women's intuition

According to a recent study, there may really be such a thing as women's intuition, but it isn't what we might have thought. Instead, it could help explain why there are so few women in academic philosophy.

The study (via Leiter) is by Wesley Buckwalter (CUNY) and Stephen Stich (Rutgers).

The paper presents a series of gender-differentiated intuitions from common philosophical thought experiments. Not every thought experiment produces a statistically significant gender difference, but in those that do, the effect is marked.

The authors argue for the strong conclusion that this gender difference in intuitions about thought experiments is implicated in the gender difference in academic philosophy. (They are clear that this is not the only cause.)

Consider the predicament of a young woman in a philosophy class, who (like 71% - 75% of women in the Starmans & Friedman study) does not find it obvious that the characters in Gettier vignettes do not have knowledge of the relevant proposition. Rather, her intuitions tell her that the Gettier characters do have knowledge, though her instructor, whether male or female, as well as a high percentage of her male classmates, clearly think she is mistaken. Different women will, of course, react to a situation like this in different ways. But it is plausible to suppose that some women facing this predicament will be puzzled or confused or uncomfortable or angry or just plain bored. Some women may become convinced that they aren’t any good at philosophy, since they do not have the intuitions that their professors and their male classmates insist are correct. If the experience engenders one or more of these alienating effects, a female student may be less likely to take another philosophy course than a male classmate who (like 59% - 64% of the men in the Starmans & Friedman study) has the “standard” intuitions that their instructor shares. That male student, unlike the majority of his female classmates, can actively participate in, and perhaps enjoy, the project of hunting for a theory that captures “our” intuitions.

It is enough to convince me that I should be careful in presenting thought experiments as evidence, since my intuitions won't predict those of other people. (It's likely that gender isn't the only bias in the "received" interpretation of thought experiments. See this post.)

what is creativity?

Steven Johnson argues that good ideas come from coffee shops. The basic idea seems to be that the kind of free-flowing discussion that happens in coffee shops is particularly conducive to the articulation of new ideas. I think that's right. More ideas come to fruition when people interact casually than when people sit alone in armchairs, and more (good) ideas come to fruition under the influence of caffeine than alcohol. But I suspect coffee shops are conducive to particular kinds of creativity -- especially combinatorial creativity or negation (pubs might be even more conducive to negation. Alcohol seems to fuel contrarians).

So what are some other forms of creativity?

Johnson describes one more, the  "long hunch," where the glimmerings of an idea are not yet fully articulated. Often, he says, what's needed is to connect up a number of half-ideas together into one good idea. So the "long hunch" is just a slow drip form of coffee shop creativity. Not really a new kind at all. But Johnson's explanation of the "long hunch" isn't satisfying to me. I think something else is going on.

John Wilkins, who has clearly thought more about this than I have, suggests a candidate, what he calls deep novelty. First, some preliminaries:

we have a frame of prior contrasts in which we typically (and traditionally, since these are inherited from teachers and other cultural influences) set up our problems and thoughts.

Wilkins pictures these contrasts as dimensions in a space of possibilities, explaining that

If you think that God may or may not exist, for example, then believing God does exist is to assert a coordinate in a binary space. If you think God’s existence is a matter of confidence or likelihood, then you settle on (if you do) a coordinate on a continuum.

On this view, coffee shop creativity involves mixing up or applying contrasts in new ways. But there are clear limits to this kind of creativity. "Our semantic world is the sum of all the contrastive axes of that space," which means that it simply isn't possible to express any idea that doesn't fall into the existing contrastive spaces.

To be clear, "our beliefs at any time are the coordinates we assert," and the possible beliefs we have the tools to understand are limited to the sum of the contrastive axes. Anything inside this space will be the combination, permutation, or negation of something pre-existing.

But there's another kind of creativity: "something is deeply novel if an entirely new contrast is added to the space."

I think this is a much better way to understand what's going on with a "slow hunch." To use Johnson's example, Darwin may have had all of the pieces to evolution, but he wasn't able to articulate how they fit together because he didn't yet have the relevant contrast. Once he had the contrastive structure in place, he could fit all the pieces together.

