Neurath's Boat

Meta-reasons and subjectivism

J. L. Mackie's classic work on ethics begins by saying "there are no objective values... The statement of this thesis is likely to provoke one of three very different reactions. Some will think it not merely false but pernicious; they will see it as a threat to morality and to everything else that is worthwhile, and they will find the presenting of such a thesis in what purports to be a book on ethics paradoxical or even outrageous. Others will regard it as a trivial truth, almost too obvious to be worth mentioning, and certainly too plain to be worth much argument. Others again will say that it is meaningless or empty, that no real issue is raised by the question whether values are or are not part of the fabric of the world."

I am in Mackie's third class; I do not believe that there is a real issue here. But I do agree with Mackie when he goes on to say "precisely because there can be these three different reactions, much more needs to be said." Those who think that there are real differences do, after all, give arguments. If I am right, there must be some problem with the arguments. So I shall try to explain what's wrong with Richard's argument.

I confess that I can't see how meta-reasons are supposed to become "mere" for the subjectivist in Richard's argument. Why treat meta-reasons any differently than any other reasons? They do, after all, have consequences, just like other reasons. For example, if things are as Richard describes, and I phi, there seems to be a very good chance that I will come to regret my actions later. This is not to say that potential regret is the sole reason not to phi, only to point out that meta-reasons seem to be connected to my interests and values, just like normal reasons; defying them seems to carry the risk of my interests and values not being served, just like normal reasons.

Of course, in Richard's example, exactly how doing phi conflicts with my values is opaque to me. This is unfortunate, no doubt, but hardly unusual. Probably unconscious reasons have more influence on our behavior than conscious reasons, after all, and unconscious reasons are ipso facto also opaque to us. It is clear to me that the subjectivist is committed to thinking it would be better if one could see more clearly, and so that one should, when possible, figure out what one's unconscious motivations are, or in Richard's case figure out what it is that the meta-reasons are pointing to, but I don't see any way in which the subjectivist is committed to saying that if one can't pierce the opacity, one is required to simply ignore those reasons.

Nozick's experience machine

I have long wondered just how much Nozick's case shows, and really whether it's very convincing at all (sure, most people say they wouldn't plug in, but look at how many hours they spend playing World of Warcraft, and that's not even as good as the Experience Machine). But for some reason it had not occurred to me to ask the question Felipe De Brigard decided to ask, which he briefly describes here. It didn't occur to me even though I always mention "The Matrix" when I discuss the experience machine, and always mention how strange I find it that anyone would want to leave the matrix given the setup in the movie. The results are what I think I would have expected, though that's what we always think when we see experimental results.
Technorati Tags: ethics, hedonism, utilitarianism, Nozick, Matrix

Did Nietzsche know he was a genius?

Clearly he believed he was a genius.  And while this is perhaps slightly more controversial, it also seems to me to have been obviously true.  But of course we all know from Plato that true belief is not enough for knowledge; though it is controversial what exactly are to count as good reasons in general, it is almost universally held that one cannot know on the basis of believing for bad reasons.  So were Nietzsche's reasons good?  Was it even possible for his reasons to have been good?  What could be good reasons for that sort of thing?

It's almost a stereotype that geniuses are misunderstood and neglected in their own times.  But the stereotype seems to have only a shaky basis in reality; quite a lot of revolutionary thinkers were wildly controversial in their own time, but they were of course centers of storms of controversy because they were also targets of enormous amounts of attention, because they were widely considered extremely important.  Those who totally escaped notice among their contemporaries to be appreciated only later seem to be pretty unusual.  On the other hand,  those who escape notice by anyone ever because they're just totally mediocre are, of course, extremely common.  So Nietzsche shouldn't have concluded he was a genius just because he was misunderstood and under-appreciated, and I don't think it's reasonable to attribute that theory to him, either.

Admittedly, being widely acclaimed in your own time is certainly not proof of genius, as there have been plenty of widely acclaimed cranks, and there have certainly been some under-appreciated geniuses, so perhaps Nietzsche should not have worried too much about not having widespread acclaim; perhaps one shouldn't appeal to that either way.  But what other evidence could their be?

Those close to someone are likely to be biased in their favor.  If they care about the person for other reasons, they're unlikely to be too critical of things that are important to the person they care about; indeed, they may genuinely value those things more than they otherwise would just because they associate the things with their author.  Also, people who share similar views are more likely to become close, so anybody who becomes close to you is likely to think you're right about more things than you are, because they're likely to be wrong about some of the same things that you are (and so think you're right about those things).  So while Nietzsche had some friends who thought fairly highly of him, it is unclear how much he could get from that.

As a student, he was hailed as a brilliant classical philologist.  However, he never did very much work in the field, so it is unclear whether he had sufficient grounds for even believing he was a genius in that area; some are far better at impressing teachers than doing independent work, so it is risky to draw conclusions from the evaluations of teachers.  And in any event, Nietzsche clearly thought he was a brilliant philosopher, not just a brilliant philologist.

So what's left?  He came up with results that seemed right to him?  But who isn't able to manage that?

Recent reading

It's gotten to be Nietzsche time for my introduction to philosophy students, so I have been engaged in one of my new procrastination strategies of reading endless material tangentially related to what I'm going to be teaching in the near future.  I was interested to note that the theory that Nietzsche died from syphilis, which I'd always repeated as fairly well established fact, is now pretty much regarded as refuted.  Apparently some of his specific symptoms don't really fit, nor does the fact that the time between his mental collapse and his death was just over ten years (advanced syphilis does not kill quickly, but it is considerably quicker than that).

Instead, the dominant modern theory is some sort of slow-growing brain tumor.  Mostly this is argued on the basis of the symptoms, as well as the fact that the diagnosis at the time was fairly uncertain; obviously at the time they couldn't give him an MRI, so this theory explains well why his doctors at the time weren't quite sure what the problem was.  It may have a further advantage which I'm surprised nobody seems to have discussed.  A disposition to such tumors may be hereditary, and Nietzsche's father died from hydrocephalus, which can sometimes be caused by such tumors.

I've also been reading about the Nietzsche/Salome/Ree situation.  I've now finally read Binion's account of the matter, in Frau Lou, and I've now also read Salome's book on Nietzsche.  Binion argues that Salome's account of the events of her relationship with Nietzsche is not to be trusted, and that somewhat surprisingly Nietzsche's sister Elizabeth gives a somewhat more accurate account than Salome.  I think he makes a good case that Salome can't be trusted, but there are points of detail where I can't agree with him.

