Martha Nussbaum has an article on Indian politics in the Chronicle today, (linked to by Arts and Letters Daily, who also link to an article on Western vs Islamic feminism which praises Nussbaum.)

Once I spotted this I did a quick google search for other recent artlces featuring philosophers and discovered this from three days ago.

Today I’ve been getting my book manuscript ready for its final submission to Oxford University Press. Nothing very exciting – just working out how to get LaTeX to comply with their “Notes to Authors” instructions. I thought I’d make some notes here about solutions I’ve discovered to the various problems. (I’d only recommend venturing below the fold if this is the kind of thing that interests you…)

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In between figuring out which students have written their own papers, and grading the ones who have, there has been less blogging than ideal. So here are a few links to keep things going.

* Kai von Fintel and David Beaver are starting up a new journal, _Semantics and Pragmatics_, and it has “a blog”:http://www.semantics-online.org/sp/. The journal will be open access and online, and it is well and truly worth supporting. I was thinking of developing a policy of submitting all non-solicited papers (if I ever write such a thing again) to “Philosophers’ Imprint”:http://www.philosophersimprint.org/index.html, out of general support for open access principles. But perhaps the right policy is a more general support for open access.
* Speaking of the Imprint, Alexander George has a “very interesting paper”:http://www.philosophersimprint.org/007002/ on the relevance of a very surprising mathematical result to the traditional problem of induction.
* Philosophy Compass is sponsoring the “online philosophy conference”:http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/2nd_annual_online_philoso/, which is now on. One of my big plans for the future is real-time online philosophy conferences. But right now that’s vaporware – this is the cutting edge as far as virtual conferences go.
* As part of the sponsopship deal, Compass is providing free access to several Compass articles. These include: Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra, “Truthmakers”, Karen Bennett, “Mental Causation”, Mandy Simons, “Foundational Issues in Presupposition”, Ron Mallon, “A Field Guide to Social Construction” and W.J. Waluchow, “Judicial Review”
* Back in meatspace, Indiana is holding a “conference on agency”:http://www.indiana.edu/~agenresp/ in September.

I should add to Brian’s last post that another TARrer, Andy Egan, has also had a paper accepted for the BSPC 2007 (co-authored with Tyler Doggett).

Stanley Fish, in his blog behind the TimesSelect pay-wall at the New York Times, argues that “[l]anguage (or discourse), rather than either reflecting or distorting reality, produces it, at least in the arena of public debate,” and that thus, people are wrong to criticize Karl Rove for spinning economic figures. After all, he suggests, “spin – the pronouncing on things from an interested angle – is not a regrettable and avoidable form of suspect thinking and judging; it is the very content of thinking and judging”.

There’s something clearly right about this – anyone pronouncing on anything does have some particular opinions, and every observation does depend to some degree on unstated assumptions – but it seems to me that in a larger sense this is just wrong. He says “Forms of language … furnish our consciousness; they are what we think with, and we can’t think without them (in two senses of “without”).” There’s something interesting about this picture, but it seems to me that there are important empirical questions as well as conceptual ones that he skips in order to reach this conclusion.

The particular example he talks about is a statement by Karl Rove that “[r]eal disposable income has risen almost 14 percent since President Bush took office.” This figure has been criticized because “the 14-percent increase did not benefit everyone, but went largely “to those in the upper half of society”; the disposable income of the lower half had “fallen by 3.6 percent.”” But Fish argues that this is just an argument about beliefs about what makes a healthy economy, between “trickle down” and “spread the wealth”, and that any evidence can only be interpreted in the lights of which of these beliefs one holds. “Those beliefs … tell you what the relevant evidence is and what it is evidence of. But they are not judged by the evidence; they generate it.” He says that “the reality of the economic situation will emerge when one of the competing accounts … proves so persuasive that reality is identified with its descriptions.”

Some have called economics “the dismal science”, because economists have discovered relatively little about the world. But if Fish is right, then there couldn’t even be such a thing as economic knowledge. There could be no evidence for or against trickle down economics – we just have to persuade people of its merits or demerits.