There's one emendation I'd make to Wilkins' account: it's also possible to stretch, shrink, or otherwise reshape existing contrasts. A mundane example of this happened when I moved from the United States to Canada and saw the political spectrum to the left suddenly unfurl and go for miles and miles kilometres and kilometres.

The remaining question (perhaps for cognitive scientists?) is how we come to have new contrasts.

In my dissertation (which is mostly about other things), I suggest that novel contrasts sometimes come about in the development of new scientific instruments. It's a complicated story, but the basic idea is that instrument design puts our conceptual understanding of the functioning of the instrument into conversation with its actual material capacities. We reshape both our ideas and the material instrument with the intention of producing an acceptable degree of agreement between concept and material. We're then able to use the instrument to provide evidence for scientific explanations. And scientific explanations consist in the selection of one state of affairs from a specified set of possible states of affairs (a contrast class).

One day soon, I hope to have the semantic space to explain that more clearly.

Visual Representation in Science workshop

Aaron of  False Vacuum is organizing a workshop on Visual Representation to be held at IHPST in December. Here's the poster:

writing tips

In keeping with today's "back to school" theme, Michael C. Munger has a great piece on writing in grad school.

Many of the graduate students who were stars in the classroom during the first two years—the people everyone admired and looked up to—suddenly aren't so stellar anymore. And a few of the marginal students—the ones who didn't care that much about pleasing the professors by reading every page of every assignment—are suddenly sending their own papers off to journals, getting published, and transforming themselves into professional scholars.

The difference is not complicated. It's writing.

Munger continues with 10 great writing tips (most of the tips are obvious, but obviously still needed, since most of us don't follow them!)

My favourite:

4. Give yourself time. Many smart people tell themselves pathetic lies like, "I do my best work at the last minute." Look: It's not true. No one works better under pressure. Sure, you are a smart person. But if you are writing about a profound problem, why would you think that you can make an important contribution off the top of your head in the middle of the night just before the conference?

Writers sit at their desks for hours, wrestling with ideas. They ask questions, talk with other smart people over drinks or dinner, go on long walks. And then write a whole bunch more. Don't worry that what you write is not very good and isn't immediately usable. You get ideas when you write; you don't just write down ideas.

The articles and books that will be read decades from now were written by men and women sitting at a desk and forcing themselves to translate profound ideas into words and then to let those words lead them to even more ideas. Writing can be magic, if you give yourself time, because you can produce in the mind of some other person, distant from you in space or even time, an image of the ideas that exist in only your mind at this one instant.

(h/t GL)

academic reading how-to

For my friends who are starting grad school, preparing for quals, or just starting coursework again... the reading probably already looks pretty daunting. And it is. But here are a few tips on getting by.

First, Chad  explains how to read scientific papers without reading every word. (Hint: it applies to HPS papers too!)

The first and most important point is to Know What You're Looking For. Different bits of information are found in different places and in different forms, so what you're looking for will determine where you look, and how you find it.

For example, if you're just trying to get a general sense of what a given paper is about, it's often enough to read only the introduction and conclusion. If you're just after a specific numerical result, it's probably in the abstract, or toward the end of the paper.

You should also be aware that what you're looking for may not be in the paper you're reading. If you want a sense of the context of a field, you're often looking for a reference to earlier work, possibly a review article. If you want the gory details of a measurement technique, you may very well be looking for some reference to an earlier or longer paper by the same group (a sentence of the form "using the method of [citation of earlier paper]"), or, even more annoyingly, some online supplement to the article you have.

(Of course, read the whole thing.)

Next, read Timothy Burke's How to Read in College.

Finally, check out John Bean's Helping Students Read Difficult Texts.

UPDATE

See also Jon's teaching tip on teaching critical reading in history.

Blogs of note

Blog fever has hit Toronto's HPS community, with the recent addition of The Bubble Chamber, there are at least half a dozen blogs written by my colleagues at IHPST.

