20 years out of grad school*