Binion utterly disbelieves Salome's claim that her interest in Nietzsche was purely intellectual.  Just from having read Salome's physical description of Nietzsche in her book about him, I have to agree with him that there had to be some physical attraction there.  But while Binion is, I think, right to attribute mixed feelings to Salome, he mostly seems to think Nietzsche's interest in Salome was intellectual.  He's not entirely consistent on that point, admittedly, but it seems to me much more plausible to think Nietzsche also had mixed feelings throughout.  Thus, to take one of the most contentious points, while Binion thinks Salome just made up the marriage proposal story, I remain quite uncertain about the matter.

I suppose this is mostly gossip, though.  On matters of actual philosophy, the most interesting thing I've read in this flurry of procrastination via Nietzsche study is a translation of two of Paul Ree's books.  It now seems to me that some of Nietzsche's seemingly less insightful criticisms of English philosophy make much more sense if they are read instead as criticisms of Ree, who was a huge anglophile.  Thus, for example, in On the Genealogy of Morality (first essay, section 2) Nietzsche criticizes the English psychologists for the theory that the usefulness of punishment has been forgotten.  A reader familiar with the English tradition may wonder when any of them said that; none of those in the dominant utilitarian tradition ever made much of a big deal of people's ability to forget usefulness, not even Hume.  But it turns out that Ree advanced precisely this theory.  Ree is, of course, mentioned in the preface to the Genealogy, and there he is also closely connected to Darwin; Nietzsche's usually questionable criticisms of Darwin are perhaps also cases where he's really going after Ree and not being clear enough about his target.

I shouldn't really be surprised

Nietzsche tells us that our central motivation is to exercise our power.  Of course, Nietzsche had a more sophisticated understanding of power than many; generosity can be a display of power.  So this interesting study is perfectly comprehensible on a Nietzschean view.

I suppose it may also give some insight into an unusual friend of mine.  It is fiercely difficult to get him to split the cost of any shared meal or outing; he will go to great lengths to pay for everyone himself.  Clearly he's ruthlessly exploiting his friends for his own pleasure.  I wish I had enough money to do that (actually, I do tend to be pretty generous when I'm feeling financially secure, but sadly that hasn't been the case for a while).

Getting at what's fundamental

I follow an interesting pro-Bayesian blog called "Overcoming Bias," which just recently had a post about reductionism. The post refers to the alleged fact that "there is only the most basic level - the elementary particles and fundamental forces." Now, I'm a great fan of reductionism (it has been some months since my dissertation was completed and accepted, but I haven't changed my mind about the central views I defend there yet). But the idea of a fundamental level is not necessary (or, I think, desirable) for a reductionist view. All of the benefits of reductionism come from accepting that there is only one world. The point of reductionism is to establish the unity of science, as some past advocates of reductionism have put it. But unity only requires that everything be linked to everything else, it doesn't require that there's some privileged foundation that all the connections flow through.

Insisting on a fundamental level saddles reductionism with unprovable metaphysics (as I ask in the comments thread, how do we know there is a basic level?) and also encourages misleading implications. The word "fundamental" sometimes means "most important," and those who make a big deal about the bottom level not infrequently seem to be misled into thinking that the bottom level (whatever they think it is) is fundamental in this sense as well, and not merely in the sense of just being the bottom.

The costs of secrecy

Lindsay Beyerstein's post about a scandal involving the treasurer of the National Republican Campaign Committee has inspired me to post on the topic of secrecy. When I teach introduction to philosophy, one of the things I have my students look at is John Stuart Mill's classic arguments for freedom of speech, from On Liberty. Mill does not discuss the case of censorship of official secrets, but it seems that aspects of his argument would apply to that case as well. His central argument, after all, is that open discussion is the only way to expose problems and find ways to fix them, and any kind of secrets will be a hindrance to the kind of open inquiry he favors. It is simply impossible to establish a means for protecting secrets which does not have the potential to be used to cover up incompetence and corruption, and the historical record suggests that this potential will always be realized. Thus, openness in government is needed not just to ensure that the government is not misusing its power in pursuit of the wrong goals, but also to ensure that, even if it has the right goals, it isn't bungling in the pursuit of those goals, perhaps by allowing those goals to be subverted by corrupt agents, or possibly simply by choosing poor means.

Now, this shows that secrecy is costly (indeed, the historical evidence suggests it is extremely costly). This does not rule out the possibility that there may be cases where it is so necessary that the costs must simply be paid; in warfare, for example, it is likely that among the many other gross violations of normal rules of behavior which are unavoidable, some official enforcement of prohibitions on discussing military plans and dispositions may be necessary. Nonetheless, extreme care must be exercised, and of course war itself is only justified in very extreme circumstances (if then; whether it's ever justified is, of course, somewhat controversial).

There are less clearly ethical cases where we can see the same calculation. A criminal organization must keep secrets; it must conceal its activity from the authorities. But this necessity comes at a high cost. It dramatically increases the risks of internal corruption, as members of the organization can use the same means which are employed to conceal activities from outsiders to conceal their own activities. It thus comes as no surprise that this situation is in fact often encountered in criminal organizations. It's not actually true that someone who would scam the government or scam a random citizen would necessarily be more likely to scam their employer; psychologists tell us that people's behavior does not display the level of consistency we imagine it to. So you're probably wrong if you think it's natural that criminals would steal from one another because criminals are just like that. On the other hand, it is true that someone who has more ways to avoid being caught is more likely to cheat; the same psychological studies support that one. People's behavior is very heavily influenced by circumstance.

Thus, if an organization is not engaged in any criminal enterprise, perhaps it should not be so eager to keep secrets; some secrets may be valuable, but they're all costly, and usually too little attention is paid to the costs. I leave the reader to judge what lesson, if any, the Republicans should draw from that.

McCarthy and Positivism

I've been reading the Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism, and finding quite a lot of interest.  It is generally material I was vaguely aware of, having been interested in this area for some time, but there's a lot of detailed evidence which I'm very glad to now have available.  Thus, for example, I had long thought that the general lack of awareness in the United States of the rather far left political leanings of the Logical Positivists was probably partly a result of their tending not to emphasize such leanings during the early years of the Cold War, especially since they had the added vulnerability of being immigrants.  But George A. Reisch has a paper on that topic in this volume which actually cites the FBI files on some of the leading positivists.  Apparently, both Carnap and Philipp Frank were targets of J. Edgar Hoover's overzealous investigations.

Reisch further suggests, and I certainly agree, that this had a terrible effect on the movement.  The positivists, to varying degrees,* attempted to avoid suspicion by shifting to a very austere, apolitical picture of science, totally disconnected from human values.  Such a view is obviously untenable, and made the positivists much more vulnerable to the sort of criticisms Kuhn and others would make in the 60s and later.

* According to Reisch, Feigl was especially guilty of this, while Carnap stuck to his principles far more than most of the other positivists.