Here are the Toronto blogs, in no particular order (I hope I haven't forgotten anyone):

• Mike Thicke, Curtis Forbes, Michelle Hoffman, Jonathan Turner, Andrew Munro, Ellie Louson, Michael Cournoyea, and Rebecca Moore are all contributors to The Bubble Chamber (as time goes on, the list will grow).
• Jaipreet Virdi discusses history of medicine, deafness, and quackery at From the Hands of Quacks.
• Ellie Louson muses about grad school at Productive (adj).
• Aaron Sidney Wright is a historian of physics who has been saying interesting things about scientific practice at his blog, False Vacuum.
• Jonathan Turner writes about grad school, teaching, and Cold War defence research in Canada over at Boffins and Cold Warriors.
• Sarah Kriger's Ramblings are more focused on writing, plays, and television than on her research, but it's still great stuff.
• Allan Olley occasionally discusses his work on the history of computing on 4ll4n0.

While I'm at it, here are a few of my favourite non-Toronto HPS blogs:

• Evolving Thoughts (John Wilkins)
• Ether Wave Propaganda (Will Thomas)
• Whewell's Ghost (group blog)
• Honest Toil (Chris Pincock)
• It's Only A Theory (group blog)

That makes for a lot of reading!

Links for 9 September

Your philosophic beliefs matter for your real world performance. (Via.)
Soon, helium will cost 10,000 times what it does today.
Small schools stand out because they are more variable. Lesson: look for the outliers at both ends.
Casino "carpets are deliberately designed to obscure and camouflage gambling chips that have fallen onto the floor."
Here's what white people really like -- according to their own OKcupid profiles. (h/t CH)
Worried about all those snakes you have on your plane? Try tylenol addled mice.
Reverse psychology.
A review of Merchants of Doubt. See also this.


(Apologies for seeming like a "best of Marginal Revolution" roundup this week.)

Doing away with formal peer review

The New York Times considers some efforts to do away with peer review and marshall the connectedness of the web.

The most pressing intellectual issue in the next decade is this tension between the insular, specialized world of expert scholarship and the open and free-wheeling exchange of information on the Web. “And academia ... is caught in the middle.”

I think making work publicly available online is Very Good (I do some of that myself). But doing away with peer review is a Bad Idea.

Peer review is a barrier to entry -- and that's a good thing. It's a sort of curated, walled garden of approved content. When I am working firmly within my area of expertise, I am comfortable evaluating the quality and representativeness of the papers I read. But sometimes -- more often than I would like -- I find myself well outside my area of expertise, and without a good sense of the lay of the land. Essay reviews and general resources like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy are helpful, but peer reviewed journals are key. Someone with expertise has okayed that content. Peer review is a proxy for knowing I'm not wasting my time.

If peer review is to be done away with, something else must replace it. If curation can be crowdsourced on the internet, I'm for it -- I'm certainly not fond of waiting for referee reports. But moderated internet comments like these ones simply won't do.

Launch of Spontaneous Generations 4:1

I am extremely proud to announce the publication of the fourth instalment of Spontaneous Generation: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science. Here's the table of contents:

Vol 4, No 1 (2010): Scientific Instruments: Knowledge, Practice, and Culture

Table of Contents

Focused Discussion

Scientific Instruments: Knowledge, Practice, and Culture [Editor’s Introduction]	PDF
Isaac Record	1-7

The Challenge of Authenticating Scientific Objects in Museum Collections: Exposing the Forgery of a Moroccan Astrolabe Allegedly Dated 1845 CE	PDF
Ingrid Hehmeyer	8-20

People as Scientific Instruments	PDF
Maarten Derksen	21-29

Equipment for an Experiment	PDF
Rom Harré	30-38

An Instrument for What? Digital Computers, Simulation and Scientific Practice	PDF
Wendy S. Parker	39-44

Great Pyramid Metrology and the Material Politics of Basalt	PDF
Michael J. Barany	45-60

Let Freeness Ring: The Canadian Standard Freeness Tester as Hegemonic Engine	PDF
James Hull	61-70

