Ethical Intuitions and the Data/Phenomena Distinction

I learned from Jennifer Zamzow and Shaun Nichols' enlightening "Variations in Ethical Intuitions" that our ethical intuitions vary, depending on various (apparently) non-moral factors, such as order effects, framing effects, and gender (of the responder, or of the characters described in the hypothetical scenario). (Ethical intuitions are, roughly, our knee-jerk reactions to the moral status of specific, concrete scenarios; intuitions do not depend on any "effortful, conscious deliberation.")

 One account of how ethical theorizing proceeds is the following analogy with scientific theorizing:
experimental results : scientific theories :: ethical intuitions : ethical theories
 (Zamzow & Nichols, p. 370).  If this is right, then the above types of variation in intuition seem seriously problematic: it would be like two people looking at the same thermometer, and the woman says "The mercury is at 57 degrees" and the man says "The mercury is at 48 degrees."  Or imagine a thermometer whose current reading depends on what its reading was 5 minutes ago.  In both these cases, we would say that we could not use such 'experimental results' as evidence to decide between competing scientific theories.

But the philosopher of science in me thought: maybe 'experimental results' is too general/ vague.  Bogen and Woodward's data-phenomena distinction might be useful here.  Their idea is roughly as follows: data are the observations scientists record, while phenomena are patterns in the world that scientists infer based on data.  Data can be shot through with experimental noise, and/or have artifacts of the experimental apparatus; the phenomena factor out these biases and noise in the data set.  And, importantly, the phenomena are what theories predict and explain -- not particular data points.

So I am wondering whether we should think about specific ethical intuitions as data.  And then these variations that Zamzow and Nichols list could be thought of as noise and/or bias.  On this view, what an ethical theory like utilitarianism needs to predict/ explain is not particular concrete intuitions, but rather something slightly more general or abstract.  I'm not exactly sure what that 'something' would be -- the moral pattern/feature, whatever it is, that underlies or generates a set of (reliable) intuitions.

I don't know the details and/or further developments of the data/phenomena discussion, and I am not completely up-to-date with debates about variations in ethical intuitions either.  But I thought I would float this idea (namely, ethical intuitions as data B&W's sense) to see if anyone has any reactions to it... or at least let me know whether someone has already pursued this line of thought.

Watch out, Dan Brown

A while ago, I wrote a book.  It has finally appeared; you can pick it up here or here.

A couple of things on the Amazon page for the book surprised me.  First, if you buy it from them and don't like it, you can trade it in for an Amazon gift card worth a whopping $0.75.  So really you can't lose.

Also, there are already 7 used copies you can buy... though the book only officially came out last week. (Strangely, one of the copies is over twice the price for a new copy.)  I don't understand the world of booksellers.

What is a 'generalist' journal?

There has been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere recently about some of sociologist Kieran Healy's really interesting preliminary findings about citations in the 'Top 4' philosophy journals (Philosophical Review, Journal of Philosophy, Mind, and Nous).  The question he is trying to answer is: 'What conversations are leading philosophers having?'  The original post is here, and the follow-up (which I want to talk about) is here.  NewAPPS and Feminist Philosophers have both opened up interesting discussions of the data and what they mean -- and what we could/should do in light of them.  Go check them out, if you are at all interested: they're worth your time (first of each here and here).

I wanted to add an ego-centric point to the discussion.   These Top 4 journals are also called 'generalist' journals.  I am not sure exactly what philosophers who use the word 'generalist' to describe journals usually mean, but I (perhaps incorrectly) assumed that they meant that it's a journal where a variety of types and/or sub-fields of philosophy are well-represented.  The point I wanted to make is that Healy's results suggest that the Big 4 are NOT generalist journals in this sense, insofar as philosophy of science is pretty seriously under-represented.  (I would guess that this is true for certain other sub-fields as well, but I don't know enough about those other fields to be confident in my assessment.)

Now, I am NOT saying that these journals never publish philosophy of science.  There is no question that they do; some really great philosophy of science has appeared in these journals in the last two decades.  But there are two pieces of evidence that suggest that these four journals are not a place where conversations in philosophy of science are happening.