Logical truth and logical consequence

As GFA notes, there has come to be something of a sentiment that logical consequence is a more fundamental notion than logical truth. He cites Read and Etchemendy; Dummett also takes this view (I've been reading Dummett's Frege: Philosophy of Language). GFA questions how anybody can say this when the two are (usually) equivalent; usually you can translate a logical truth into the claim that some consequence relation holds, and vice versa.

GFA does note a couple of exceptions to this equivalence. It is not exactly an exception, but is perhaps also relevant that in providing a minimal basis for a logical system, it is possible to give only rules of inference and no axioms (in fact, this is often done; the logic I'm teaching in my intro class this semester is a "natural deduction" system which uses this approach). On the other hand, it is not possible to give only axioms; some rule of inference is always needed ("axiomatic" systems normally have modus ponens, as well as some sort of substitution rule; substitution rules may be a special case, but modus ponens is clearly a rule of logical consequence). At least, the only way to give a purely axiomatic system would be to make every logical truth an axiom.

Whether all of this suffices to make consequence the more "fundamental" notion, I'm not sure. I am by nature very suspicious of claims that anything is more fundamental than anything else. On the other hand, I sympathize with some of the motives for saying that consequence is the more fundamental notion. Dummett notes that the 20th century saw quite a bit of controversy over the status of logical truths; whether they could be understood to be "analytic" (whatever that means anyway; another issue that was much fought over) and what status they did have if they couldn't be classified as analytic. Dummett seems to consider this largely ink spilled in vain (certainly nothing much was ever settled by all these debates), and also thinks there wouldn't have been so much fuss over it if people had been thinking in terms of consequences rather than logical truths. Perhaps there is more of an intuition that a logical truth needs to be about something, that something needs to make it true, than there is any corresponding intuition regarding logical consequences.

If such an intuition has indeed been a source of frivolous worries, then the equivalence of logical consequence and logical truth ought to be enough to undermine the intuition; if logical truth and logical consequence are equivalent, then it's possible, even if not compulsory, to give a reductive account of the former in terms of the latter, so intuitions that special explanations of logical truths are needed should already be undermined. But they're not precisely equivalent; as GFA's examples show, and as mine may also show, logical consequence is an ever so slightly broader notion. This surely wouldn't justify any extravagant metaphysical thesis that logical consequences are built into the structure of reality in a way that logical truths are not, but of course I don't myself think any extravagant metaphysical theses are ever justified, and if Dummett is right the great benefit of focusing on logical consequence is that such a metaphysical thesis has no intuitive appeal anyway. If we set aside such metaphysical concerns, though, we do seem to be left with a meaningful sense in which consequence is more fundamental. Still, perhaps the terminology is less than ideal, since the word "fundamental" has so many associations with the metaphysical concerns.

Bookshelves

Though a quick check showed, barring extreme memory slips, that I have read nearly all of nearly all of the books in my living room, and that probably only drops down to most of most of if I look at all the books I own, I still agree with Ezra Klein on this issue.  Well, apart from not being the sort of person who would read 900 page books on Lyndon Johnson or the Reformation.  So I seem to disagree with him on a lot, really.  But the central point remains; owning books is for showing what sort of person you are, and has relatively little to do with the activity of reading books.  This is regardless of how seriously you take the latter activity, or at least this is so for an academic like me, since I have such easy access to such great libraries.

As for the risk of being embarrassed by being asked about a book you haven't read, which many of the comments on Klein's post seemed to suggest was a decisive reason to avoid having such books on shelves, I find this unconvincing.  There are plenty of books I have read that I couldn't tell you much of anything true about, and I imagine Klein has interesting things he could say about Johnson or the Reformation to deflect the conversation away from the specific contents of those books he hasn't read.

Tufts colloquia

On Friday, I attended a talk by Claire Finkelstein on contracts under coercion.  I've been trying to attend a lot of colloquia recently, as they can be a source of ideas and it seems to be a good thing to be getting out and talking to other philosophers.  Discussion at this one was spirited.

Finkelstein's argument centered around an example; a robber threatens to kill me unless I can pay him, and I have no money on me, so I promise I will get the money and pay him tomorrow.  Obviously, this is of no value unless the robber actually believes I will pay, so in order for this move to save my life, I must somehow bring it about that the robber believes this.  It would thus be very much in my interest if it were possible for me to call on some external enforcement mechanism, to sign a guarantee of some sort which, say, the state would compel me to honor.

Of course, as the law stands now, I could not do such a thing; contracts entered into under coercion are unenforceable.  And so my situation is hopeless; I can't provide the money now, and my promises to do so in the future are not credible, so the robber will shoot me.  It seems that I should wish that the law did not take this stance on coerced contracts.

Finkelstein supposes that the reason we do not enforce coerced contracts is that we wish to discourage people from engaging in coercion, by reducing the rewards, but she notes that this not only imposes a cost on the one engaged in coercion (who is denied access to some rewards) but also on the victim (who is denied the possibility of a less bad escape).  She considers it quite unfair to impose this further cost on the victim, and so suggests that we really ought to be increasing the penalty to the robber in other ways (since there are always other ways to ramp up punishment), finding ways that don't impose a cost on the victim.  So she argues that coerced contracts should be enforced.

Endless complications and debate arose, and my own general reaction was that, as usual, sorting through the strained and tortured logic of consent and voluntary action and rationality reinforced my fondness for utilitarianism.  It may be hard to figure out what will produce the best outcome, and sometimes the advice is unpleasant, but other approaches seem to provide even sillier results, when they provide any results at all.

At the dinner after the talk, I was pointed toward a presentation of an extraordinary view.  Finkelstein told us that Richard Posner had argued that criminal activity in general could be seen as all involving bypassing of efficient market mechanisms, and so that the interest of the state in enforcing criminal law could be seen as entirely concerned with protecting the market.  He actually suggests in one paper that even rape fits this model; it can be seen as bypassing implicit markets in dating.

Posner considers the possibility that the rapist may want non-consensual sex specifically, something in which there is not (and cannot be) a market, and on that issue Finkelstein was actually slightly unfair to him; she reported him as saying that it was too hard to distinguish such cases from other cases of rape, so although the state had no interest in discouraging rapes of that form as such, they should still as a practical matter be punished like other rapes.

In fact, Posner isn't quite that silly in the paper, though I can see where Finkelstein gets that impression.  He does suggest the approach Finkelstein reported, but he also allows that there are situations where people's interests are in conflict, where there is no consensual market solution to the conflict.  He does not actually say the state has no interest in such cases; he suggests that when leaving it up to the people involved to resolve it without interference produces decreased utility, that also constitutes a form of inefficiency, and he explicitly puts rape in this category.  However, this seems to undermine Posner's central point, since it concedes that bypassing market mechanisms isn't really the only way to go wrong.  Perhaps Finkelstein was charitably seeking a more consistent interpretation of Posner.