The Machine Speaks Falsely	PDF
Allan Franklin	71-84

Reading Measuring Instruments	PDF
Mario Bunge	85-93

Engineering Realities	PDF
Davis Baird	94-110

Conceptual Sea Changes	PDF
Paul Humphreys	111-115

Extended Thing Knowledge	PDF
Mathieu Charbonneau	116-128

Otto in the Chinese Room	PDF
Philip Murray McCullough	129-137

Humans not Instruments	PDF
Harry Collins	138-147

Apparatus and Experimentation Revisited	PDF
Trevor H. Levere	148-154

Material Culture and the Dobsonian Telescope	PDF
Jessica Ellen Sewell, Andrew Johnston	155-162

Taming the “Publication Machine”: Generating Unity, Engaging the Trading Zones	PDF
François Thoreau, Maria Neicu	163-172

Concepts as Tools in the Experimental Generation of Knowledge in Cognitive Neuropsychology	PDF
Uljana Feest	173-190

Articles

Domesticating the Planets: Instruments and Practices in the Development of Planetary Geology	PDF
Matthew Benjamin Shindell	191-230

“Old” Technology in New Hands: Instruments as Mediators of Interdisciplinary Learning in Microfluidics	PDF
Dorothy Sutherland Olsen	231-254

Opinions

Out the Door: A Short History of the University of Toronto Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments	PDF
Erich Weidenhammer, Michael Da Silva	255-261

Reviews

Ian Hesketh. Of Apes and Ancestors: Evolution, Christianity, and the Oxford Debate	PDF
Sebastian Assenza	262-265

Marc Lange. Laws and Lawmakers: Science, Metaphysics, and the Laws of Nature	PDF
Christopher Belanger	266-269

William Sims Bainbridge. The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World	PDF
Bruce J. Petrie	270-272

Steven Shapin. The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation	PDF
Michael Cournoyea	273-275

Learning From Artifacts: A Review of the “Reading Artifacts: Summer Institute in the Material Culture of Science,” Presented by The Canada Science and Technology Museum and Situating Science Cluster	PDF
Jaipreet Virdi	276-279

Aaron A. Cohen-Gadol and Dennis D. Spencer. The Legacy of Harvey Cushing: Profiles of Patient Care	PDF
Delia Gavrus	280-282

Adrian Parr. Hijacking Sustainability	PDF
R. Moore	283-285

Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rinker, eds. Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis	PDF
Julia Agapitos	286-288

David Pantalony. Altered Sensations: Rudolph Koenig’s Acoustical Workshop in Nineteenth-Century Paris	PDF
Sarah-Jane Patterson	289-291

Michael Strevens. Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation	PDF
Anthony Kulic	292-299

ISSN: 1913-0465

Seeing reasons

Seeing reasons (Amy Kind on Jennifer Church): 

I can see the broken window, but can I also see why the window is broken?  In this ambitious and interesting paper, Church argues for an affirmative answer to this question.  Just as we can have perceptual knowledge of a state of affairs, so too can we have perceptual knowledge of the reason for that state of affairs.

Here is a key move:

Our experience of something as objective depends on our imagining alternative perspectives of it. Via the imagination, we can occupy perspectives and modalities different from the ones we are presently occupying, and it is these imaginings that serve to ground experiential objectivity.

The promise is to show that we can directly perceive reasons. Since the account entails that we automatically perceive alternatives, counterfactual accounts suddenly make all sorts of sense.

The challenge is to flesh out the mechanism in sufficient detail. (e.g., where do the alternatives come from? Plato's world of forms? Previous experience?)

In my view, explanation consists in the selection of one state of affairs from a specified set of possible states of affairs by giving evidence that meets specified acceptance standards. The key to understanding explanation, then, is in understanding how possibility spaces and acceptance standards are specified -- and these require a more detailed answer than Church seems to provide.

Whoa.

On Neurath (from Jordi Cat).

Who renders judgment?

Brian Leiter  doesn't like the "epistemic egalitarianism" of Wikipedia. Here he quotes Larry Sanger:

There was this attitude that experts should be disqualified [from participating] by the very fact that they had published on the subject—that because they had published, they were therefore biased.

