Cure-alls and Remedies
It’d be nice if the folks who don’t believe in global warming weren’t polluting the same world as the folks who do, but the tragedy of existence is that we must share one world. No one sane and good is ever a relativist or a pragmatist about criminal guilt or ignorance, about child abuse and the Satanic panic, or about vaccines. Relativism is always reserved for some other stuff that’s off to the side, like whether a particular artwork is beautiful.
Some recent posts by Dan Kahan on the subject of “cultural cognition” deserve attention: (Cultural cognition refers to the tendency of individuals to conform their beliefs about disputed matters of fact (e.g., whether global warming is a serious threat; whether the death penalty deters murder; whether gun control makes society more safe or less) to…
Last year, I suggested that liberal objections to Citizens United were partly justified by predictions about its effects that I didn’t see as probable . As the election draws to a close, we can begin to say whether the consensus view or my own views were accurate. Here goes: as a percentage of GDP, this is…
I try to defend conservatism sometimes . I also like Chesterton . Here’s one reason why: In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let…
Most people who know me in person would at least consider using the term “snarky” in their description of me, which is why John Barnes’ polemic against “snark” troubled me so: It’s a currently fashionable powerful rhetorical weapon that allows the uninvolved and the never-to-be-involved to discredit people who do, or attempt – anything at…
George Orwell supposedly* wrote that “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.” A piece is journalism if and only if someone does not want it printed. Orwell does not want public relations printed (as if it were journalism.) Orwell is someone. Printing a piece (as if it…
In my brief response to Community College Dean a few weeks back , I said something that I think is pretty obvious, but that is often ignored: humanities advocates spend so much time fighting the instrumental approach to education [because] you’ve got to pretend like time doesn’t matter, or else the education won’t work. Consider the…
The Obama administration brews its own beer Weigel takes a stab at serious policy Weigel has predicated a lot on the conditional statement: “If you look at it right, then you’ll see serious policy.” But we don’t have any evidence for the antecedent, that the public or the media *will* “look at it right.” More to…
It is my considered opinion that the next three months will involve no serious deliberations regarding substantive public policy. Though readership and viewership for such matters will be at its highest, none of the things discussed will be discussed in a way that comports with public reason or with anything like the goal of exchanging…
John Quiggin has been taking up the case against the basic income guarantee at Crooked Timber recently. See here and here . Unfortunately, he is attacking a weak man version of the policy. It doesn’t look like he actually opposes the BIG, in theory, but his objections all appear to demonstrate that a Basic Income…
In his initial response to the the Crooked Timber bloggers , Cowen also suggests that he doesn’t like the “mood affiliation” of the CT bloggers: I am not comfortable with the mood affiliation of the piece. How about a simple mention of the massive magnitude of employee theft in the United States, perhaps in the…
On Tuesday we had a university-wide faculty meeting on revising the general education requirements at Morgan State, and predictably President Wilson held up a copy of Arum and Roksa’s Academically Adrift and made some comments about how we had to do better while horribly mangling the actual findings of the book. Though there’s a lot…
[caption id=”” align=”alignleft” width=”320″ caption=”Blame it on REM”] [/caption] I had the pleasure and discomfort of attending parts of the Reason Rally on Saturday, a march on Washington by atheists, agnostics, and heathens . It was cold, rainy, and frequently quite boring. I mostly went to see Bad Religion , but I enjoyed Eddie Izzard’s…
We don’t normally think of induction and statistics as a part of critical thinking courses, but I think we should. Logic doesn’t end with deduction, after all, and there are few other instances in a college curriculum where students are asked to think carefully about how they ought to evaluate evidence, rather than being asked to apply…
This weekend’s revelation that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple and Foxconn was partly fabricated has led some bloggers and journalists to return to the question of how we should interpret the relationship between something called “facts” and something Daisey is calling “higher truth.” This distinction seems spurious to me, though we often hear it described…
In my last post , I noted that Jason Brennan’s published work strongly opposed disenfranchisement in the ordinary sense, and I claimed that Eric Schiesser had misrepresented his words in order to derive that conclusion. Today, Eric Schliesser supplied an unpublished paper in which Brennan offers an argument for experimentation with competency tests to disenfranchise…
When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “Truth and Beauty” with the poet Ann Lauterbach . It was basically a class on reading and writing essays, but I took it because I was a philosophy major and I thought it would be about aesthetics, i.e. about whether judgments about beauty can be…
Apparently, it did! On Thursday, I produced a graph and some older papers in economics that made the case that there is a pretty clear trend in campaign spending that was completely unaffected by the 2002 BCRA. However, I’m a philosopher, not an econometrician, so I left off the most important part: comparing growth in…
So I’ve just completed grading 55 papers on Citizens United v FEC , and though I’d kind of like to reflect on it a bit, I’m also finding that grading has totally exhausted my interest in the legal questions. (But seriously: the personhood question is a red herring!) Maybe later this week I’ll post…
Today Dr. J encourages her readers to understand the Occupy Wall Street movement through the lens of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: The Occupy Movement is like our sense of sight. It’s not (instrumentally) valuable for what it allows us to see, but rather it’s (intrinsically) valuable in that it allows us to see. Like sight, it “brings to light many differences…
In his new book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism , Ha-Joon Chang offers a progressive explanation for what Tyler Cowen calls “The Great Stagnation ,” the slowing growth in public goods available for consumption or redistribution. Between his various jibes at a strawman version of the standard economic model, Chang offers a…
One of the major debates in the philosophy of emotions is whether they ought to be treated as propositional attitudes and judgments capable of truth-tracking or simply as moods that can be appropriate or inappropriate to a context, but not falsifiable or verifiable. The question is whether emotions are a kind of intentional cognition or not….