An idea whose time has come?

Is it time to bring in the robot overlords?  Even the monkeys are suggesting that the answer may be yes.

PZ Myers stands up for philosophers!

Critics of intelligent design sometimes suggest that it ought to be discussed in philosophy classes rather than biology classes. A recent post at Pharyngula recognizes that intelligent design's total lack of intellectual content makes it of little more interest to philosophers than to biologists; it's so nice to see someone who isn't a philosopher recognize this point.

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Diplomatic ambiguity

The issue of what to do about Iran's nuclear program has been much discussed recently; the leftist blogs have extensively discussed the way the top Democratic candidates are going to such lengths to be sure to say that the option of attacking Iran is not "off the table." The diplomatic theory underlying this, of course, is that our negotiating position is stronger if Iran thinks we might actually use military force, so we should never say we would definitely not do that. One problem with this line of thinking, as many have noted, is that constantly reminding Iran that we're willing to attack them is quite likely to make the government of Iran think that they need nuclear weapons to deter such an attack. I'd like to mention another flaw in the reasoning.

We have overwhelming military force. Everybody knows this. Thus, every country in the world knows that, potentially, the United States could use that military force against them. There is no need to say we're going to do that, or make a big deal of our willingness to do things like that, in order to ensure that other countries take this into account in their planning. Paranoia, plus the extreme badness of any outcome which involves us actually attacking, guarantees that countries are always going to take that into account, whatever our public rhetoric. Thus, it is frivolous to engage in saber-rattling in order to prove to our enemies that we're a threat; they know that perfectly well and need no proof.

Instead, the most likely consequence of publicly making threats is to guarantee that any concessions that our enemies make to us appear to the world to be made under duress. Since many of our enemies appear to be as neurotic about "appearing weak" as our own administration, this is only going to make them more reluctant to make any concessions.

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Influences

I am teaching a class on freedom at Rhode Island College this semester, and in a fit of doubtless excess ambition I decided that one of the things I wanted to do was to carefully go through Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.  I take the book much more seriously than I used to.  Of course, this is because I find the view and the arguments presented more interesting than I once did, but while I think I can explain what it is that I find in the work that I didn't always see (I certainly hope so, since I want to explain that to my students), I wonder whether the reason I found it is rationally suspect.

One of my favorite teachers, Tony Anderson, was a grad student at UCLA while Carnap was still alive.  Carnap had retired by then, but Tony got the chance to meet him.  Apparently Carnap had gone blind, and the UCLA philosophy department had a volunteer from among the graduate students help him out by reading his letters to him and writing replies for him.  Tony enthusiastically volunteered for this job, and after dealing with the letters, he says that he and Carnap would talk about philosophy.

One story Tony tells about this time is that he was taking some class or seminar where Kant's moral theory was under discussion.  He made some disparaging comment to Carnap about how silly some part of Kant's moral theory was, expecting Carnap to immediately agree (Carnap was, after all, a non-cognitivist).  Instead, Tony reports that Carnap said "you shouldn't be so hasty.  There is something to what Kant is saying there."

Tony tells this story to indicate that Carnap's reputation as a rigid and dogmatic thinker is undeserved, but while I certainly think that Carnap was in important senses quite open-minded, for me that explanation isn't quite satisfactory.  I'm sure that's not what Carnap would have said if Tony had instead made a comment about, say, Heidegger.  It seems to me that the only reason Carnap would have said there was something to what Kant was saying was if he thought that there was something to what Kant was saying.  So this story puzzled me for a long time; I wondered what Carnap though there was in Kant's moral theory that was on the right track.  And that's what I, these days, think I've figured out.

Of course, one of the things this story emphasizes is the contingency of our (or at least my) knowledge.  The path by which I was led to the insight in question (if it is one) seems utterly accidental.  I do not know exactly what lessons to draw from that.

Descartes interpretation

Brian Weatherson proposes a heterodox interpretation of the argument of the first meditation.  At least, he thinks it is heterodox, and it sounds heterodox to me, but I can't claim to be familiar with the full range of Descartes scholarship.  The interpretation also strikes me as having some merit; it does stand out, as Brian says, that Descartes never really solves the evil genius problem.

I've been teaching Descartes again, which has me pondering my own heterodoxies.  Or at least, again, that's what I take them to be.  In particular, I've been pondering the question of what this God that Descartes claims to be able to prove the existence of is.  Some interpretive problems are solved (and others are generated) if for Descartes God just is the mathematical structure of the world, the union of all the logical and mathematical truths.

Of course, speaking of the union of logical and mathematical truths suggests a composite God, and the possibility of somebody being right about some parts and not about others.  But all the parts are necessary, and anyway it's not clear that we should speak of parts in this case; all necessary truths are equivalent, after all, and necessarily so.  On some ways of counting and individuating (perhaps the metaphysically appropriate ways), there is only the one necessary truth.

If that's God, then in attributing necessary existence to God Descartes is not saying much more than that the necessary truth is necessary, so it becomes less mysterious why he thinks this is something easily established by logic.  Admittedly, there may be a tiny bit more; in talking about "existence," he may be implying a Platonism which would not necessarily be shared by everyone who thinks that there's a necessary truth which is genuinely necessary, but Descartes of course was a Platonist, and made a point of emphasizing that at the start of his 5th meditation proof for the existence of God.

Now, there are those who would deny this necessary truth; Mill, Nietzsche, and Quine would presumably all reject it, and many others would say that misleading things have already been said about necessary truth even in my highly abstract discussion.  But while this wouldn't produce smooth sailing for Descartes, it would make his attempt at an ontological argument far less absurd.

The most glaring problem for this interpretation is that even if there is a necessary truth, it hardly seems that this would have the traditional attributes of God.  In what sense is necessary truth loving or benevolent?  In what sense is necessary truth a cause of the world?  What sense does it make to worship or pray to necessary truth?  What connection does it have to the Catholic tradition Descartes claimed not to be completely abandoning?

Perhaps most pointedly for Descartes specific project in the meditations, what sense does it make to say that necessary truth is not a deceiver, or if it can't deceive (perhaps because it's true, though it seems truth can mislead, or perhaps because it can't cause anything and so can't cause deception), how does the mere fact that there is necessary truth establish that clear and distinct perceptions must be infallible?