The worry about epistemic egalitarianism is that true expertise is being missed or even suppressed. Leiter points to cases in which Wikipedians have overruled experts, and it is easy to equate this kind of egalitarianism with "teach the controversy," science-bashing movements, and other perversions.

Sanger gives a bit of context for where this attitude comes from:

There's a whole worldview that's shared by many programmers—although not all of them, of course—and by many young intellectuals that I characterize as "epistemic egalitarianism." They're greatly offended by the idea that anyone might be regarded as more reliable on a given topic than everyone else. They feel that for everything to be as fair as possible and equal as possible, the only thing that ought to matter is the content [of a claim] itself, not its source.

Having been a programmer, I can attest to the prevalence of this attitude, and add that it is usually coupled with a naive sense of entitlement to render judgment -- and that both the attitude and the habit are hard to overcome. A contractarian might view the recognition of expertise as a voluntary ceding of autonomy to an authority. Programmers usually have radical views about intellectual property, so it should be no surprise that they have radical views about authority generally. (I suppose that, like programmers, philosophers tend toward epistemic egalitarianism (modulo a general discomfort with Heidegger).)

But nowhere in either the attitude of epistemic egalitarianism or the habit of rendering judgment is any support for the kind of anti-expertise Leiter is worried about. We can dismiss arguments that rely on claims to authority without dismissing arguments made by authorities.

Eric Schleisser defends epistemic egalitarianism (toward science-as-expert) for its public policy implications:

1. Scientific authority can get willfully abused (Nazi medicine, eugenics, etc). But let's leave this aside.
2. A. Scientific expertise is fairly narrow and it can easily be misapplied in public policy domains. B. Few scientific experts are trained in neighboring fields as to judge the interactions among their expertise and other experts.
3. scientific expertise gets selected for by interested parties, including (alas) self-selection.
4. scientific experts are normal rent-seeking agents. 
5. When scientific experts get it wrong in matters of policy they do not tend to run the costs of their errors.

Note that none of these (2-4) points mean we should not seek expert advice or base policy on scientific knowledge. (The fifth one may incline us to be very cautious about scientific experts.) But points 2-4 do encourage transparency of the sort that EE insist on in order to let (skeptical) non-experts weigh in on and scrutinize expert authority in decision-making processes.

Scientists aren't (and shouldn't be) disinterested in the social or political implications of their studies. My own interests -- in the way things work, in money, in electronics -- led me to become an engineer. Changing interests -- in how we come to know things, in dialog, in scientific practice -- led me to switch tracks and become a philosopher. To pretend otherwise would be foolish. But the fact that I have held these and other interests does nothing to diminish (or inflate) whatever small contribution I have made (or will make) to those respective fields.

A key challenge for social epistemology (of science) is in determining what sort of group (of scientists) is entitled to make knowledge claims. Some typical criteria are publication, peer-review, consensus, and diversity. The first three recognize some basic institutions of science, while "diversity" defends against accusations of bias: the more diverse the group of individuals who assent to some claim, the more likely it will be that any possible objection will have been considered. I gather that this is supposed to follow from the diversity of interests that connect to their decision to join the group in question.

This diversity effect has always left me a bit uneasy. While I concede that a person's stance likely blinds them to alternatives, it need not do so. Biases can be overcome. One way to help overcome a particular bias in a group is to add people without said bias to the group. Another way is simply to point out the bias. That won't always work, but I wouldn't want to rule out the possibility.

Childrearing

Oh, McSweeney's! (via Uncertain Principles, I think)

When little Aiden toddled up our daughter Johanna and asked to play with her Elmo ball, he was, admittedly, very sweet and polite. I think his exact words were, "Have a ball, peas [sic]?" 

And I'm sure you were very proud of him for using his manners. 

To be sure, I was equally proud when Johanna yelled, "No! Looter!" right in his looter face, and then only marginally less proud when she sort of shoved him. 

The thing is, in this family we take the philosophies of Ayn Rand seriously.

It is probably best that philosophers are so often ignored by society at large.

Should Journals Get Rid of "Revise and Resubmit"?

Leiter posts a reader question: Should Journals Get Rid of "Revise and Resubmit"?

