Neurath's Boat

The survey results

There's been a survey of views among philosophers, and apparently there was widespread participation; it produced some interesting results concerning the distribution of views among philosophers.  As a Carnapian, I was particularly interested to notice that 2/3 of philosophers believe in the analytic/synthetic distinction; apparently people are no longer as impressed with Quine's argument as they once were (assuming they ever were as impressed as is usually reported; there's no survey from a few decades ago to compare).

Of perhaps more general interest, there has been some discussion of the fact that while around 3/4 of philosophers generally are atheists, the numbers are reversed for philosophers of religion.  Trent Dougherty suggests that we should take this as evidence in favor of theism, that the experts lean toward that view.  I'm not so sure.  It's the only area I can find where there's such a sharp difference between the specialists and other philosophers.  Given that the other philosophers are certainly not completely uninformed (it's hard to be completely uninformed on this topic, and certainly anybody who does history of philosophy can't avoid lots of contact with philosophy of religion), it seems unlikely to me that such a big difference could be based solely on the experts having better evidence; their evidence surely isn't that much better.  So I tend to think that there's some other explanation for this pattern, though I don't have a firm opinion as to which of the possible explanations apply.

In addition to proposing that theism among philosophers of religion may be based on good evidence, Trent proposes a more sociological explanation for widespread naturalism.  While there certainly are fashions in philosophy, I actually think philosophers have been more inclined to naturalism than the general public for as long as there has been philosophy.  And I would have thought that the reason that the trend has over the course of the modern era become stronger and more entrenched is surely because of the success of science in progressively explaining more and more of the world.

Interesting research

There's a discussion here of a study into gender differences in the use of tentative communication styles, employment of various forms of hedging and disclaimers.  The stereotype is that women are more prone to this sort of thing, but the study apparently found the situation to be more complex than that.  I think I've noticed a tendency for women philosophers to write more tentatively than men, though of course I've noticed exceptions (nothing tentative about Susan Haack's writing, for instance, while on the other hand this very sentence by a male philosopher is rather tentative).  But, of course, one tends to pay more attention to confirming data for theories one had in advance.  For all I know an objective study of academic writing in philosophy would reveal that it fits the pattern described in the Palomares study, of equal tentativeness when the subject isn't inherently gendered.  I hope somebody eventually does such a study.

Trying to do better

Feminist Philosophers provide a link to an essay on "how to mentor someone who doesn't look like you." I did find it slightly surprising that Professor Wong reported encountering so few philosophers of East Asian heritage, since my dissertation supervisor at Brown was of Korean descent, and before I jumped ship from Santa Barbara, I'd been working with a professor whose ancestry was Japanese. Admittedly, they were also each the only East Asians in their respective departments. Kind of an odd coincidence that I ended up connecting with both of them (even more oddly, they were both undergrads at Dartmouth together, though I don't think they knew one another at the time).

Anyway, check out Wong's tips.

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.

Maybe I'm not wasting my life

Steve Gimbel discusses new research suggesting that encouraging people to think rationally can have powerful beneficial effects after all.  I'm definitely fired up for my next lecture now.  I encourage everyone who follows the link to think rationally about the information presented.

Determining copyright status

One issue that I worry about every time I teach is burdening students with excessively expensive textbooks.  Assembling packets of readings involves tangling with copyrights of the copied texts; you can sometimes get the copy service you're using to figure out who needs to be paid which royalties, but I'd prefer to keep down the costs and confusion by just not having royalties.  Sometimes that's easy; Hume and Mill, which I use a lot in intro level courses, are of course not under copyright, so I grab their text off the interwebs, and can even do my own nice formatting and add helpful footnotes and my own introduction if I'm feeling up to it.

It is hard to do that with foreign language texts, even when they're old, as usually the newer translations are better, and the translations are still copyrighted.  Since I've been feeling so energetic and motivated recently, I've been contemplating doing some of my own translations to get around that problem.  But there's a certain gray area I need to figure out what to do about.  How can I tell if something published in another country in the early 20th century is under copyright or not?  Is there a good general method for determining that sort of thing?  Some sort of copyright clearinghouse, or web page of useful copyright information?  I suppose I should do some searching, but was wondering if anybody else had encountered the problem and had tips.

I'm specifically interested in the status of Carnap's "Ueberwindung" at the moment, but I'm more interested in finding a good general method than in finding out what's up with that one paper.

Early influences

One of the blogs I read raised the topic of who one's earliest influences in philosophy were.  Cohen's answer reminded me that I really didn't get started looking at philosophy until college.  My intro to philosophy class looked at Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic, and I thought they were both brilliant.  I still think that Hume was largely right, though I now find Ayer's version of positivism little more than a caricature of the real thing.

Recommended reading

Some excellent advice.  My main addition would be that you probably should take a separate course on probability and statistics to go along with the economics course; studies suggest that one economics course is not nearly enough to cure you of the incredible errors in evaluating probabilities and statistics which people tend to make.

Oh, and I say you can keep taking philosophy courses until you can tell whether philosophers are giving you bullshit.  If you end up wanting to actually make money, all you have to do is go to law school at that point.  While generating bullshit is a good part of being a good lawyer, seeing through the other guy's bullshit is also important, so experience evaluating arguments from philosophy is very valuable.  Law schools love a philosophy background in their applicants.

Or you can be like me and be poor.

Bias!

I must admit to being shocked at the anti-American bias in the academy revealed in a recent survey, reported here.  At least, I believe Lyotard is French, and I know Habermas is some kind of European.  No Americans even got enough support to be mentioned?  Or perhaps the survey itself is biased against America!  The rot goes deep.