On the present picture, Descartes claim that God is not a deceiver is perhaps on a par with Einstein's claim that God does not play dice; an assertion that the ultimate principles of nature are not utterly cut off from us.  This, of course, increases my suspicion that I'm being anachronistic in attributing this to Descartes, though perhaps it is not shocking that two great physicists might end up agreeing on some metaphysical points.  But if that is what he means, I'm not sure what reason he can be seen as giving for thinking that it's true.

Maybe the unity is supposed to help here, though.  If there's only the one necessary truth ultimately, then perhaps the notion is that if we can grasp it at all, and we seem to know a bit of mathematics, that means that the necessary truth is within reach (of course, if it's just one thing, it's puzzling how it seems we can know some necessary truths and not others, but everybody has that problem).  Perhaps this is why Descartes makes so much of the fact that he claims to have an idea of God.

Of course, to be thoroughly anachronistic, most people these days think Einstein was wrong about the dice.

The selfish pose

Wow, it has been a long time since I've posted anything.  I've been teaching an ethics class this fall, and at the moment I'm discussing ethical egoism with my students.  As a result, I've been thinking about why people advocate selfishness.  Certainly people can behave selfishly just because they are selfish, but what would make someone advocate everyone being selfish?  Surely a truly selfish person wouldn't want others to be selfish.

Part of the reason no doubt is that the selfish person wishes his behavior to appear normal and acceptable, but I think that is not the whole story, or even the most important part of it.  Rather, I suspect the major reason is that we have come to associate selfishness with cleverness.  Thus, while ordinarily one would have thought a selfish person would want to avoid advertising the fact, in practice people's desire to appear clever, or at least to avoid appearing stupid at all costs, leads many of them to want to be thought of as selfish.  Hence, they advocate selfish principles in order to try to signal that they are selfish, and so not stupid, and no doubt in some cases they even try to act more selfish than they actually want to be, again because they expect this to be viewed as sophistication.

I wonder how much of the popularity of libertarian views on the internet owes itself to this phenomenon.

Death penalty test cases

Philosoraptor presents one of those kinds of cases which is often used to justify the death penalty, a case where it is very difficult emotionally not to want a death by slow torture for the perpetrators. Certainly that's my reaction, and I'd even add the same for anyone who has an ounce of sympathy for the perpetrators. But I try to recognize that this is not very productive; burning hate does not tend to produce good public policy.*

It's pretty well established what's actually needed to help improve situations like this. Give women more power, and things like this happen less often; giving women more power seems to make just about everything better, based on comparative studies of various communities and societies, but in particular it definitely helps women. So we should be reaching out to women in the communities where these situations occur, doing what we can to increase their educational and economic opportunities and working to fight all of the oppression they are subject to, not just the most horrifying high profile headline-grabbing examples of oppression.

Further, even from the point of view of satisfying our emotions rather than public policy, the form of death penalty under discussion is virtually never that; the form of the death penalty which is under debate is supposed to be painless and humane. I'm not sure why it's more emotionally satisfying to subject someone to a painless death than to subject them to the horrible conditions in prisons. So I don't really see how test cases like this are particularly informative concerning the death penalty debate.

* One respect in which emotions are very bad guides; I'd like to think that I'd be no less horrified by the case if the victim were not an attractive young woman, but I'd be lying to myself. My emotional reactions are not as politically enlightened as my intellectual responses, though over time my intellectual responses do have some tendency to train my emotional responses to be a little less horribly embarrassing.

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Life update

I don't usually post things about my own life here, as I have another blog I never update for that purpose.  However, this item is of fairly huge personal significance, so I thought I should mention that I successfully defended my dissertation a couple of days ago.  I am now a Doctor of Philosophy.

Now I just need to get a bunch of papers published.  I did get a few recommendations on which things to extract from my dissertation and try to publish, and I will be trying to put together a paper on infinite complexity at some point in the near future.

The meaning of religious claims

P. Z. Myers has recently been in a bit of a flap over his claims that religious belief is foolish and irrational.  I've also been hanging around with Dan Dennett's goddaughter a bit, and Dennett of course pulls no punches when it comes to criticizing religion.  I have myself thought about the content of religious claims before, as I find it to be a profound puzzle how anyone can take them seriously, and recent events have gotten me back on that subject.

Most philosophers know that the old positivists were in the habit of dismissing religious claims as meaningless, devoid of cognitive content like the various metaphysical claims they so famously opposed.  In fact, that is slightly oversimplified, as they standardly distinguished between what they called mythological religious claims and what they called metaphysical religious claims.  The terminology may not be ideal, but I don't have any really good replacements, so I'll stick with their terms.

Mythological doctrines essentially involved treating the tales of gods and miracles as historical claims, which of course we have every reason to think are false.  This is the version of religious doctrine which Myers and Dennett so like to mock.  The positivists, on the other hand, paid virtually no attention to this interpretation of religious claims.  Partly this is because they saw religious philosophers as more prone to the metaphysical than the mythological, and partly this is because they saw many religious believers as equivocating between the mythological and the metaphysical, but I think there is more to it.

On the metaphysical interpretation, religious claims are, according to the positivists, devoid of cognitive content.  There is no test to determine whether the god of the philosophers, that metaphysical abstraction, exists or not.  It is very unclear what the claim that such a god exists even means; the religious philosophers themselves often emphasize the mysteriousness of the absolute.  The positivists argued that it's so hard to interpret the metaphysical religious claims because in fact they have no content at all; they aren't really saying anything which could be true or false.

Now, it is not clear why it would ever be a problem that people sometimes make meaningless noises.  We already knew that.  So a little appreciated question is why the positivists considered metaphysics to be in need of being attacked, of being criticized, if really it said nothing at all.  If it's all just babbling, wouldn't that make it harmless?  The reason the positivists thought otherwise is that they didn't think metaphysics lacked any content whatever.  According to the positivists, metaphysical claims encoded disguised values.

This is why viewing metaphysical claims as true or false was, according to the positivists, anything but harmless.  The encoding sought to put the values above criticism.  Since they were being presented as truths, the usual examination to which we subject values (contemplating what we really want and trying to coordinate our aims with one another and with those of other people) are ruled out; truths are not matters to be negotiated.  But since they weren't really truths, they couldn't be tested as truth claims usually are either; no such tests were applicable.  Thus, the metaphysical values could not be criticized at all, and it is this attempt to conjure up absolute values and shut down any possible challenge to them which the positivists found profoundly dangerous and harmful.

I think this explains why the positivists focused on the metaphysical aspects of religion.  We read polls that more than 90% of Americans believe in God in some form, and far more specific and empirically questionable claims are also endorsed by very large numbers.  But I think that's misleading.  It's questionable to me that a majority of those people really believe what they claim to, at least in the sense that they believe, for example, that ripe bananas are yellow or George W. Bush is president.  As Hume noted, no Christians act as if they believe they'll go to hell if they sin.  Very few of them will go to faith healers rather than doctors if they're sick.  Very few of them consult religious authorities on any factual questions about how the world works which are relevant to their lives.

