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*

One objection that Henry Kyburg raises in several places to the Dutch Book argument for the notion of subjective probability is that people can avoid Dutch Books by exercise of purely deductive reasoning, and therefore they provide no constraint on betting odds or the like. As he puts it in his 1978 paper, “Subjective Probability: Criticisms, Reflections, and Problems”:

No rational person, whatever his degrees of belief, would accept a sequence of bets under which he would be bound to lose no matter what happens. No rational person will in fact have a book made against him. If we consider a sequence of bets, then quite independently of the odds at which the person is willing to bet, he will decline any bet that converts the sequence into a Dutch Book.

I think there’s something right about the general point, but this particular passage I quoted seems just plain wrong. I’ll give an example in which it seems perfectly reasonable to get oneself into such a Dutch Book.
Let’s say that back in January I was very impressed by John McCain’s cross-partisan popularity, and his apparent front-runner status as the Republican nominee for president, so I spent $40 on a bet that pays $100 if he’s elected president. After a few months, seeing his poll numbers plummet, let’s say I became more bullish on Giuliani, and spent $40 on a bet that pays $100 if he’s elected instead. But now that Republicans seem to be backing away from him too, and that Hillary Clinton may be pulling ahead in the Democratic primary, say I now think she’s the most likely candidate to win. If Kyburg is right, then no matter what my degree of belief, I wouldn’t spend more than $20 on a bet that pays $100 if she wins, because I will have converted my set of bets into a Dutch Book against myself (assuming as I do that no more than one of them can be elected). However, it seems eminently rational for me to buy a bet on Clinton for some larger amount of money, because I regard my previous bets as sunk costs, and just want to focus on making money in the future.

Something like this is possible on the Bayesian picture whenever I change my degrees of belief at all – I might have already made bets that I now consider regrettable, but that shouldn’t stop me from making future bets (unless it perhaps does something to convince me that my overall bet-placing skills are bad).

To be fair, I’m sure that Kyburg intends his claim only in the case where the agent is sequentially accepting bets in a setting where her beliefs aren’t changing, where the basic Dutch Book theorem is meant to apply. He’s certainly right that there are ways to avoid Dutch Books while still having betting odds that violate the probability axioms, unless one is somehow required to accept any sum of bets for and against any proposition at one’s published odds.

But somehow Kyburg seems to be suggesting that deductive rationality alone is sufficient to prevent Dutch Books, even with this extra flexibility. However, I’m not sure that this will necessarily happen – one can judge a certain loss as better than some combination of chances of loss and gain. And he even provides a footnote to a remark of Teddy Seidenfeld that I think makes basically this point!

It is interesting to note, as pointed out to me by Teddy Seidenfeld, that the Dutch Book against the irrational agent can only be constructed by an irrational (whether unscrupulous or not) opponent. Suppose that the Agent offers odds of 2:1 on heads and odds of 2:1 on tails on the toss of a coin. If the opponent is rational, according to the theory under examination, there will be a number p that represents his degree of belief in the occurrence of heads. If p is less than a half, the opponent will maximize his expectation by staking his entire stake on tails in accordance with the first odds posted by the Agent. But then the Agent need not lose. Similarly, if p is greater than a half. But if p is exactly a half, then the rational opponent should be indifferent between dividing his stake (to make the Dutch Book) and putting his entire stake on one outcome: the expectation in any case will be the same.

If Kyburg’s earlier claim that agents will never get themselves into Dutch Books is correct, then this argument by Seidenfeld can’t be – the same reasoning that keeps agent out of Dutch Books should make bookies buy them (unless it’s more bad to have a sure loss than it is good to have the corresponding sure gain). I suspect that each of the two arguments will apply in some cases but not others. At certain points, the bookie will feel safer buying the Dutch Book, while at others, she will favor maximizing expectation. Similarly, the agent will sometimes feel safer allowing a Dutch Book to be completed against her, rather than exposing herself to the risk of a much greater loss.
I think Kyburg is right that there are problems with any existing formulation of the Dutch Book argument, but I think he’s wrong in the facts of this particular criticism, and also wrong about subjective probability as a whole. Seidenfeld’s argument is really quite thought-provoking, and probably deserves further attention.

Logicians often complain that there are no logic jobs in philosophy, but Adam Morton has just sent me news of one, and it’s at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where I did a postdoc. Alberta is a great department – I had an absolutely fantastic year there – and Edmonton is a great place to be if you have any interest in winter sports…or theatre for that matter, the Edmonton Fringe Festival is some of the best fun you can have without snow.

……………………..

The Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta, invites applications for a tenure-track position in Philosophy, with a specialization in Logic. Other areas of research and teaching specialization and competence are open. The appointment will be made at the rank of Assistant Professor, effective July 1, 2008. Responsibilities include undergraduate and graduate teaching and maintaining an active research programme. Tenure stream faculty normally teach four one term courses per year. Candidates should hold a PhD in Philosophy and provide evidence of scholarly and teaching excellence. Salary is commensurate with qualifications and experience, and the benefit package is comprehensive. Applicants should arrange to send a letter of application indicating the position applied for and describing areas of research interest, curriculum vitae, all university transcripts, a sample of written work, letters from three referees, and, if available, a teaching dossier and teaching evaluations to Bruce Hunter, Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, CANADA, T6G 2E5. CLOSING DATE: November 10, 2007. The University of Alberta hires on the basis of merit. We are committed to the principle of equity in employment. We welcome diversity and encourage applications from all qualified women and men, including persons with disabilities, members of visible minorities, and Aboriginal persons. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadian citizens and permanent residents will be given priority. For further information concerning the Department, please consult http://www.uofaweb.ualberta.ca/philosophy/.