There may be something to his points about the purely normative claims of economics, that one situation is better or worse than another. But I think that most of these political arguments aren’t of this sort – I think Republicans and Democrats and just about everyone else thinks the world would be better if more people had access to more material goods, other things being equal. The dispute is really about the empirical question of whether rising incomes at the top of the income distribution bring about more of this sort of effect than rising incomes at the very bottom of the income distribution. Fish seems to be denying that any sorts of discoveries of this sort could be relevant as anything other than persuasive material in an argument.

I think he’s broadly right that there’s no conceptual possibility of something like a purely neutral or disinterested way to couch all of the evidence in these social disputes. But this doesn’t mean that there’s no such thing as evidence that can be shared across the lines, or that “[o]pen-mindedness, far from being a virtue, is a condition which, if it could be achieved, would result in a mind that was spectacularly empty.”

Just a few quick links while we celebrate/mourn the various sporting and political results from the last few days.

* Sally Haslanger has posted a bunch of “information concerning women and minorities in philosophy”:https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/display/SGRP/Materials+concerning+women+and+minorities+in+philosophy at SGRP. Some of it will be familiar from previous discussions, but it is good to have it in one place.
* Congratulations to “Carrie and Daniel”:http://longwordsbotherme.blogspot.com/2007/05/backwards-explanation-and-real.html for getting their paper on “backwards explanation”:http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/Jenkins/BackwardsExplanation.pdf accepted to BSPC.
* I meant to promote “this competition”:http://www.rsc.org/AboutUs/News/PressReleases/2007/ChineseMaths.asp concerning the relative quality of maths education in Britain and China. But it seems the deadline has passed. In any case, here is the “BBC story”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/6589301.stm with a very nice illustration at the end of the differences between the two. This is relevant to philosophy, because it is hard to use mathematical examples (some of which are quite crucial) given the poor state of western mathematical education.

Daniel and I have been talking a lot about conservatism lately (Daniel’s been writing a book chapter on it), and we’re considering writing a joint paper on the topic. Here’s one of the things we’ve noticed that we’d like to write about.

A few importantly different kinds of epistemic conservatism seem to be floating around in the literature, not remarked upon nor clearly separated from one another, although it is far from obvious how they are related.

Some versions are about how to update your beliefs (e.g. Quineans, Bayesians), others about how to evaluate beliefs at a time. Let’s call these ‘update-evaluating conservatism’ and ‘state-evaluating conservatism’ respectively. In the latter category, there are some versions which say that what matters is your belief state at an earlier time than the time which is being evaluated (e.g. Sklar), others which say that what matters is your belief state at that very time (e.g. Chisholm). Let’s call these ‘diachronic state-evaluating’ and ‘synchronic state-evaluating’ conservatism respectively. Here are some examples from each category:

Update-evaluating (always diachronic): The best updating strategy involves minimal change to your belief and credence structure.

Synchronic and state-evaluating: The fact that you believe p at t1 gives a positive boost to the epistemic valuation of your belief in p at t1.

Diachronic and state-evaluating: The fact that you believe p at t1 gives a positive boost to the epistemic valuation of your belief in p at t2.

Now, the interesting question: does believing one of these principles commit you to any or all of the others? In this paper by McGrath – one of the few I know of that talks about this stuff – it is assumed that the core of conservatism is an update-evaluating kind, but that this is equivalent in truth-value to a corresponding synchronic state-evaluating kind of conservatism.

But here’s one reason to doubt things are that simple. Suppose I have a belief at t1 that is so epistemically bad that there is nothing to be said in its favour. Suppose I retain that belief at t2, with no new evidence, purely through inertia. One might wish to approve of the update qua update-evaluating conservative, but not wish to proffer any corresponding (diachronic or synchronic) state-evaluating approval of the belief at t2 – which, after all, is still held for really bad reasons.

Comments, pointers to good things to read, etc. warmly invited.

“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?