I think even for the religious rank and file, the religious claims are metaphysical in the positivists' sense.  The strange, crazy religious doctrines are value judgments of various kinds, disguised as truths.  Thus, they are not treated as truths by most of the believers in everyday life.  Still, they are presented as truths, and this disguise plays a vital role (insulating them from being seen as evaluative preferences, subject to negotiation).  Thus, criticizing them as truths still challenges them, and the religious will respond fiercely to any such challenge.  They will be all the more passionate about it since it is their values that they see as really under attack, but they have to defend the claims as truths in order to maintain the edifice of disguised values.

Of course, this diagnosis of what's going on does not immediately indicate what to do about it.  Since religious values are often deeply problematic, and confusing truths with values probably does have some tendency to foster other confusions about truth, I agree with Myers and Dennett that it would be profoundly preferable if more people could be freed from viewing religious claims as true in any sense.  But the fact that religious doctrines are not held for anything like the reasons most factual beliefs are held makes it hard to know how to question them; questioning their factual basis seems like it won't work very well unless the factual basis is actually relevant to the holding of the belief.  Still, other alternatives are not obvious either.

Thoughts inspired by David Charles Stove

I came across a book written by Stove the other day, and it was utterly horrifying.  I know some of my readers are well enough informed to question why this should be any surprise; surely he only wrote bad books, I can hear them thinking.  Indeed, my very first encounter with Stove was when I examined his attempted refutation of Hume's inductive skepticism.  That attempted refutation is sufficiently awful that I feel a little guilty about shooting fish in a barrel when I wrote a term paper criticizing it.  However, the book I just found was a collection of Stove's attempts at writing more popular essays, and disturbingly they do seem to have been somewhat popular.  It disturbed me enormously that the back cover had a favorable blurb from David Armstrong.  The two were apparently friends, but still, I don't see how anyone with a shred of self-respect could even hint at endorsement of the contents of the book.

I think one of the most revealing essays in the book, at least for philosophers, is Stove's criticism of Nozick.  Nozick was, of course, a well-known right-leaning philosopher, and the usual practice of right-wing nuts is to embrace anyone intellectually respectable who seems to agree with them in part, so it seems on the surface odd that Stove should bother to write an essay against someone who was in any way allied with him, when his enemies were so plentiful.  The explanation, however, is relatively straightforward.

Nozick really believed that coercion was wrong, indeed that it was pretty much the worst thing possible.  His libertarian views were founded on that basic principle, that coercion is just not acceptable, when it is performed by anyone for any reason, and so governments, like all other people and institutions, should be stripped of their coercive power as much as possible.  He was, in other words, clearly not one of the typical internet libertarians with wet dreams about how he'd lord it over everyone else with his arsenal of guns once the government stopped pestering him.

As a result, Stove thought Nozick was a pussy.  Admittedly, Stove didn't put it in (quite) such crude terms, but the terminology perfectly captures his intent; Stove was extremely misogynistic.  One of his essays in Against the Idols argues vigorously for the intellectual inferiority of women, and his prudishness (which also comes up in his criticism of Nozick) is also a common trait of misogynists (for those who think women are only for sex, "women are bad" and "sex is bad" tend to get bundled together).  Stove thought feminists and hippies and various other nefarious characters were corrupting the pure, manly intellectual standards of the academy and of political institutions, and clearly thought Nozick had too many such soft-headed, feminine inclinations.  Sure, Nozick said he liked free markets, but he was unaccountably squeamish about sending tens of thousands of soldiers to die and killing hundreds of thousands of foreigners in a dubious effort to slightly weaken the forces of communism worldwide.  Real anti-communists favored having a huge military and using it often, even if the military was hardly a bastion of free market practices and it was paid for by high, market-distortion-inducing taxes.  Real anti-communists were real men, you see.  Nobody who opposed the Vietnam War, as Nozick did, could have been a real man, and so no such person could be a real anti-communist.

I didn't intend this to be such a long post.  Still, it's clearly more relevant to the blogosphere than most of my writings, so maybe it's OK to ramble on a bit.

A book on the subject which seems rather good

Geoffrey Miller's The Mating Mind impressed me.  It was clearly intended for a general audience, and so light on the really detailed evidence, but Miller showed an awareness not shared by the other evolutionary psychologists I've looked at to recognize when his data wasn't all that and be cautious with his speculations.  His speculations were nonetheless fascinating and in many cases plausible.

In particular, I am attracted to his theory that humans might have evolved ethical behavior as a mating display.  Altruism obviously involves taking on costs for no apparent benefit, and it is less often noted that the same is true of punishment in most instances.  One of the depressing aspects of this theory, but also one of my reasons for finding it extremely plausible, is that it accounts for why people generally devote so little effort to making sure their generosity and punishments are directed at the most appropriate targets.  If we punish people to show off our surplus power, and perhaps our commitment to the community, we're going to want to punish unpopular people (harming popular people will have negative effects which would undermine the benefits of the display), but punishing people who are actually guilty, or whose behavior is likely to be usefully influenced by the punishment, would hardly matter at all.  That is a pretty good description of how people target their punishments.

Of course, I also take this as further evidence for utilitarianism.  The objections which are always considered so problematic for utilitarianism involve cases where utilitarianism gives answers that feel wrong.  If Miller's right about where our ethical feelings come from, my own inclination to think people shouldn't be putting so much faith in their unanalyzed feelings seems even more justified.

A stunningly unoriginal thought, I'm sure

One way of looking at what's distinctive of Platonist/Rationalist/Realist views, which can be collectively referred to as "the bad views," is that they prioritize identity over similarity, when similarity is the more fundamental concept.  The Platonist characterizes similarity as identity in some respect; in the view advocated in Plato's writings, they are similar because they participate in identical forms.  All forms of rationalism have some form-like elements which play the same role, and even modern, supposedly scientific varieties of realism get all superstitious about "natural kinds," basically forms in modern dress.

Similarity, however, is the more fundamental idea.  We only arrive at the notion of things sharing the same property on the basis of observing their similarity.  Plato himself saw this, which is why he made the unsatisfying move of locating the forms outside of the world of our experience, because it is so obvious that we do not experience them in this world.  However, while the various mystics have proposed a number of different unsatisfying ways we might perceive the genuine, unchanging forms, the only ones who have claimed that similarity is something truly universal, objective, and unchanging have been those who interpreted it in terms of presence of identical universal, objective, and unchanging forms.  Otherwise, it is obvious that our recognition of similarities is heavily influenced by our contingent interests and our past experiences.  Thus, the similarity view encourages pragmatism, empiricism, and anti-realism, "the sensible views," to give them an all-encompassing name.