"A philosopher writes: I think that journals should no longer give revise-and-resubmits. All decisions should be either accept or reject. A journal can certainly send an acceptance that reads 'we are pleased to accept your paper, and ask that you..."

Some reactions, from the obscure to the general:

1. Revise & Resubmit is sometimes the grade editors give when they aren't happy with their referees. Despite appearances to the contrary, editors generally want to get a decision to authors in a timely manner. But sometimes, referees do not cooperate. Useless or capricious referees are a fact of life, but editors (who are known to referees) cannot always overrule their recommendation. An R&R can be a way out for editor and author, especially if the editor directs the author to make reasonable changes (but to ignore requests to write a different paper).
2. There are occasions where an author (typically but not always new, or perhaps from an allied field) has jumped the gun and needs to spend more time with the paper before it can be published. Perhaps she has missed crucial literature or needs to add or remove sections before the paper is in the right form. In such cases, R&R is a signal that the journal wants the paper, and that the work IS worth undertaking.
1. When referee reports make it clear that a paper is of high quality but not right for the journal, it should be rejected, with an explanation from the editor and (if possible) a pointer to the right journal. Referees and editors should never ask authors to write a different paper and submit that instead.
3. An editor is typically looking for papers that are well-reasoned, interesting, original, and are responsive to existing literature. At top journals, they are also looking for papers that will stand the test of time. Papers can be rejected for offences to any or all of these sensibilities, and if possible, editors should say which.
1. "Accept" (typically with minor revisions) means the paper is fundamentally sound, but would be improved with slight changes.
2. "Reject" means the paper is fundamentally unsound, uninteresting, unoriginal, or unresponsive to the literature.
3. "Revise and Resubmit" should be reserved for those papers whose research is there, but which have serious flaws. Usually, the editor has major concerns about the structure of the paper or its responsiveness to literature. (Papers that are unoriginal or uninteresting should be rejected so that the author can try elsewhere. These problems will not be solved with revisions.)

dancing in context

A few days ago, I noted that simply recognizing context as a factor in the dance of science wasn't very satisfying, because that "gives no flavour for how context interacts with the cycle elements" (observation, experiment, theorizing, and classification).

John Wilkins was nice enough to respond, first by pointing out that he's in the middle of a series (oops!) and second, that

... It is an empirical matter in each case what that context is. There are no generalisations that I think are unexceptional about this. Sometimes a science will run more or less independently of its culture, and at other times a science will be beholden to its cultural context independently of the internal issues of the science. [...] To think there is a general, universal and consistent cultural context for science is, I believe, a holdover of Comtean positivist thinking. You want to know what the relevant context was for the Hubble telescope, or for the discovery of aspirin? Go look. My schematic here merely indicates the general relations of external and internal movements in the science.

Yup. Good stuff, and I look forward to reading what comes next in the series.

Although context is frustratingly idiosyncratic, I think there are some areas at the fringes where it is possible to make definite claims about its relationship to scientific practice. But first, I want to say why I think context is such a hard problem.

It isn't clear what context is. I mean, it's a distinction between something and its surroundings, but what does that mean? What kind of distinction does "context" rely on? It isn't strictly foreground/background (that seems to imply salient/not-salient, and that's clearly not right). It's more like inside/outside. That seems to depend on solving the "demarcation problem:" what is science, and what isn't? Some activities count as scientific, others do not (I suppose measuring counts, but napping does not). Some interests are scientific, others are not (perhaps understanding counts but getting tenure does not). Things get fuzzy fast, and I'm not entirely certain a sharp line is desirable.

Still, even without a satisfactory notion of what context is, we can pick out cases of context affecting science. For example, legal restrictions make certain experiments impossible.*

I expect I'll have more to say about context at a later date, but that's enough noodling for today.

* For a sense of "possible" that is sensitive to legal matters. Typically, we would say illegal activities are "impermissible," not impossible, but I prefer to discuss "regulative possibility." This allows for an analysis that makes use of overlapping realms of possibility -- physical, technological, economic, ethical, and regulative to name a few.