From Understanding Arguments by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Robert Fogelin, which I use in my critical thinking course: Ideologies and worldviews tend to be self-sealing. The Marxist ideology sometimes has this quality. If you fail to see the truth of the Marxist ideology, that just shows that your social consciousness has not been raised. The very…
One major defense of status emotions like deference and disdain is that they count as judgments of a person’s character. We defer to experts because they have a history of being right; we disdain scoundrels because they have a history of cheating or misleading us. In this sense, status emotions are akin to other reactive…
There’s been a conflict running through Jonathan Haidt’s work that it’s time for him to address. On the one hand, he asserts that there are characteristic moral intuitions that distinguish partisan liberals from partisan conservatives . He recently argued that these moral intuitions are demonstrated by the fact that the vast majority of social psychologists…
Responding to the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Socioeconomic Status , Peter Levine discusses some of the difficulties in measuring socioeconomic status : To take another example: you need wealth and family connections to be admitted to certain snobby clubs. But having wealth and family connections might hurt your chances of hanging out with the…
In his comments on my post last week , Robin Hanson asked about the conceptual work still needed to advance the cause of prediction markets as tools for governance. To my knowledge, Hanson’s definitive statement of futarchy can be found here : When an approved betting market clearly estimates that a proposed policy would increase expected…
Robin Hanson channels and extends Thomas Reid : What can you do about serious skepticism, i.e., the possibility that you might be quite mistaken on a great many of your beliefs? For this, you might want to consider which of your beliefs are the most reliable, in order to try to lean more on those…
Most philosophers start with the big theories : psychological continuity, embodied persistence, “no further fact” anticriterialism. Yet in a vaguely Parfitian way, I’ve been wondering whether our identity intuitions can or should be forced to line up under a particular theory. So let’s look at some of the intuition pumps and see if they ought,…
My colleague Joe Pettit has posted a defense of theism that takes up the traditional Christian onto-theological response to the Euthyphro problem . God is the Measure Rather than speak of God as in some sense separate from the moral law, Pettit posits that God is the moral law. That way, there’s no dilemma when…
Is this the argument ? 1. (Our) wars are unjust. 2. Stopping (our) wars will prevent further injustice. combined with: 3. (Our) wars depend on secrecy in inception and in daily practice. 4. Thus, (our) wars can be prevented by eliminating the secrecy in inception. 5. Moreover, (our) wars can be stopped by eliminating the…
I’m revamping my Critical Thinking syllabus, and I’m looking to ramp up the heuristics and biases section, perhaps to four or five weeks. Most of the material I’ve reviewed is either too technical or too simplistic, akin to the “memorize a list of fallacies” model. I’d like something a bit more in-depth, but I’m balking…
Hugo Mercier and Helene Landemore describe an evolutionary psychological theory of deliberative polarization in their paper, “Reasoning is for Arguing: Understanding the Successes and Failures of Deliberation.” From the paper: We suggest that the function of reasoning is not the betterment of beliefs and judgments through private ratiocination and this is why reasoning does not accomplish this task well….