I know David Armstrong makes much of the need for identical properties to ground similarities between things.  I'm trying to think of who else has seen the status of similarity vs. identity of properties as a crucial perspective on the great philosophical divide.

Carnap on Heidegger

So, I'm continuing to try to put together a paper on the motivation and significance of Carnap's criticism of Heidegger in his "Overcoming Metaphysics."  As I see it, the core is not so much the verification principle as Carnap's anti-authoritarianism; he rejected metaphysics as being an attempt to claim the authority of Truth for value judgments, and considered Heidegger an important contemporary representative of such authoritarian trends.

Part of this project requires me to get a much better grip on Heidegger.  After all, Carnap himself spent a long time studying Heidegger before he first presented his anti-Heidegger polemic.  However, I find Heidegger extremely hard to understand (probably far more so than Carnap did, since Carnap was familiar with Husserl and the neo-Kantians and the general German philosophical scene which he shared with Heidegger).  I've tried reading Heidegger's own writings before, and haven't gotten much out of them, so before attempting that again I'm trying to find other readings that might help me figure out what he's really trying to say.

To that end, I've been reading Husserl's introduction to phenomenology, but I have also found that very hard to follow.  Tracing things back further, I looked up some Brentano, which seemed easier to follow, but didn't seem to help much with understanding Husserl.  Probably I should read some neo-Kantian stuff, or perhaps work from the other direction and read some Sartre, since I never found Sartre as hard to follow as some other continental thinkers.  Maybe seeing what Sartre tries to do with Heidegger will give me more of an idea of what Heidegger could have been up to.

I did pick up a book on Nietzsche's influence on the early 20th century German left wing, particularly the Expressionists.  That's also useful for my general thesis, as I find Carnap's approving comments on Nietzsche supportive of my interpretation of Carnap as anti-authoritarian.  Nietzsche's criticisms of metaphysics were certainly directed at the way metaphysicians tried to derive authority from Truth, and the appropriation of Nietzsche by other early 20th century leftists shows that Carnap could easily have picked up on that feature of Nietzsche through his leftist cohorts.

Anyway, suggestions from others are of course welcome.

A thought on Hillary Clinton as candidate

It is well known that people who don't vote are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans; this is why Democrats try so hard to increase voter turnout, while Republicans try to make it harder to vote to prevent non-voters from getting active.  One of the biggest categories of people who usually support liberal ideas but usually don't vote are single women.  Hillary Clinton has more support among women than men, and I wonder if she could make it easier for the Democrats to reach out to that underused potential base of support.  Obviously, if the Democrats could get more single women out to vote, that wouldn't just help Clinton's chances of becoming president; more people inclined toward Democrats voting could help the Democrats in all the other races in 2008 as well.

Of course, Obama might be able to get more black voters out to the polls, so Clinton isn't the only candidate who might have a desirable appeal to people who usually don't vote.  Offhand, I don't think the number of blacks who don't vote but who could plausibly be reached is as great as the number of single women in that position, but I admit to having no numbers or poll data on that.

Now, Edwards has less entrenched opposition to face than either Clinton or Obama, and it's possible that Clinton's benefits for other Democrats would be offset because she'd also encourage insecure Republican men to vote more, while Obama might similarly bring more racists to the polls.  So I'm still not sure who looks best in all of this.  On policies, they all have strengths and weaknesses, and I really can't decide which I think is stronger.

I guess I'm still in the same place; I'd support any of the three major candidates, and I'm willing to leave it up to the primary to select the best one.  I still wish Gore would run.  But I'd like to see more analysis of strategic issues like these.  Has anybody been working on it?

Citation practices

There has been some discussion on the academic blogs recently of the practice of citing unpublished work, and the practice of some philosophers of sometimes marking unpublished papers as "not for citation."  Brian Weatherson weighs in on the issue here.  For my part, I'm fine with anything I've ever presented to the public in any form being cited; the more often my name is mentioned in other peoples' work, the better.

I'm curious about the general standards, though.  In my dissertation, I cite a paper Sarah Moss presented at a graduate conference, as while this was a couple of years ago, she seems not to have subsequently published the work (most unfortunately, in my opinion; the paper belongs in print).

I find it hard to see how there could be any damage to Moss from the citation, as I don't give away her secrets or present a devastating criticism or anything else of the sort which might make it harder for her to get her paper published in future (in the highly unlikely event that anything from my dissertation becomes well known in the philosophical community in the first place).  But if there is any question about whether this sort of thing is generally acceptable, I suppose I should ask her directly.  Actually, I may have already asked her; I know at one point some time ago I asked her to send me a copy of her paper, which she did, and I think I may have said or implied that I was planning to cite it.  She sent me the paper and I'm sure I'd remember if she said not to cite it, but there's some chance I didn't ask specifically and she simply didn't mention the subject.

The citation is on a point quite secondary to the central topic of my dissertation, so it could be harmlessly removed; I actually mostly included it because I was so impressed with Moss's work and wanted to call attention to it.

Continuing to research evolutionary psychology

Helen Longino gave a talk at Brown a couple of months ago, advocating a pluralistic approach to the study of human behavior.  She condemned various reductionist approaches, including what she saw as crypto-reductionism.*  While her examples were specific projects in psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience, she tried to connect her criticism to the broader project of reductionism in the philosophy of science, and when I questioned her after the talk about which philosophers advocated the views she was describing (since I sincerely couldn't think of any; even philosophers like myself who call themselves reductionists have a very different idea of reduction than that she attributes to the scientists she criticizes), she made a reference to the "whole unity of science movement" as an example of these ideas being widespread in philosophy.  I found this unsatisfying, as the unity of science crowd were precisely the people who seemed to me to not have been making or encouraging any of the mistakes she criticized in her particular examples.

I still find her case that philosophers are sources of some of the bad philosophical ideas she criticizes dubious.  In my reading of evolutionary psychology I saw little evidence of the influence of any work in the philosophy of science (sadly, there was philosophical content, but it was blissfully uninformed by any work by philosophers, as I mentioned when I talked about Palmer and Thornhill on causation).  I'm sure I could have made the point much more sharply if I'd had more examples of my own of the sort of bad science she wanted to criticize, and to which her pluralism was supposed to be an alternative.  So I wish I'd read the evolutionary psychology material before her talk.  Perhaps I'll see her again.  Or, better yet, perhaps I should look up some of her papers and write up a paper of my own discussing these issues.