1. In the second post, Healy has a list of the 526 most-cited items in the Top 4 from the last two decades.  A grand total of 9 of them (by my count) are solidly, squarely in the philosophy of empirical science.  Now, if we open up the criteria a bit, and count e.g. philosophy of mathematics, we can add 3 more.  That's 1.7% and 2.3% of the total highly-cited items.  I'm guessing that more that 1.7% of professional philosophers are philosophers of science.  (Mere counting of course will be misleading, because many people will describe themselves as philosophers of science AND something else; but even after adjusting for that, 1.7% is going to be too low, I think.)

2. In the first post, Healy presents a chart with a bunch of connected nodes.  Recall that the basic motivating question was: what are the main conversations?  Each node represents an item cited in an article in one of the Top 4 journals.  A line is drawn between any two items that are cited together in any one (third) article in the Top 4.  Healy's rationale: "the more often any two papers are cited together, the more likely they are to be part of some research question or ongoing problem or conversation topic within the discipline." Healy then cleaned up the picture by 'erasing' any lines that connected items that had not both been cited at least 10 times.  In the resulting chart, there are 'clusters': these represent the conversations Healy was interested in finding.  Interestingly (and here's my point), there are no 'pure' philosophy of science clusters.  There IS a cluster where the metaphysics of causation borders philosophy of science (in the chart: it's green, about halfway down, on the left-hand side).  But other than that, there aren't really any 'big conversations' in philosophy of science happening in the Top 4 journals.

Bringing this together: looking at Healy's chart, I thought: maybe the so-called 'generalist' journals aren't really generalist in a strong sense.  Rather, they are the most prestigious journals for people working in metaphysics, epistemology, language, and mind (LEMM).  To put the point in an analogy: the Top 4 play the same role for LEMM philosophers that the journals Philosophy of Science and the British Journal for Philosophy of Science play for philosophers of science.  There is (in my limited impression) no absolutely top-prestige journal for the four LEMM components, though there are very, very good journals that specialize in one or the other of them (e.g. Episteme, Mind & Language).

If something like this is correct, the Top 4 journals are not generalist in the sense of being a forum for all the best conversations in professional philosophy as a whole.  But perhaps they could still be called 'generalist' insofar as specific LEMM topics are of general interest to all philosophers, even those not publishing on LEMM topics.

One qualification, however: the Top 4 journals DO occasionally publish pure philosophy of science pieces.  Philosophy of Science never publishes an article on e.g. Rawlsian justice.  So that is a clear and unequivocal disanalogy between the two cases.

Greg Restall's bite-sized advanced logic lectures

34 mini-lectures from Greg Restall: Advanced Logic (Kurt Gödel's Greatest Hits)

I have not looked at all of these, but the ones I've watched so far have been (of course) excellent.

numerals, and language with an infinite lexicon

Here is an idea that I've seen in several places: "it is plain that if a language is to be learnable, the number of basic significant elements (words) has to be finite" (Tim Crane, The Mechanical Mind, 2nd ed. p.140).  (Is the locus classicus for this Davidson's "Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages?")

But how does this square with numerals (words for numbers)?  There are an infinite number of numerals.  And arithmetical language is learnable. 

So how could/should Crane, Davidson, et al. deal with this apparent counterexample?  I'm not sure... perhaps (despite appearences) numerals are  not themselves genuine words; rather only the digits are genuine words, and the higher numerals are complex supra-word symbols. 

Neurath and Russell

So I'm reading Otto Neurath's "Universal Jargon and Terminology" (you know, like you do), and I see this on the first page:

"Bertrand Russell presented his classic thesaurus of symbolic tools;"

What text do you think Neurath has in mind?  (I didn't see any helpful/ illuminating context around this bit.)

If Neurath means the Principia, I think that would be hilarious; the last word I would use to describe that book is 'thesaurus'...

Bivalence: an urban myth?

Looking around on snopes.com for new examples beyond the same old Gödel-Schmidt and Jonah cases, I found this:

true contradictions and daylight savings time

Are there true contradictions?    Via reddit, I saw the following, which seems like it might be a list of decent candidates for true contradictions -- and these candidates don't seem at first glance to fall into any of the existing categories of supposed true contradiction. (A relatively accessible list of proposed candidates can be found here.)

After thinking about it a little, I think these are probably not good candidates for true contradictions: rather, it looks like 'Sunday November 3rd, 2012 at 1:30AM' is ambiguous.  And it is not a true contradiction when 'Maria was a philosophy major' is true and 'Maria was not a philosophy major' is also true, if there are two different people named 'Maria' (and the first majored in philosophy but the second didn't).