Most liberals adopt some version of the Rawlsian principle that changes in the distribution of goods ought to benefit the least advantaged. This is a principle easily adopted on utilitarian grounds: the marginal utility to be derived from redistribution is quite high. For instance, the difference between the pleasure I currently experience and the pleasure…
Here’s a question: what books, stories, or essays have changed your mind, and how? ( via ) It’s pretty common to talk about the books that influence us, but I tend to think that these texts make us more ourselves or cement already existing biases: anti-authoritarian teenagers read Ayn Rand, young people of faith read…
One of the most common philosophical conversations on the internet is the argument between atheists and agnostics as to which is the more reasonable position. This comes up so often that I thought I’d record some of my reflections on it. In particular, I am mindful that my position is somewhat at odds with my…
Following up on my claim in the last post that “honor produces error,” in my view, the problem is epistemic privilege, i.e. deference. By deference, I mean the epistemic privileges that some people receive or earn through demonstrating their erudition or looking like they know what they’re talking about. When you think of deference, you…
Dr. Trott has a nice post over at Mahogany Feed on Terry Jones’ threat to burn Korans over the weekend to commemorate the attacks of September 11th and to remind Muslims “not to push their agenda on us .” Dr. Trott suggests that this threat to burn the holy book of a cultural group, with…
In a previous post , I argued deception robbed sexual and marriage partners of their capacity to grant informed consent: attempts to reduce consent to the simple act of saying “yes” actually ignore the ways in which fraudulently representing oneself may be coercive. We can hate the bigotry and prejudice that make the lies seem…
If you lie about your ethnicity in order to procure consent for sex, is that rape? Sabbar Kashur, 30, was sentenced to 18 months in prison on Monday after the court ruled that he was guilty of rape by deception. According to the complaint filed by the woman with the Jerusalem district court, the two…
So after my last Tea Party post , I’ve been trying to track down more information about the movement. One interview does not an investigation make. Here’s what I’ve dug up: Evan pointed me to The Next Right. Not the Tea Party, but a similar attempt to reconstitute the conservative party around less jingoistic and racist…
The New York Times’ article on Tea Party ‘founder’ Keli Carender, struck me as an interesting corrective to much of the treatment of the movement as either a Fox News ‘stunt’ or a wing of the Republican Party run by the same old white men with a few token non-males and non-whites. Carendar is apparently…
Let’s get the jokes out of the way: “If corporations are people, do they get to vote?” “If corporations are people, can we start incarcerating them when they commit crimes?” “Does this mean I can marry my bank?” “Does charging a fee for incorporation constitute an unconstitutional violation of their reproductive rights?” “Thank God we’ve…
My old boss Ted Kinnaman has a piece in the Huffington Post on Pat Robertson’s claim that Haitians deserved the recent earthquake because they made a pact with the devil in order free themselves from colonial slavery. Others have developed the historical case for such a pact . Where many have taken Robertson to task…
Ever since the markets became front page news, I’ve been caught in some sort of economics blog vortex. At this point, most of my reading is no longer directed towards macro-economic issues and institutional critique, but rather focuses on the economics department at George Mason. The problem is that it seems like these people really…
I’ve been having a debate on a friend’s Facebook page about the value of Martha Nussbaum’s work (I’m a fan) and serendipitously I found this post on “appreciative thinking” via Tyler Cowen . It’s a kind of inverted critical thinking, from Seth Roberts: When it comes to scientific papers, to teach appreciative thinking means to…
Dr. J responds on moral realism. It appears that our dispute focuses on the role that ‘the world’ plays in verifying our moral propositions. Dr. J is right to note that I’ve made an important and potentially dispositive claim in asserting that agent-neutrality requires that one’s account be “either verified by the world or not.” However, I…
(What follows are some reflections on two related problems. One is Robin Hanson’s discussion of prediction markets to counteract status quo bias , and the other is my friend Leigh Johnson’s meditation on strong moral relativism . Because of length, I have cut my extended reflections on Dr. J’s “strong relativism” for a post tomorrow.)…
The other night I was discussing Lacan with a friend who practices psychotherapy, and he suggested that Lacan’s work ‘only makes sense in the clinic.’ We agreed that when philosophers and critical theorists try to invoke Lacan, they inevitably bungle the job. Today, I discovered Andrew Robinson’s nice little takedown of Zizek, Laclau, and Mouffe’s…
Crooked Timber challenges us to discover the best first paragraphs of academic texts . They provide this example: “Affluence breeds impatience and impatience undermines well-being. This is the core of my argument. For detail and evidence, go directly to the chapters; for implications, to the conclusion, which also has chapter summaries.” (Avner Offer, The Challenge…
Sam Harris has started another great debate over religion, this time with conservative author Andrew Sullivan. They’ve been fairly civil with each other, and what little upset there has been has arisen from the justifiable claims they both make about the intellectual honesty of theism. In other debates, Harris has been too civil with his…
Saw the movie version of Proof the other night. It’s a nicely written mystery, masquerading as a family drama. I especially liked these lines: “If I go back to the beginning. I could start it over again. Here. I could go line by line. Try and find a shorter way. I could try to make…
The argument for a separate status for the mental extends ultimately to the claim that there is something it is like to hope, believe, or experience redly, and that this likeness is irreducible to any other form of explanation that depends only on third-person arguments. In one form, this can be seen in Frank Jackson’s…