* Not her word, but it seems an appropriate one for people who constantly talk about complicated interplay between genes and developmental and environmental factors, and then provide explanations which are entirely or nearly entirely based on genes alone.

More on tyrants

Plato thought that it was democracy which lead to tyranny in the classical Greek sense; when the mob grew strong enough to oppose all previous concentrations of power, an ambitious leader would take up the cause of the mob and use them to crush the existing institutions and establish their own unrestricted rule.  While the connection with democracy is not so straightforward as Plato suggests, there is an important element of truth in this.  A tyrant in the classical Greek sense certainly did tap into new sources of power and use them to crush existing institutions, rather than simply making deals with existing institutions and thus facing the constant danger that the established powers would decide to back out of the alliances.

One of the reasons for the remarkable performance of the French army during Napoleon's wars was Napoleon's method of replacing losses in the officer corps.  Enlisted soldiers who displayed conspicuous bravery would be promoted to officer rank.  It was possible for any old commoner who joined the army to rise to any rank by such promotions.  Most of Napoleon's enemies had policies of recruiting only aristocrats as military officers, with rank in the army heavily influenced by aristocratic rank.

There were disadvantages to Napoleon's system; aristocrats tended to be better educated, and those who served in the military generally would have had some training in military science.  However, Napoleon's system had much more important advantages.

First, it contributed greatly to the morale of the French soldiers.  Since their officers were generally conspicuously brave (or else they wouldn't have been promoted to become officers), the officers set a strong example for the troops.  They also understood the troops better, having come from among them.  The possibility of becoming an officer encouraged both loyalty generally, since it increased the potential rewards of military service, and courageous effort, since that was the way to gain those potential rewards.

Second, it meant that Napoleon had no trouble replacing losses in the officer corps (or at least no more difficulty than he had in replacing the common soldiers).  Such losses were by no means infrequent, and Napoleon's enemies seem to have been put at a great disadvantage in replacing losses by the fact that they recruited officers only from the aristocracy, and the most martially inclined aristocrats were already in the army, so they had to recruit less promising candidates and in some cases simply get by with fewer officers when they raised new forces after heavy losses against Napoleon.

Still, quite possibly the most important value of the policy for Napoleon is that it meant his officers tended not to be connected to existing institutions of power, and so were less likely to be troubled by divided loyalties.  This also had the disadvantage of making existing institutions of power more hostile to him, since he was further excluding them from power, but the French revolution had already greatly weakened such institutions, and Napoleon preferred to continue that process in order to further concentrate power in his own hands.  Probably the most successful tyrant in history, Augustus, preferred to employ freed slaves in many top-level administrative positions despite his own patrician background, with similar benefits.

What relevance does this have for the modern world?  Well, relying on alliances with institutions of power makes a tyrant weaker.  So tyrants who depend on foreign support, to take one example, are predictably weaker than those who do not.  Thus, even if a dictator can sometimes produce greater political stability, it's generally a bad idea for outsiders to support a dictator with such a goal in mind; by doing so, they reduce the chances that the one they support will turn out to be one of the successful ones, and so that they really will provide stability.  Sadly, U.S. foreign policy does not ever seem to have noticed this, despite providing plenty of empirical evidence for the thesis in the record of its failures.  Given the length this blog post has already reached, I will leave other lessons as an exercise for the reader.

Conservative reading comprehension

I don't know why anything at Powerline should ever surprise me; there's some idiocy in almost every post.  But for some reason, this one stood out for me.  I looked up Lincoln's speech, to make sure it wasn't merely incompetent quoting on Powerline's part, but no, it's not just their quote that seems to say the opposite of what they intend, the original speech does as well.  In Lincoln's speech, the "tribe of the eagle" refers to the potential tyrants.  So what's with the ending, "may the tribe of the Gathering of Eagles increase?"  There's some massive rhetorical incompetence going on there, using the same metaphors for the tyrants and those who (according to Powerline) are the good guys.  This is, of course, consistent with their general attitude that only tyranny can oppose tyranny, so we should have our own brand of tyranny* which is somehow free in order to oppose enemy bad tyranny.   Rather than, say, just opposing tyranny generally, which is what Lincoln advocates.

* Admittedly, "family of the lion"  and "tribe of the eagle" don't seem appropriate to the chickenhawks, and the "genius" Lincoln attributes to tyrants doesn't seem to fit the shrub quite as well as it might fit a Napoleon or Caesar, but I believe that Powerline is not (or at least not openly) of the opinion that it is cowardice and stupidity which distinguishes good leaders from evil tyrants.

The science of A Natural History of Rape

There is a dramatic shift in Palmer and Thornhill's text, starting in chapter 3, and ending at the end of chapter 4.  This is the region of the book where the authors discuss the particular evidence they find most relevant to their theses about rape.  In this region of the book, they frequently mention issues which they think require more study, and make proposals for tests of their speculations.  Somewhat less frequently, but still notably (especially in contrast to the rest of their book), they mention data which seems to raise questions for their hypotheses.  The data that they mention in this portion of the book is certainly intriguing and suggestive, though it is quite unclear what exactly to conclude from it.

Since I had wanted not to hate the book, it having been recommended to me by someone I like and have some respect for, I felt very relieved when I started to get into chapter 3, and hoped the rest of the book would continue more in that tone.  This looked like science; sure, they were engaging in speculations, and their evidence was far from conclusive, but the phenomena of human behavior are extremely complex.  Making speculative claims and proposing further tests seems an entirely appropriate procedure.  Unfortunately, there are reasons to worry even about this part of the book.

I will not comment in detail about the quality of the data that Palmer and Thornhill present; I am not by any means an expert in their field.  Evolution, Gender, and Rape contains much discussion of their evidence by those with more knowledge of the field.  I found the essays in that volume of uneven quality, but some were quite good, and they often cited fascinating evidence and speculations of their own.  Some of the essays also raised serious questions about Palmer and Thornhill's methods of analyzing their data, which surely need to be examined; such issues represent the first problem with the more scientific part of Palmer and Thornhill's text.

The second problem is that it ends so quickly.  It constitutes roughly a quarter of the book, with the remaining 3/4 devoted to virulent and sometimes dishonest polemic against feminist social psychologists, as well as some very bad philosophy of science.

An obvious speculation is that they did not, in fact, have enough material to make a substantial book, and padded it out with deliberate attempts to provoke controversy (if this was their goal, they certainly succeeded).  The next question for my investigation of bias and methodology is whether the flaws in the science section show any sort of pattern, such that Palmer and Thornhill's motivations might have affected that part of the book as well; this question will require far more thorough investigation than I have so far done, so I probably won't be posting any more about this particular book for some time.  Which will probably be a relief to many.