Or is there something special about time, that makes these daylight savings cases different from garden-variety ambiguity cases (like 'Maria')?  Am I missing something?


 (For any readers wondering 'Why does it matter whether there are true contradictions?': It is a theorem of classical logic that everything follows from a contradiction.  Many people have found this counterintuitive and want to reject it.  So many of these people look for true contradictions: if there are true contradictions, then there will be arguments that have contradictory premises, which are all true, but nonetheless a false conclusion.)

reporting from the Carnap archive

Did you know that Rudolf (née Rudi) Carnap was a teenage playwright?

Need For Cognition and the Bias Blind Spot

This post isn't really about philosophy, but philosophers I know keep linking to this article on facebook.  That's my excuse for talking about a psychology paper.

Jonah Lehrer posted, on the New Yorker website, this short piece entitled "Why Smart People are Stupid," with the more descriptive alternate title "Research Shows that the Smarter People Are, the More Susceptible They Are to Cognitive Bias."  It's (supposed to be) a report of a recent article called "Cognitive Sophistication Does not Attenuate the Bias Blind Spot" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, by Richard West, Russell Meserve, and Keith Stanovich.  The bias blind spot, the authors of the latter paper tell us, is "reporting that thinking biases [e.g. the base-rate fallacy, the Alice the bank-teller conjunctive fallacy] are more prevalent in others than in themselves."  What follows is about the original article, not the Lehrer post.
 (The substantial gap between the Lehrer post and the actual article, which you could already figure out from the differing titles, is covered well here.) 

The authors of the study used multiple instruments to judge cognitive sophistication, which includes not only cognitive ability (the authors use SAT scores to measure cognitive ability), but also 'thinking dispositions,' measured in part by a Need for Cognition test.  (All the following quotations come from this site on the Need for Cognition Scale.)  This test "quantitatively measures 'the tendency for an individual to engage in and enjoy thinking" (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982, p. 116)."  I had heard of the Need for Cognition Scale before, but had never looked at the actual 18-question survey instrument (again, available here).  Some of the questions are the sorts of questions I expected, given the name 'Need for Cognition':

"5.  I try to anticipate and avoid situations where there is likely a chance I will have to think in depth about something.
6.  I find satisfaction in deliberating hard and for long hours."

However, some of the questions seemed instead to measure something slightly different: the respondent's belief or faith in her rational faculties:

"2.  I like to have the responsibility of handling a situation that requires a lot of thinking.

10.  The idea of relying on thought to make my way to the top appeals to me.

15. I would prefer a task that is intellectual, difficult, and important to one that is somewhat important but does not require much thought."

Respondents who say that they 'agree very strongly' with 2, 10, and 15 seem like they would be much more likely to think of themselves as overcoming irrational biases.  Speaking purely from my own case, I certainly agree very strongly with item #6 ('I find satisfaction in deliberating hard and for long hours').  However, I also believe humans (myself included) can exhibit irrational biases in (what what feels like) rational deliberations, so I would probably disagree or at least say I 'neither agree nor disagree' with 2 and 15.  If there is an important task that I can get the right answer to that does not require much thought, then I would prefer that to a task where there a lot of rational speculation is required.  To put the point more pithily: if a decision really is important, I'd rather be right than think -- since I think biases can creep into my thinking process. 

My point is just that items 2, 10, and 15 seem to already be asking 'How much faith do you have that your rational faculties aren't clouded by bias?', which is pretty close to asking about the blind spot bias.  Or at least, people who very strongly agree with 2, 10, and 15 would be people who think they can overcome bias when they are responsible for making important decisions.  And that seems to be halfway to the bias blind spot (the belief that biases are more prevalent in others than ourselves) -- and it's the more substantive half, since just about everyone agrees that other people are suffer from biases. 

And this fits the data: the correlation between 'Composite Bias Blind Spot' (the authors asked subjects about 7 different specific biases, not just 'Do you think you are less biased than other people?') and Need For Cognition score is .260, p<.001 (Table 2).  (And interestingly, this correlation was by far the largest of the 4 four components of 'cognitive sophistication.')

So the interesting question for me would be: suppose we took each subject's Need For Cognition answers, dropped the answers to 2, 10, and 15 (or maybe just 2 and 15), and re-calculate each subject's NFC score.  If I am right, the size of the correlation would drop significantly.